Every year, Insurance Business America sets out to answer a deceptively simple question: who are the best insurance carriers and program administrators (PAs) in the USA? Few corners of the industry carry as much responsibility with as little public visibility as program administration itself. These firms hold underwriting authority most brokers never touch, set the appetite and pricing across entire books of business, and answer directly to the carriers whose capital stands behind every policy they write. It is a position of genuine influence, and in 2026 that influence is expanding faster than almost anywhere else in the market.

That expansion might suggest a market rewarding speed above all else. The data says otherwise. Vertafore’s 2026 MGA outlook argues that carrier partners are increasingly focused on underwriting consistency, loss-ratio stability, and portfolio discipline, and that MGAs able to demonstrate sustained performance will be better positioned to secure and retain capacity. Despite that scrutiny, the market remains genuinely fragmented rather than dominated by a handful of giants, a dynamic explored in detail below. That fragmentation is exactly why longevity and specialist focus still matter as much as scale.

IBA’s 5-Star Program Administrators and Carriers report, now in its sixth year, identifies the best insurance carriers and program PAs in the USA as rated by their own peers, on the categories that matter most in this niche corner of the industry: expertise, stability, innovation, and the quality of the carrier partnerships underpinning it all. Nominees were ranked on their largest programs, their demonstrated expertise and stability, and their innovations in program development. Carriers, in turn, were scored directly by the program PAs who work with them.

What emerges from this year’s winners, and from in-depth conversations with three of them, is a pattern that cuts against the assumption that innovation belongs to whoever moves fastest. Great Lakes General Agency, JenCap Group, and RPS Programs each point instead to something closer to strategic discipline: decades of accumulated data and a disciplined read of where a market segment is heading in two cases, and a rapid, deliberate structural overhaul built on the same underlying instinct in the third. What unites all three is not how long they have been doing this, but the institutional memory and analytical bench to know which opportunities are worth chasing.

Insurance carrier ratings: which attributes program administrators value most

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Three years of IBA survey data show PAs sharpening, not just maintaining, their expectations of carrier partners. Claims specialization has seen the steepest climb of any attribute, rising from 3.71 out of 5 in 2024 to 4.44 in 2026, a shift that lines up closely with the industry’s own account of rising litigation exposure and claims complexity in segments like trucking.

Financial stability tells a less linear story: it peaked at 4.92 in 2025 before easing slightly to 4.78 in 2026, suggesting that while it remains one of the two or three most valued attributes overall, it is no longer rising in lockstep with everything else.

Marketing support dipped further in 2025 before recovering somewhat in 2026 but has stayed the lowest-rated attribute in all three years, a persistent soft spot in the carrier relationship that shows no sign of resolving on its own.
That combination, rising expectations around claims and underwriting sophistication, a plateauing view of financial stability, and a marketing gap that carriers have not closed, points to a market where PAs are getting more specific about what they need, not simply more demanding across the board. It is also consistent with a wider MGA market that is still expanding sharply in absolute terms, but where carriers are being asked to compete increasingly on service quality rather than capacity alone.

US insurance carriers and MGA market growth in 2026

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The scale of that expansion helps explain why. Managing general agent-sourced premium in the US grew 90 percent between 2020 and 2024, more than double the 49 percent growth rate across the broader property and casualty sector, reaching $90.4 billion by 2024, according to analysis cited by S&P Global Ratings. Gallagher Re projects a further 10 percent of growth for its own tracked program carrier composite in 2026.

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Yet that growth has not consolidated the market at the top: the 10 largest MGAs account for only around 17 percent of total premium, according to Deloitte figures, with more than half the market spread across firms outside the top 50. That fragmentation is exactly why longevity and specialist focus still carry real weight, particularly as a softening market threatens to stress-test underwriting discipline across the MGA sector, and why the discipline described by all three of this year’s featured winners, knowing which risks are trending well before the numbers confirm it, and knowing which opportunities to decline even when the top line would benefit from saying yes, remains a genuine competitive advantage rather than a defensive posture.

