An active market with a thin public record
Independent agencies have been acquired steadily for years, mostly by broker platforms assembling scale. It is one of the more mature consolidation markets in this set.
You would expect a mature acquisition market to produce a good public record of what agencies sell for. It has produced the opposite. The figures an owner can find are the least reliable part of the market, and the firms with the best data publish none of it.
The visible publisher, and its own warning
Insurance Agency Trader, updated 16 May 2026, publishes the most accessible figures. It reports that property and casualty agency earnings multiples run 1.8x to 3.7x owner earnings with a median of 2.80x, and separately that revenue multiples run 1.1x to 2.2x with a median of 1.54x. It scopes owner earnings valuation to agencies under $1 million of revenue that are owner operated.
It then says something most publishers do not. Its medians track active listings rather than closed deals, and should be read as a starting ceiling rather than a clearing price.
That is a genuinely useful disclosure and it deserves credit. It also changes what the number is. A listing price is what a seller hopes to receive, filtered through whatever a broker thought would attract interest. It is not evidence of what anybody paid.
Asking is not closing, and the gap runs one way
The distinction matters more than it first appears, because the error is not random. Listings that ask too much do not sell, so they stay listed and stay in the sample. Listings priced realistically leave the sample by closing. An asking-price dataset therefore skews upward and keeps skewing as the unsold accumulate.
An owner benchmarking against those figures is comparing their business to a set of prices that, by construction, includes every seller whose expectations were too high. The publisher is telling you this. It is worth taking the warning at face value.
A transaction record exists, and it does not say what we expected
There is one source here drawn from businesses recorded as sold rather than listed. BizBuySell transaction data covering 2021 through 2025 reports that the middle half of insurance agency sales fell between 1.88x and 3.44x owner earnings.
Set that against the asking-price band of 1.8x to 3.7x and the argument above predicts a visible gap, with the closing figures sitting materially below the listing figures. They do not. The transaction band sits inside the asking band and covers most of it.
We are reporting that because it is what the evidence shows, not because it helps. The asking-price skew is real and the publisher's own warning stands, but on the one comparison available to us here it is smaller than the reasoning implies.
The most likely explanation is that both sources describe the same population. A marketplace of small business listings and a publisher scoping to owner operated agencies under $1 million of revenue are looking at the same end of the market, where the buyer is often an individual and the asking price is set with more discipline than it is at the top. That is a hypothesis and we are labelling it as one. It is not something either publisher states.
What it does not do is fill the real gap, which is at the other end. Neither source describes the platform transactions that dominate this sector by value, and that record remains unavailable.
The firms who know do not publish
The recognised names in insurance agency transactions are advisory firms that track closed deals directly. Their public pages do not carry current multiples. One references the old industry convention of one and a half times annual revenue and describes it as outdated, without replacing it with a current figure. Another publishes report titles and deal counts without the multiples inside.
Their figures do reach the public, but through trade press coverage rather than from the firms themselves. We have not republished those numbers here, because we could not verify them at the source that produced them. A number that has passed through a third party without an original we can read is exactly the kind of figure this method excludes.
That leaves an odd situation. The most authoritative view of what agencies actually close at exists, and is simply not available to the owner trying to benchmark.
And the larger deals use a different measure
Those same advisory firms work in EBITDA and in commission revenue rather than owner earnings. That is not a stylistic preference. It reflects that above a certain size the buyer is a platform underwriting a book it will fold into an existing operation, and it prices accordingly.
So the measure split by size that appears across most of these trades appears here too. Owner earnings for smaller owner operated agencies. EBITDA and commission revenue above that. Comparing a figure from one world to a business in the other produces nonsense in either direction.
The second publisher, and why the two conflict
CT Acquisitions, verified 1 July 2026, also reports on owner earnings for smaller agencies, at 3.0x to 5.0x for agencies under $500,000 of revenue and 5.0x to 7.0x for agencies between $500,000 and $2 million.
Those ranges sit substantially above the asking-price derived figures, which is the opposite of what you might expect if listings skew high. The two sources overlap only between 3.0x and 3.7x, well under the threshold we use for treating publishers as describing the same population, so our estimator reports conflicting evidence. It also makes the distinction this whole article turns on structural: it leads with what agencies recorded as sold actually cleared, and sets the advertised figures beside it under the heading asking versus sold. An advertised multiple is an invitation. A sold multiple is a record of what a buyer paid.
We are not going to explain that gap away. Two publishers report on the same measure for the same segment and disagree materially, one of them using a method it has itself flagged as a ceiling. Both are shown, both are dated, and the disagreement stands as the finding.
What a buyer examines
Whatever the multiple, agency diligence concentrates on whether the book is transferable and whether the revenue behind it is contractual.
- Carrier appointments, and whether they survive a change of control
- Book concentration by client and by carrier
- Retention and lapse history across recent renewal cycles
- Commission schedules, and contingent or profit sharing arrangements
- Producer agreements, including non solicit terms that apply on a sale
- Errors and omissions history and any open claims
- Whether the largest client relationships sit with the agency or with an individual
What the thin record means for you
When the public benchmarks are asking prices and the real ones are private, an owner has very little leverage from market data. What remains under your control is the quality of what you can prove about your own book.
That is not a consolation prize. In a market where the buyer has better information than the seller, the seller's defensible position is a record that answers questions without contradicting itself. A buyer who can verify retention, carrier standing, and commission terms from documents prices what they can see. A buyer who cannot prices the uncertainty instead, and that discount is real whatever the published multiple says.
Verelume reads contracts, financials, and operating records and reports what the record supports, where documents conflict, and where a claim has no documentation behind it. For an agency, that means knowing whether your book stands up as evidence before the party with better market data starts reading it.