For the last several years, independent agencies with a foothold in excess and surplus lines could count on the tide doing a lot of the work. That tide is still coming in — just not as fast.
AM Best data cited by Insurance Journal shows E&S market premium grew 9.7% through the first three quarters of 2025, down from 13.5% growth over the same stretch a year earlier. The deceleration traces to softer pricing in a handful of lines — cyber, commercial property, and directors and officers coverage among them — where competitive pressure has picked back up after several hard-market years. Even with that cooling, nine of the top 10 E&S carriers still grew direct premiums written in the third quarter; Berkshire Hathaway was the lone exception among that group, pulling back 12.4% year over year, per AM Best.
The surplus lines side of the business tells a similar story of continued, if uneven, expansion. WSIA's 2025 midyear stamping office report put premium at $46.2 billion across 3.7 million items filed in the 15 stamping-office states, a 13.2% increase in premium and a 12.4% rise in item count versus the first half of 2024. That built on a full-year 2024 total of $81.6 billion across those states, up 12.1% from 2023, according to WSIA. Commercial liability outside of professional lines remains the largest single category at $16.9 billion, or 36.6% of midyear premium, with commercial property close behind at $15.7 billion, or 34.0% share. The lines growing fastest by percentage are smaller in dollar terms — auto liability and residential or homeowners-adjacent E&S business — but their trajectory suggests where underwriting appetite is shifting next, per WSIA's data.
RT Specialty's chief executive, Tim Turner, told Insurance Journal the wholesale giant expects to write more than $30 billion in premium in 2025 and continues to post growth north of 20% annually, pointing to segments like hospitals, nursing homes, and assisted-living facilities — coverage he described as getting harder to place by the day. That kind of pocket-specific hardening, even as the broad market softens, is exactly the environment where wholesale relationships and specialty underwriting knowledge separate agencies from one another.
What this means for agency owners is less about whether E&S keeps growing — it does — and more about who captures that growth going forward. When the segment was expanding at double-digit-plus rates across nearly every line, a broker with even modest surplus lines access could ride the wave. As growth moderates and pricing turns more line-specific, the advantage shifts toward agencies that already have deep carrier panels, wholesale relationships, and underwriting expertise in the harder pockets — property, certain habitational and social-services risks, and specialty auto — rather than those leaning on a single standard-market carrier relationship.
That carrier-access gap shows up clearly in state licensing and carrier-appointment records. In Texas, where 9,100 independent P&C agencies still make up 99.7% of the market, median carrier access ranges from 6 appointments in Austin to 9 in San Antonio, with single-carrier dependency — a marker of sub-scale exposure — running 6% to 7% across the state's major metros. Florida's 9,945 independent agencies carry deeper average appointment counts, with medians of 12 to 15 carriers across Miami, Tampa, Orlando, and Jacksonville and single-carrier shares as low as 3% in Jacksonville, even as 3.9% of the state's agency count now sits with consolidation platforms.
None of this argues for a sale — it's a read on structure, not a prompt to act on it. But as MarshBerry's M&A trends report shows average broker valuations hitting an all-time high of 11.50x on an upfront base purchase price in 2025, and platform broker multiples reaching 14.34x, per The Insurer, the market is visibly pricing carrier breadth and specialty capability at a premium. Agencies that understand where they sit on that carrier-access spectrum — and build toward the harder-market specialty lines rather than away from them — are the ones positioned to keep growing as the E&S tailwind normalizes.
For a fuller view of carrier-access patterns across Texas and Florida metros, see the Pexara insurance intelligence landscape.