Eight days before Washington reported an 11th straight month of US insurance job losses, two of Britain's best-known insurers told staff they would cut jobs.
US insurance carriers and related businesses cut another 2,300 jobs in September, their 11th straight monthly decline, according to figures released Friday by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The US industry now employs about 2.93 million people, roughly 95,000 fewer than at its February 2025 peak. That is more jobs than it lost between July 2008 and early 2011, although the current decline is smaller as a share of the workforce, at 3.2% compared with 3.6% then.
On the 24th of last month, Admiral said it would cut about 500 roles from its UK insurance business, roughly one in 20 of the people who work there, as part of a £100 million cost drive. Legal & General told staff the same day that it planned to cut about a tenth of its workforce, starting with voluntary redundancies. Both follow Allianz, which cut 650 jobs from its UK general insurance business in June 2025.
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Admiral has said its cuts are about efficiency rather than AI. Alistair Hargreaves, who runs its UK insurance arm, said the company needed "the right structure, skills and ways of working" to meet changing customer needs. The insurer is also dealing with a weaker UK motor market, and its half-year investor presentation cited an EY forecast that UK motor will run at a 108% combined ratio in 2026.
Legal & General is cutting staff after it sold its US protection and US pension risk transfer businesses in February, a deal that produced a £1.4 billion profit, according to its 2026 half-year financial tables. Core operating profit rose 7% to £918 million in the first half, but UK pension risk transfer new business fell to about £2.0 billion from £3.3 billion a year earlier.
And maybe it is AI behind much of this. In the US at least, automation is now the most common reason insurers give for planned cuts, according to the Q3 2026 Insurance Labor Market Study by The Jacobson Group and Aon. US companies also cut more than they had planned. In July 2025, 13% of US property and casualty respondents expected to reduce staff; a year later, 26% said they had.
Allianz has given both explanations. When it cut its UK jobs in 2025, it attributed the decision to market pressures rather than automation. Its travel insurance unit, Allianz Partners, has since been reported to be cutting 1,500 to 1,800 roles worldwide as AI takes over call centre work, and Allianz's chief executive has confirmed that AI is the cause.
Allianz ranked first in the 2026 Evident AI Index for Insurance.
The wider UK jobs market is also weakening. The number of payrolled employees fell by 145,000, or 0.5%, in the year to August 2026, to 30.2 million, according to an early estimate from the Office for National Statistics. The UK unemployment rate was 4.9% in the three months to July.
Official data shows UK financial services shrinking too, although it cannot isolate insurance. Employee jobs in financial and insurance activities fell from a recent high of 1.098 million in December 2024 to 1.035 million a year later, a drop of about 63,000, or 5.7%, according to the ONS Workforce Jobs series. A provisional estimate puts the figure at 1.054 million in June 2026, still 1.2% lower than a year earlier. The category includes banks as well as insurers.
The ONS's annual employer survey shows how the UK insurance workforce is split.
Great Britain had about 309,000 employees in insurance, reinsurance and related activities in 2024, according to the Business Register and Employment Survey. About two-thirds of them worked in broking, loss adjusting and other activities auxiliary to insurance rather than for insurers. The 2024 figures are provisional, and the ONS says the survey is not designed to track changes from year to year.
Unlike the US, the UK does not publish a monthly employment figure for insurance alone, so the clearest evidence from inside the industry still comes from company announcements. The ONS publishes its next labour market figures on Oct. 20.
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The Lloyd's market wrote £57.9 billion of gross premium in 2025, up 4.2%, even though prices fell 3.7%, according to its annual report. Contracts concluded in the US accounted for £8.4 billion of the market's £37.8 billion in direct insurance premiums, about 22%. That measure counts where contracts were signed rather than where the insured risks are. Lloyd's chief executive Patrick Tiernan said in the market's full-year results statement that pricing conditions were getting tougher, particularly in large US commercial accounts.
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The ONS labour market release on Oct. 20, the Bank of England's next rate decision on Nov. 5 and the BLS October jobs report on Nov. 6 are the next releases to watch.
The ONS also plans to publish revised 2024 employment survey figures this month.
