Independent distribution didn't lose ground during the hard market — it held its line. The Big “I” 2026 Market Share Report puts the independent agency channel at 62% of all U.S. property/casualty premium written in 2025, a tick above the 61.5% recorded in 2024 and steady with the channel's five-year average of 62%. The mix shows where independent shops win: independent agents wrote 87.7% of commercial-lines premium and 39.5% of personal lines in 2025. For owners whose books lean commercial, the channel's durable grip on that business is the single most reassuring number in the dataset.
What's shifting is not the channel's share but its shape. The Big “I” 2024 Agency Universe Study counts almost 39,000 independent P&C agencies across the country, with roughly 750 to 800 changing hands annually. Against that base, IA Valuations tallies only about 45 institutional buyers actively consolidating a fragmented field of roughly 35,000 independent agencies. MarshBerry's industry primer frames the result as a bifurcation: about 11,400 agencies have sold over the past two decades, yet there are nearly as many independent brokerages in the U.S. in 2026 as there were in 2006. Scaled regional and national platforms now occupy one end of the market while hyper-local, relationship-driven boutiques occupy the other, and the mid-sized tier in between has thinned out.
State licensing records show that the long tail remains overwhelmingly owner-held, especially in the two biggest independent markets. Texas counts 9,100 independent P&C agencies, and 99.7% of them are still independent — consolidation platforms hold just 0.2%. Florida's 9,945 independent agencies tell a similar story at 95.3% independent, with 3.9% platform-owned. The local texture matters: Dallas–Fort Worth has 2,788 agencies with a median 8 carrier appointments and 6% of firms appointed to a single carrier; Houston has 2,519 (median 7, 7% single-carrier); Austin 729 (median 6); San Antonio 655 (median 9). Florida's metros run deeper on carrier access — Miami's 2,518 agencies carry a median 15 appointments, Tampa's 1,440 a median 12, Orlando's 1,181 a median 14, and Jacksonville's 523 a median 15, with single-carrier dependency ranging from 3% to 7%.
The base keeps regenerating. Florida DFS/CFO licensing records as of Aug. 13, 2026, show 50,453 active resident General Lines (2-20 P&C) agents and 2,823 new agency licenses issued in the trailing 12 months, with formation roughly flat at 242 new licenses a month in the latest full quarter versus 251 a month a year earlier. Another 1,157 new 2-20 agent licenses appeared in the last 90 days. The typical General Lines agent holds appointments with 7 distinct carriers (25th percentile 3, 75th percentile 17). New formation concentrates in the same counties that already hold the most agencies — Dade (627 new agents in 12 months), Broward (504), Palm Beach (278), Orange (242), and Hillsborough (202). See the full roll-up picture at the Florida consolidation dashboard.
Even as new shops form, dealmaking is throttling back. OPTIS Partners counted 292 insurance-agency transactions in the first half of 2026, down 15% from the first half of 2025 and the slowest six-month start since 2016. Private-equity-backed buyers made 76% of those deals; ten firms accounted for 45% of first-half volume, and 37 of 68 unique buyers were PE-backed. Sellers skewed heavily P&C — 198 transactions, or 68% of the total. MarshBerry's Q2 2026 update pegged the average up-front EBITDA multiple at 11.57x for all firms and 14.22x for high performers, while its WayPoint data shows private capital-backed buyers took 605 of 854 brokerage transactions in 2025 (70.8%).
For an owner-operator, the picture is a barbell that keeps regenerating its own base: a handful of well-capitalized platforms dominate a slower M&A market at the top, while new licenses — most of them in Texas and Florida, where nearly every shop is still locally owned — keep replenishing the fragmented bottom. That's not a market disappearing into consolidation. It's a market where the premium flow is stable, the buyers are selective, and the independent shop remains the default structure of the American P&C channel.