Managing general agents and other delegated underwriting authority enterprises wrote $108.7 billion of US direct premium in 2025, up 17.8% from $92.3 billion, against roughly 5% growth for the broader property and casualty industry.
It is the fifth straight year of double-digit growth, and AM Best's framing of the milestone is not celebratory. The report is titled "Managing General Agents Adapt to Changing Demands and Added Scrutiny."
Key Takeaways
- $16.4 billion of new direct premium entered the channel in one year, at 17.8% growth against about 5% for the industry, on a base that has roughly doubled over the decade.
- More than three-quarters of delegated authority agreements in 2025 gave the MGA underwriting authority rather than binding or claims handling alone, a higher share than the prior year.
- AM Best and Aon differ by roughly $17 billion on 2024 market size, because $18.8 billion of Aon's count never appears in a statutory filing at all.
- $29.1 billion of issuing-carrier premium backed MGA programs at year-end 2024, up 22% from $23.8 billion across 30 dedicated carriers, capital Aon describes as predominantly private-equity funded.
- E&S-adjacent MGA activity has eased over 12 to 18 months even as total channel premium kept compounding, which is where the capacity pullback is showing up first.
A Growth Rate the Industry Cannot Match
The gap is the story. A 17.8% increase against roughly 5% for the industry added about $16.4 billion of direct premium in a single year on an already large base. Five consecutive years of that puts the channel past being a distribution alternative; it is absorbing a disproportionate share of the industry's incremental volume.
The authority mix moved with it. More than three-quarters of 2025 delegated authority agreements gave the MGA underwriting authority, not merely binding or claims handling, and that share rose from the prior year. The channel is not only writing more premium, it is making more of the risk selection decisions behind it.
Helen Andersen, an AM Best industry research analyst, framed the result as a maturity problem rather than a growth problem: "The maturing MGA market will need greater discipline in building portfolios along with successfully adopting newer technologies" (Reinsurance News, July 2, 2026).
That is the divergence the report title names. The volume story and the discipline story have separated, and AM Best is saying so before any loss ratio has deteriorated enough to force the point.
The Reporting Lag Sits Between the Risk and the Reserve
An MGA does not hold the paper. A carrier or reinsurer behind it takes the underwriting risk while the MGA distributes, binds and often handles claims. The structure depends on loss experience flowing back cleanly, and the bordereau, the periodic summary of policies bound and claims incurred, has never matched a carrier's own policy administration system on granularity or timeliness.
A capacity provider fronting ten MGAs across different lines is running ten reserving problems through ten data pipelines, each with its own lag and its own definition of an open claim. AM Best's David Blades described the response as broader than selectivity: "It's not limited to capacity producers being more selective. There is also a sense of heightened oversight."
| Period | Approximate MGA direct premium | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2014 to 2020 | Roughly $40 billion to $50 billion, flat | Aon |
| 2023 | $92.3 billion direct premium (AM Best); issuing-carrier capacity $23.8 billion (Aon) | AM Best, Aon |
| 2024 | $92.3 billion (AM Best) versus $109.2 billion including unreported business (Aon); issuing-carrier capacity $29.1 billion (Aon) | AM Best, Aon |
| 2025 | $108.7 billion direct premium, up 17.8% year over year | AM Best |
The lag bites hardest where the channel grew fastest. Specialty and hard-to-place coverage develops longer and less predictably than personal auto or homeowners, so a capacity provider with six months of bordereau data is pricing next year's program on a truncated view of this year's losses. The pricing consequence is a wider confidence interval on the same nominal loss ratio, which means an early-duration MGA loss ratio is weaker evidence than the identical figure on a book the carrier reserves itself.
Scrutiny is showing up as several levers at once: tighter loss ratio caps in the binding agreement, more aggressive profit commission clawbacks, shorter contract terms that allow a faster exit, and direct claims and bound-policy extracts that bypass the bordereau. Some capacity providers are pushing MGAs toward algorithmic underwriting specifically because a model leaves an audit trail that underwriter judgment does not.
That E&S-adjacent activity has eased over 12 to 18 months while total premium kept compounding fits the same reading. Capacity is being redirected toward newer programs in other lines while exposure is trimmed on E&S books old enough to have produced a judgeable loss history.
Two Credible Counts of the Same Market Differ by $17 Billion
Aon's 2025 study put 2024 delegated authority premium at $109.2 billion, roughly $17 billion above AM Best's $92.3 billion for the same year. The difference is not a methodology quibble: Aon traced $90.4 billion through regulatory data and layered an $18.8 billion estimate on top for business that never appears in a statutory filing.
Two data-rich analytics shops counting the same market from the outside landed $17 billion apart on a base year. A single capacity provider relying on one MGA's bordereau has considerably less certainty than a loss ratio on a filed schedule implies, and the industry-level baseline against which a program gets benchmarked is itself an estimate.
The trajectory is not in doubt. Aon's series shows the channel sitting between $40 billion and $50 billion for most of 2014 through 2020, then compounding roughly 90% from 2020 through 2024.
What complicates the discipline argument is who funds the capacity. Aon profiled 30 dedicated issuing carriers holding $29.1 billion of direct written premium behind MGA programs at year-end 2024, up 22% from $23.8 billion, and describes that capital as predominantly private-equity funded. Those owners carry return-on-capital timelines that argue for faster program approval at the same moment the rating agency covering the capital argues for slower growth.
The technology bet lands on the same fault line. MGAs moving to agentic underwriting that takes a submission from intake to bind with minimal review are asking for more trust from capacity providers who are extending less of it, and a periodic bordereau review is the tool least able to catch a drifting risk appetite in a book that binds faster than it reports.
Further Reading
- Why Agentic AI Deploys First in E&S Lines – the rate-filing freedom and premium scale that make surplus lines MGAs early adopters of algorithmic underwriting.
- NAIC's Third-Party Data and Model Vendor Registry – the regulatory-side counterpart to AM Best's capacity-side scrutiny of delegated authority analytics.
- Cytora Autopilot and Binding Authority at Volume – what happens to accumulation monitoring and model drift when an agent holds binding authority.
- The P&C Soft Market Reserve Adequacy Playbook – how reserving discipline more broadly is being tested as the market cycle turns.
- Fronting Carriers Now Back a Fifth of the $128B MGA Market – Conning's competing count of the same channel and why fronting-carrier concentration, not headline growth, is the load-bearing risk.
Sources
- AM Best, "Best's Market Segment Report: Managing General Agents Adapt to Changing Demands and Added Scrutiny," June 30, 2026
- Reinsurance News, "AM Best sees shift towards underwriting discipline as delegated authority market expands," July 2, 2026
- Risk & Insurance, "MGA Premiums Hit $108.7 Billion in 2025 as Capacity Scrutiny Tightens"
- Carrier Management, "$100B-Plus and Growing: Aon Reports on MGA Market," August 21, 2025