Anyone watching agency M&A headlines this year could be forgiven for thinking the consolidation era is winding down. It isn't — it's rotating.
OPTIS Partners tracked 292 North American insurance agency transactions in the first half of 2026, a 15% drop from 342 a year earlier and the softest first-half tally in seven years, Insurance Business America reported on July 22. Zoom out to a trailing-twelve-month view and the picture is similarly muted: 646 deals, the weakest pace since early 2019. Full-year 2025 closed at 695 deals, itself down 12% from 787 in 2024 — the third consecutive year that ended without the usual fourth-quarter scramble to close before year-end.
MarshBerry's read on why lines up with what agency owners are hearing in every conversation about financing right now. Managing director Phil Trem points to a more hawkish rate environment, slowing organic growth at target agencies, and general macro uncertainty pushing buyers to be choosier rather than chase volume. Add a decade of near-continuous acquisition and it's a fair bet that integration fatigue inside the largest platforms is doing some of the work too.
That shows up clearly in who's pulling back. Per OPTIS Partners' data, Hub International's deal pace is down 47% on a trailing-twelve-month basis, Keystone Agency Partners has slowed 29%, and Acrisure, Patriot Growth, Alera Group and HighStreet have each cut their buying rate by 31% to 69%. BroadStreet Partners remains the most active single buyer in the country with 37 deals in H1 2026, but even BroadStreet trimmed its pace by 16%.
Here's the part operators shouldn't miss: private-equity-backed and hybrid buyers still accounted for 75% of trailing-twelve-month deals and a full 80% of deals in Q2 2026 alone. Of the 68 distinct buyers active in the first half, six PE firms and nine privately-held acquirers were doing their very first agency deal. The household-name platforms are simply being outpaced by newer, less publicized capital that's stepping into the gap. For an agency owner, the practical upshot is that the buyer universe has gotten more crowded and less predictable, not smaller.
P&C books remain the primary target: they made up 68% of H1 2026 sell-side volume, or 198 of the 292 deals tracked. On price, Sica|Fletcher's H1 2025 dataset of more than 450 sell-side transactions — cited via Adastra Equity — put agencies with at least $1.0 million in EBITDA at an average 11.8x multiple, essentially flat against 11.9x in 2024. Mid-market books between $1 million and $10 million in EBITDA bracketed 11.4x to 11.8x, with personal-lines-heavy agencies trading lower (5x-7x) and specialty or benefits books commanding 9x-12x — a reminder that book composition, not just size, still drives what buyers will pay.
What does a slower national deal count mean at the ground level? Public state licensing and carrier-appointment records show most metros are still overwhelmingly independent — in Texas, only 0.2% of the state's roughly 9,100 P&C agencies are platform-owned; in Florida, that figure is 3.9% of about 9,945 agencies. But Florida's records also show single-carrier dependency running 6-7% across major metros, a signal of the sub-scale exposure that makes an agency a natural acquisition candidate whether or not a national platform is the one calling. That dynamic, and the county-by-county fragmentation behind it, is broken out at /intelligence/insurance/florida/consolidation.
The practical takeaway isn't that consolidation pressure has eased — it's that the buyers applying it have changed. Agencies built on carrier diversification, organic growth and operational discipline are less exposed to that pressure regardless of who's writing checks this cycle.