For much of the last decade, the drumbeat around independent agency ownership has been consolidation: platform buyers rolling up books, private equity chasing scale, and a sense that independence was a temporary state before an inevitable sale. New deal data suggests that story needs an update.
OPTIS Partners tracked 292 agency transactions across North America in the first half of 2026, a 15% drop from the 342 deals recorded a year earlier and the softest first-half showing since 2016, according to Insurance Journal. The pullback deepened in the second quarter alone, with Insurance Business America reporting 138 deals — down 25% year-over-year — and a trailing 12-month total of 646 transactions, the lowest since the first quarter of 2019.
What makes this slowdown notable isn't just the topline number — it's who's driving it. The largest platform consolidators, long the most aggressive buyers in the space, appear to be the ones stepping back hardest. Insurance Business America reports Hub International's deal pace has fallen 47% over the trailing twelve months, Keystone Agency Partners is down 29%, and even BroadStreet Partners — still the most active acquirer with 37 deals closed in H1 — trimmed its own activity by 16%.
That retreat is opening space for a different set of buyers. Of the 68 distinct acquirers active in H1 2026, 37 were private-equity-backed firms — six of them completing their first agency acquisition ever — and 21 were privately held buyers, nine of them new entrants to the M&A market, per Insurance Business America. Smaller and newer buyers are filling some of the gap left by the giants, even as overall volume shrinks. Property and casualty agencies continued to dominate the seller side, representing 198 of the 292 H1 transactions, or 68% of total volume.
MarshBerry's own review of the 2026 environment, cited by Insurance Business America, points to a mix of causes: higher financing costs squeezing deal economics, integration fatigue among serial acquirers digesting prior purchases, and a broader industry shift toward organic growth and operational discipline rather than chasing deal counts.
Zoom out to the underlying market structure and the slowdown looks even less like an existential threat to independence. Public state licensing and carrier-appointment records show Texas has roughly 9,100 independent P&C agencies, with 99.7% still independently owned and just 0.2% held by consolidation platforms. Florida's independent agency count sits near 9,945, with 95.3% independent and 3.9% platform-owned. Even in Florida, where platform ownership is comparatively higher, the vast majority of the market remains in independent hands — a reminder that headline-grabbing roll-up activity has touched only a sliver of the total agency population. Owners can see the fuller county-by-county picture at Pexara's Florida consolidation view.
For agency owners, the practical takeaway isn't that a buyer will never call — it's that scale increasingly has to be built rather than sold into. One place that's already happening: independent agencies that grew up writing personal lines are pushing harder into commercial business. Michael Rabinowitz of EZLynx, quoted in Insurance Business America, points to commoditized, increasingly automated personal-lines rating as a catalyst pushing agencies toward diversification and the growth opportunity commercial lines still offers.
Carrier access remains one of the clearest structural levers agencies control themselves. Public records show median carrier appointments varying sharply by metro — from 6 in Austin to 15 in Miami and Jacksonville — while single-carrier dependency, a marker of sub-scale operations, ranges from roughly 3% to 7% across major Texas and Florida metros. Building broader carrier relationships, diversifying lines of business, and improving retention are levers an agency controls regardless of what platform buyers are doing.
With consolidator appetite cooling and fragmentation still the norm — not the exception — in two of the country's largest P&C markets, the more useful question for owners may no longer be whether a buyer will eventually show up. It's what a well-run, independently owned agency looks like three to five years from now in a market that clearly isn't consolidating as fast as recent years suggested. More market detail is available at Pexara's insurance intelligence hub.