Two large carriers publish what they pay the agent who sells you a policy, which is more disclosure than most trades offer. Chubb's 2025 schedule reaches 30 percent of premium on homeowners and 40 percent on workers' compensation, and none of it appears on your invoice, because the carrier pays it out of the premium you have already handed over. In New York you can require your broker to tell you the dollar figure.
| Service | Typical |
|---|---|
| Private passenger auto insurance, average premium by coverageCountrywide average, 2023 data | $464 to $737 per insured vehicle, per year |
Ranges last checked September 2026. They come down automatically when they are due to be rechecked.
Every figure above comes from a named source we can link to, with the date we last checked it. We publish ranges rather than single prices because a range is what a provider will actually give you: the same job moves with what is being worked on, the materials, how hard it is to get at and how busy the trade is locally. Treat these as the order of magnitude to expect before you call, not as a quote.
Where a source publishes figures state by state, this page shows the figure for this state rather than a national average. Where no state-level source exists, it shows the national range and the local factors that move a job within it. We do not scale a national number by a multiplier of our own invention.
Every range carries a review date. When that date passes the number comes down until it is rechecked, rather than sitting here undated.
Two large carriers publish their producer compensation schedules. Chubb's disclosure for business written in 2025 shows homeowners commission running from 2 percent of premium up to 30 percent, auto physical damage from 5 to 35 percent, and workers' compensation as high as 40 percent. AIG's disclosure for the year ending December 2024 shows general liability from 10 to 39 percent and commercial property from 7.5 to 28 percent.
On top of the base rate both carriers pay contingent or supplemental compensation, tied to the volume and profitability of the business an agency places with them. Chubb reports paying up to 13.4 percent during 2025. AIG puts its contingent compensation generally under 4 percent of total premium.
None of this reaches your invoice. The carrier pays it out of the premium you have already handed over, which is why the question of what an agent costs has no answer on your side of the transaction.
A captive agent writes one insurer's products under a company agency agreement that is not published. The bands above come from carriers disclosing what they pay independent agents and brokers, so they say nothing about what a State Farm or Allstate agency earns. An independent agency places business across several carriers; a captive agency does not. That is a difference in what gets shopped, not a claim about who is better.
New York Regulation 194 requires every producer to give the buyer an initial disclosure describing their role in the sale, and, on the buyer's request, to disclose the amount of compensation as a specific dollar figure rather than a percentage, at or before the policy is issued. Title insurance agents must disclose whether asked or not. Reinsurance, captives, wholesale brokers with no direct customer contact and most renewals are exempt.
No other state represented in this directory carries the same rule, so it is worth knowing which side of that line a placement falls on.
States set the licensing, the continuing education and the sales and marketing rules, and they set them differently. More than 2 million individuals and over 236,000 business entities hold producer licenses nationally. NIPR, an NAIC affiliate, runs the Producer Database covering all fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam and the US Virgin Islands, and that is the route by which an agent licensed in one state becomes licensed in another. Rate filing and approval, the rating factors an insurer may use, guaranty fund limits and complaint adjudication are all state matters too.
Read the carrier's complaint record before you read the agency's reviews. The NAIC Consumer Insurance Search publishes closed, confirmed complaints by state, company and line for the preceding three years, alongside financial condition and direct premiums written. The NAIC's own guidance is to read a complaint count against premium volume rather than on its own, because a carrier writing a large book accumulates more complaints than a small one without being any worse to deal with.
Decide first whether you want one insurer's products or a market shopped, and then pick the type of agency that matches. Asking an independent agency how many carriers it actually placed business with last year is a fairer question than asking how many it is appointed by.
Expect the homeowners conversation to be harder than it used to be. The NAIC's first national analysis of that market, published in August 2026, found inflation-adjusted average premium per policy rose between 18.3 and 43.3 percent from 2018 to 2024 depending on region, and that company-initiated nonrenewal rates rose between 96 and 216 percent over the same period. 715 companies wrote homeowners insurance in 2024. The analysis reports percentage change rather than a national dollar average, so there is no single homeowners figure to hold anyone to.
For auto, the useful anchor is the NAIC's Auto Insurance Database Report, which puts the 2023 countrywide average expenditure at $1,281 per insured vehicle, up 13.99 percent over 2022. That is expenditure per vehicle, not the price of any one coverage, and it is a national average rather than a quote.
The carrier pays the agent a commission out of the premium you have already paid, so it never appears as a separate charge to you. Chubb and AIG both publish the percentage bands they pay, and those bands vary widely by line of business.
In New York, yes. Regulation 194 requires a producer to disclose the compensation as a dollar amount on request, at or before the policy is issued. Most states have no equivalent rule, so the answer elsewhere depends on whether the broker chooses to tell you.
A captive agency writes one insurer's products. An independent agency places business across several carriers. The published carrier commission schedules describe independent and brokerage compensation; captive compensation is set by a company agency agreement that is not published.
No. Producers are licensed state by state, and the requirements differ. NIPR runs a Producer Database covering all fifty states and the territories, which is the mechanism by which an agent licensed in one state becomes licensed in another.
The NAIC Consumer Insurance Search publishes closed, confirmed complaints by state, company and line for the preceding three years, along with financial condition and premiums written. Read the complaint count against the carrier's premium volume rather than on its own.
The NAIC found inflation-adjusted homeowners premiums rose between 18.3 and 43.3 percent from 2018 to 2024 depending on region. Over the same period company-initiated nonrenewals rose between 96 and 216 percent, so a renewal that arrives at all is not guaranteed to arrive at last year's price.