Agency Compensation 360: Q3 Insights

Agency Compensation 360: Benchmarking Pay the Smart Way

What Agency Compensation 360 is and why it matters now

Agency Compensation 360 is a national benchmarking initiative that helps independent insurance agencies compare pay, benefits, and staffing practices using real peer data instead of guesswork. Built for Big “I” state association members, it turns agency-submitted compensation data into interactive analytics you can filter and apply to your own decisions.

The study goes far beyond base salary. It pulls in salary and commission structures, bonuses and incentives, benefits and PTO, remote and flexible work practices, staffing models, and outsourcing trends. In other words, it focuses on the full cost and design of your workforce, not just what shows up in the paycheck.

For many participating agencies, one number jumps off the screen: payroll averages in the low‑40% range of total agency revenue (excluding benefits). That’s your largest expense line outside of contingencies.

At the same time, nearly half of agencies expect to grow staff, even as technology and AI reshape workflows. That tension—between rising talent costs and new automation options—is exactly why having current, insurance‑specific benchmarks matters.

Agency Compensation 360 is designed to answer practical questions:

• Are we over- or under-paying for key roles?
• Is our payroll percentage of revenue in a healthy range for our size?
• Are our benefits and PTO competitive enough to recruit and retain?
• Where should we hire people, and where should we invest in tech instead?

Instead of pulling generic HR reports or relying on national averages that lump you in with unrelated industries, Comp360 gives you a view tailored to independent agencies.

How to benchmark your agency with the right peer group

The power of Agency Compensation 360 comes from how precisely you can define your peer set. You’re not stuck with a single national average. Instead, you can slice the data by state, revenue band, and community type (urban, suburban, rural) to get a true apples‑to‑apples comparison.

For example, you can filter to agencies:

• In Texas and Oklahoma
• Between $1 million and $2.5 million in total commissions (excluding contingencies)
• Located in urban and suburban markets only

In one click, you see how many respondents match that profile and can start benchmarking payroll as a percentage of revenue, average FTE counts, and typical use of 1099 support.

This matters because a $1.5 million suburban agency simply does not operate like a $10 million urban firm. Community type affects salary expectations. Agency size affects management layers and specialized roles. Without filters, you risk comparing yourself to agencies that bear little resemblance to yours.

Comp360 also lets you drill into specific roles. You can look at account manager compensation, for example, and see bottom quartile, median, average, and top quartile pay by years of experience. That’s far more actionable than a single blended number.

When you benchmark this way, you move from vague questions like “Are we high or low?” to targeted ones such as “How do our 3–5‑year commercial account managers compare to similar agencies in our region?”

Designing a clear compensation philosophy your team can trust

Benchmark data is only useful if it supports a consistent compensation philosophy. Agency leaders often jump straight into numbers for raises, offers, and bonuses without first deciding where they want to sit in the market.

A practical starting point is to define, for each major element of compensation, whether you intend to:

• Lead the market
• Match the market
• Lag the market (by choice, not by accident)

You can apply those choices separately to base pay, variable pay, and benefits. For example, one agency might:

• Match the market on base and bonus
• Lead the market on health benefits and PTO
• Match the market on retirement contributions

Agency Compensation 360 helps you test whether that philosophy is actually reflected in your numbers. If you say you “match” on account manager pay, but your data consistently sits in the bottom quartile for peers, those are not aligned.

Using the dashboard, you can:

• Compare your current compensation ranges against filtered peer benchmarks
• Check whether departments are treated equitably (e.g., sales vs service)
• See how your payroll percentage of revenue stacks up to similar agencies

The goal is not to fix everything overnight. Instead, you can use Comp360 to see where you are today, decide where you want to be (lead, match, or lag), and then build a phased plan so every new hire, promotion, and raise moves you closer to that target.

Using Comp360 data to tackle pay equity and compression

One of the clearest trends surfacing in the study is pay compression: new hires coming in at higher salaries than some long‑tenured employees in similar roles. In the recent tight labor market, many agencies raised offers quickly to land candidates. The impact is showing up in the data.

Comp360 visualizes this by showing compensation quartiles by role and years of experience. In some markets, you can see:

• Newer hires clustering near upper‑quartile pay
• Long‑tenured staff sitting closer to the median or below

That pattern can create equity concerns and morale issues if left unaddressed. The dashboard does not solve the problem for you, but it gives you the visibility to:

• Identify which roles and tenure bands show the biggest gaps
• Compare those gaps to what is typical in your filtered peer group
• Prioritize where you need a plan versus where you’re in line with the market

The answer is rarely across‑the‑board adjustments. Instead, agencies are using this data to design pragmatic responses, such as:

• Phased increases for specific legacy roles over several review cycles
• Re-leveling titles so responsibilities and pay align more clearly
• Tying raises to defined compensation bands informed by Comp360 ranges

Having transparent, third‑party benchmarks also helps you communicate with your team. You can show employees you’re not reacting emotionally, but rather working from structured data and a stated compensation philosophy.

Turning benefits and PTO data into a talent advantage

Compensation is more than pay. Employees care deeply about benefits, PTO, and flexibility, and Comp360 captures these dimensions in detail. That includes health insurance eligibility, how much employers contribute, PTO structures, and remote or hybrid work practices.

For instance, when you filter the data to smaller rural and suburban agencies, you may see that the percentage offering employer‑paid health insurance is significantly lower than larger or urban peers. In one example set, health coverage dropped to around a third of respondents when looking only at smaller rural/suburban agencies, versus near‑universal coverage among larger firms.

You can treat that gap as a disadvantage, or as an opportunity.

If your peer group is less likely to offer benefits, adding even a modest employer health contribution or a more generous PTO policy can be a strong differentiator. Conversely, if you discover that 90%+ of your filtered peers offer a benefit you do not, that may explain recruiting challenges.

Comp360 also highlights PTO design trends. Many agencies have moved away from legacy models where employees wait years to earn higher PTO tiers. Instead, they set a single, richer PTO level and offer it from day one, using pay (not time off) to reflect different roles and responsibilities.

By benchmarking your own benefits against filtered peer data, you can:

• Decide where you want to lead, match, or lag the market on benefits
• Adjust PTO policies to better support recruitment and retention
• Build total‑rewards communication that reflects real market context

How to participate, update your data, and act on the insights

Agency Compensation 360 only works if agencies participate. The program has already seen strong engagement, with well over 1,300 completed surveys and hundreds more in progress across 39 participating Big “I” states. The more agencies contribute, the more reliable and granular the benchmarks become.

Participation steps are straightforward:

• Confirm your Big “I” state is part of the initiative (Comp360 is free with membership).
• Ensure the right person at your agency is authorized to enter data.
• Complete the survey sections: agency overview, workforce, outsourcing, benefits, and employee compensation details.
• Use anonymized employee IDs instead of names for privacy and easier year‑over‑year updates.

Data integrity and confidentiality are core design principles. The platform enforces minimums and maximums on numeric fields, runs quality checks to catch outliers, and restricts access so only validated contacts can view or change your agency’s information.

Once you’ve submitted your data, the real value is in coming back at least annually. Soon, you'll be able to copy last year’s information forward, update what changed, and immediately see:

• How your payroll percentage of revenue has shifted
• Whether your pay ranges are keeping pace with the market
• How your benefits stack up as competitors adjust their offerings

From there, you can bring the Comp360 dashboards into leadership and board discussions, use them to shape next year’s budget, and pair them with Catalyit resources such as the State of Tech Report to make informed choices about where to invest in people and where to invest in technology.

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Watch now to learn more about Agency Compensation 360 and how it can help your agency.