Plan Ledger DOL Form 5500 · updated monthly

What Benefits Brokers Were Paid2024

Research report · generated 2026-09-10 · from 61,086 employers' Form 5500 Schedule A filings

Employers' health, dental, vision, life, and disability plans must disclose what insurance brokers and agents were paid. Almost nobody reads those filings. We did: in plan year 2024, brokers were paid $8.42 billion across 61,086 employer plans covering 71,546,429 people, up 7.9% from 2023 among employers filing both years. Every employer's number is on this site.

Key findings
Brokers and agents were paid $8.42 billion in 202461,086 plans
22.9% of it was fees rather than commissions$1.9B
Among 54,146 employers filing both 2023 and 2024, broker pay rose 7.9%$7.1B → $7.7B
Where contracts report both premiums and compensation, brokers took 3.8% of premiums19,753 contracts
The median plan pays $191 per covered person; the top tenth pays $687+68,460 plans
The ten highest-paid brokerages collected 42.9% of all reported pay$3.6B
Early 2025 filings (on-time cohort): matched-employer pay down 0.5%22,375 employers
Highest-paid benefits brokerages · 202410
1. Lockton · 3,752 plans$495,259,012
2. Marsh McLennan Agency · 5,726 plans$489,958,277
3. Gallagher · 5,268 plans$485,777,280
4. Mercer · 2,857 plans$469,307,730
5. WTW · 2,526 plans$396,920,107
6. USI · 5,862 plans$364,254,682
7. HUB International · 3,897 plans$292,610,322
8. Aon · 1,711 plans$251,817,546
9. Alliant · 2,271 plans$207,466,494
10. Brown & Brown · 2,582 plans$161,892,510

Full rankings: all brokerages · carriers by premiums · raw table: CSV download

Look up any employer

Every number above decomposes to a page per employer: its carriers, premiums, and exactly what its brokers were paid, with a national percentile. Search an employer or browse the health & benefits wing by state.

Method & honest caveats

Source: DOL Form 5500 Schedule A filings for plan year 2024 (large plans, generally 100+ participants; small plans file a short form without Schedule A). "Broker pay" is the sum of commissions and fees reported per contract, as filed by the plan sponsor. The premiums-percentage figure uses only the 19,753 contracts that report both premiums and compensation on the same row; premiums are unreported on most contracts, so no broader ratio is honest. Year-over-year growth is computed on the matched cohort (employers reporting compensation in both years), which controls for filing-volume changes. Plan year 2025 is a partial, on-time-only cohort; most large plans file on extension by October 15. Amounts are as reported; misfilings exist. Verify any filing on EFAST2.

Cite this

Plan Ledger, "What Benefits Brokers Were Paid (2024)", planledger.com/research/broker-pay, generated 2026-09-10 from U.S. Department of Labor Form 5500 Schedule A filings. Free to cite with attribution; journalists can reach us via the address on the about page.