For the better part of a decade, the excess and surplus lines market rewarded almost anyone with a pulse and a wholesale relationship. That era appears to be ending. The latest earnings and rating-agency data point to a market that is still growing, but unevenly — and the unevenness is the story independent agency owners need to understand.
Ryan Specialty, the country's largest wholesale broker, posted organic revenue growth of 6.7% in the second quarter of 2026, down from 7.1% a year prior, according to Insurance Business America's coverage of the results. That's not a collapse, but it's the latest data point in a multi-quarter deceleration across the broader E&S market. More telling is where the growth came from: casualty-driven underwriting management was Ryan's strongest segment, with net commissions and fees up 12.8%, even as the company's property book softened. Commercial property E&S premiums actually fell 2.8% in 2025 — the segment's first annual decline since 2017 — based on S&P Global Market Intelligence figures cited in that same coverage.
Kinsale Capital Group, one of the more prominent E&S carriers writing through wholesale brokers and independent agencies, told a similar story on its fourth-quarter 2025 earnings call. Overall gross written premium grew just 1.8% for the quarter. Strip out the company's shrinking, fiercely competitive commercial property division, and growth was 10.2% for the quarter, per remarks from Kinsale executive Kehoe reported by MarketBeat via Yahoo Finance. The gap between those two numbers is the whole thesis: growth hasn't disappeared, it's concentrated in casualty and specialty niches while property gets picked apart by competition and capacity discipline.
AM Best put a name on the broader trend in a January 2026 special report, describing how the flow of business migrating out of the admitted market and into E&S has moderated after years of consistent, substantial expansion, according to the report as covered by Business Wire. Translated for agency owners: the easy tailwind of admitted carriers pulling back and pushing business into the surplus lines channel is no longer accelerating the way it did through the early 2020s.
What does this mean at the agency level? It means the agencies that built genuine breadth — multiple carrier appointments, real wholesale relationships across casualty and specialty lines, not just a property-heavy E&S book tied to one or two markets — are the ones positioned to keep growing through this shift. Agencies still dependent on a single admitted carrier relationship, or concentrated in the now-softening commercial property niche, are exposed on two fronts at once: shrinking premium in the line they lean on, and no alternative markets to pivot into.
Public state licensing and carrier-appointment records offer a useful proxy for that kind of resilience. In Florida, where E&S and specialty carrier density runs higher than in many states, median carrier-appointment counts by metro range from 12 in Tampa to 15 in both Miami and Jacksonville, with single-carrier dependency — agencies holding just one appointment — as low as 3% in Jacksonville and 5-7% elsewhere, per state licensing and carrier-appointment registries. Texas metros show a wider spread: Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston carry median appointment counts of 8 and 7 respectively, with single-carrier shares around 6-7%, suggesting somewhat thinner average carrier access than Florida's specialty-dense metros, even though Texas's independent-agency share of the market (99.7%) remains higher than Florida's (95.3%).
Neither state's numbers say which individual agencies are thriving or struggling — that's not knowable, or the point. What they do show is the range of carrier depth already built into a given market, which is a reasonable starting proxy for how exposed the typical agency there might be to a property-led E&S slowdown versus how much runway it has in casualty and specialty lines instead.
For owners assessing their own footing, the practical question isn't whether E&S growth is slowing — it clearly is, by degrees, depending on line. It's whether your agency's carrier and wholesale relationships are broad enough to move with the market rather than get stuck in the part of it that's cooling. For a deeper look at carrier-appointment patterns by metro, see Pexara's Florida market intelligence.