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Great Lakes General Agency marked its 38th year in business on July 1, 2026, having opened its doors as an independent managing general agent on July 1, 1988. That kind of tenure would be a footnote for most firms. For Great Lakes, it is the foundation of its entire strategy.

Jason Austin took over as president and CEO in November 2025, with founder Dave Smith stepping back into an advisory role as chairman. The move was, in part, a deliberate bet on Austin’s background: alongside his underwriting experience, he spent nearly a decade working as an actuary before moving into underwriting, giving him a close read on the numbers behind Great Lakes’ four decades of trucking-focused data. Rather than expanding the sales team immediately after taking the top job, Austin chose to spend his first months understanding the firm’s culture and hiring practices before adding headcount, a decision he says has paid off in how the business has grown organically through 2026.
 

 

That independence, Austin argues, is increasingly rare in a market shaped by years of consolidation on the retail, wholesale, and carrier sides alike. He believes brokers and agents are growing tired of dealing with ever-larger, more layered organizations, and that Great Lakes’ flat structure gives producers room to bring forward new ideas without routing them through multiple levels of management. The firm still operates as a genuinely collaborative, hands-on business day to day: across its six offices, spanning Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, and Arizona, deliberately positioned to serve distinct regional agent bases, Austin describes an atmosphere that is casual but far from relaxed, one where people who are given real ownership tend to work harder, not less.

That combination of independence and specialist focus runs through the firm’s three proprietary state-specific programs, two long-standing delegated authority partnerships and a newer non-admitted program that completed its first successful renewal in 2026. All three sit inside Great Lakes’ core trucking specialty, an area where decades of underwriting data have become a genuine barrier to entry for newer competitors.

That data advantage is also feeding directly into how Great Lakes reads the current transportation market, and how it is investing in the next few years. Telematics has become table stakes across the trucking MGA space, Austin says, but the differentiator is what a firm does with the feed once it has it. Roughly 60 percent of insurers were already using telematics somewhere in their underwriting process as of early 2026, per fleet-technology trade reporting, up sharply from a smaller base only a few years earlier. Simply collecting that data is not enough to move the needle, however: a 2026 driver-risk study by SambaSafety, drawing on nearly 50 million motor vehicle records, found that the underlying behaviors driving commercial auto losses have not meaningfully improved industry-wide despite years of telematics awareness, a dynamic tied to a broader strategic shift now underway as telematics scales across US auto insurance. Great Lakes’ in-house risk engineering and loss control capability is built specifically to close that gap, translating raw driving data into specific, actionable feedback for insureds, rather than simply collecting it.

That same data discipline extends to a threat Austin describes as increasingly visible across the sector: bad actors deliberately targeting trucking companies for payouts. 

“We see news stories about maybe bad actors in the trucking business,” he says. “That’s something that we’re increasingly aware of, and I think we’re doing a good job of making sure that we can try to sniff those out and try to stay away from them.” 

That concern is well documented rather than anecdotal. The American Transportation Research Institute has tracked significant trucking litigation judgments rising 967 percent over 15 years, with per-mile insurance costs climbing sharply as a direct result, while a US Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform study of 154 trucking verdicts found organized fraud rings staging accidents specifically to target carriers for large settlements. For a firm underwriting almost exclusively in this space, the ability to identify that risk before it becomes a claim, rather than after, is exactly the kind of judgment 40 years of accumulated data is meant to sharpen.

Looking toward the firm’s 40th anniversary in 2028, Austin is direct about where he wants Great Lakes’ next chapter to focus: continued organic growth, built from within, in a market he believes is moving in the firm’s favor.

A: It gives us the ability to pivot and be nimble and own our own destiny, whether or not that’s successes or failures. I’d say that’s really in our DNA. It gives us the ability to treat our employees really well. It gives us the ability to service our retail agents in what we think is the best way to do that.

A: We know that moving forward over the next 12, 18, 24 months, frankly three to five years, how can we harness all the data that we do have over the last 40 years to be able to stand out and continue to be a good competitor to the larger shops.

