The excess and surplus lines market has quietly become one of the biggest structural stories in American insurance. U.S. E&S direct premiums written hit $98.2 billion in 2024, up from $86.6 billion in 2023 and $75.5 billion in 2022, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data reported by Insurance Journal. That puts E&S at 9.5% of all U.S. direct premiums written last year — a share that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, when the surplus lines market was still a niche outlet for hard-to-place risk.
But the headline number obscures a more important trend for agency owners: the growth engine is losing power. S&P's 2025 U.S. Excess & Surplus Market Report shows the market expanded 13.4% in 2024, down from 14.5% in 2023 and a long way off the 32.3% surge recorded in 2021. Inside that slowdown, the two major E&S lines are moving in opposite directions. Liability premium growth actually reaccelerated to 12.4% in 2024 after cooling to 4.3% in 2023, while property growth — the pandemic-era rocket fuel of the E&S boom — decelerated sharply to 15.4% from 40.6% the year before.
The property softening tracks with what's happening in the broader market. Marsh's Global Insurance Market Index found global commercial property rates fell 12% in the second quarter of 2026, the eighth consecutive quarterly decline, while U.S. casualty rates rose 7% over the same period. Translation: the property capacity crunch that pushed so much business into the E&S channel over the past three years is easing, even as casualty exposure — social inflation, litigation trends, nuclear verdicts — keeps pushing that line toward non-admitted paper.
Meanwhile, the carriers writing this business are consolidating fast. American Family Mutual's roughly $1.2 billion cash deal to acquire Bowhead Specialty Holdings, reported by Insurance Journal, is the latest example of a large admitted carrier buying its way into specialty underwriting capacity rather than building it. For agencies, that's a signal worth taking seriously: the number of independent specialty markets willing to write niche E&S business through smaller retail relationships is not expanding indefinitely, and program access increasingly runs through a shrinking set of larger platforms.
What does this mean at the agency level? The E&S shift of the last several years rewarded agencies that built real appointment depth with wholesale and specialty markets — not agencies that leaned on one surplus lines relationship to fill gaps. As property rates soften and standard markets regain some appetite, agencies with a single specialty outlet are more exposed to being squeezed out as carriers tighten distribution and consolidate underwriting capacity upstream.
Carrier appointment breadth is a useful proxy for how well-positioned an agency is for this environment. Public state licensing and carrier-appointment records show meaningful variation even within a single state. In Texas, independent agencies carry a median of six to nine carrier appointments depending on metro — Austin runs leanest at a median of six, while San Antonio runs deepest at nine — with single-carrier dependency in the 6-7% range across major metros. Florida agencies generally carry more appointments, with metro medians running 12 to 15, and single-carrier dependency as low as 3% in Jacksonville. Those numbers aren't a verdict on any individual agency, but they're a reasonable gauge of how much carrier optionality is typical in a given market — and how exposed an under-appointed agency might be if a key specialty relationship gets absorbed into the next consolidation deal.
For agency principals evaluating where they sit relative to local peers, a look at metro-level carrier access and market structure is a useful starting point. Public records-based detail for both states is available at Pexara's Texas insurance intelligence page and the broader insurance market landscape.