A: We’re lucky enough to have our own in-house risk engineering or loss control team, and they’re able to not only ingest that telematics data, which is huge, but also put it to good use. We’re taking it and feeding it back to our insureds and partners and saying, here’s your 10 vehicles that you should probably address. Here’s your 10 vehicles that maybe you want to incentivize because they’re doing so well.

A: I think what you’re really seeing is better choices. Companies are getting better at determining which risks are trending the right way and which risks are trending the wrong way. What you see is people are willing to chase the good business, and on the poor-performing business, they’re able to set up guardrails, whether it’s pricing or subjectivities.

A: We give producers the ability to own their own destiny. We’re not necessarily going to handhold, we’re not necessarily going to micromanage you. We just want to bring people on who are great service people, knowledgeable about underwriting, and really just have the ability to make decisions and take ownership of what they’re working on. We have a good bench, a really good number of young producers who grew up with us at Great Lakes.

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JenCap Group’s pitch for its 5-Star Program Administrators recognition begins somewhere unusual for an insurance business: with restraint. John LaCava, chief operating officer at JenCap Group, describes the past 12 months as a year of real growth for the firm, with several new programs launched and more planned for late 2026 into 2027. But that growth has come inside a market he characterizes as far from calm, marked by significant turnover across both the MGA landscape and the carrier market that backs it.

LaCava traces JenCap’s steadiness through this period back to its history: the firm has operated in the delegated authority and program underwriting space for decades, with individual programs dating back more than 30 years. That tenure, he argues, gives JenCap a genuinely different vantage point from the wave of newer MGAs that emerged during the recent hard market, many of which launched with fresh backing to compete for the same narrow slice of business, effectively riding the cycle up without the institutional memory to navigate what comes after it. LaCava has lived through several full market cycles, including down cycles, and says that experience is exactly what the firm is drawing on to position itself ahead of the coming soft market rather than reacting to it once it arrives.
 

 

That long view shapes which segments JenCap will and will not enter. Casualty remains the firm’s largest and most historically active focus, an area LaCava says still holds real opportunity for new product development. Monoline property and standalone commercial auto, by contrast, sit outside JenCap’s appetite entirely, both segments the firm has judged structurally unable to support a program administrator’s added cost once folded into a carrier’s combined ratio. That discipline extends to admitting when a program simply is not working. Rather than repackaging a struggling product for a different distribution channel, LaCava says JenCap’s approach is to recognize early when a segment will not receive the support it needs in the market, and to exit cleanly rather than force it.

LaCava is equally candid about how quickly competitors tend to follow a genuinely good idea, describing near-immediate imitation as close to a guarantee once a program proves itself. What protects JenCap’s position once that competition arrives, he argues, is service delivered consistently across the entire relationship, not just at the point of quoting a new program, extending through underwriting, claims handling, accounting, and every support function an agent or insured touches.

That same institutional depth is now feeding directly into JenCap’s use of AI. The firm has worked with AI for several years, LaCava says, and its decades of accumulated program data have become exactly the kind of raw material AI is best positioned to unlock for underwriting and risk-selection decisions. He is direct about where he sees this heading: proprietary data becoming table stakes for competing in the MGA space at all, a shift he expects to accelerate consolidation among firms without the underwriting history to compete on it, and a future where policies are built around an individual insured’s specific operations and loss history rather than a generalist form designed to cover as many scenarios as possible.

A: It’s been incredibly consistent. Unlike some of our peers, we’ve been in delegated authority, program underwriting space for decades, and in fact we’ve got programs that go back over 30 years. That longevity, that consistency for us is critical.

A: We tend to focus on very specific niches, and we’ll work to identify a particular subsegment of a market. It has to have something that’s unique. It could be a unique geography, it could be the product itself, or it could be targeting a specific subsegment of a market where we feel it’s underserved.

A: The markets that tended to be more difficult and had incredibly thin margins just don’t lend themselves to the economic model, particularly something like commercial auto that’s been under so much pressure from a loss ratio standpoint. When the carriers look at that on a combined ratio basis, adding our cost into that just doesn’t make sense.

A: Because of our tenure and because of the amount of data we’ve accumulated on some of our larger programs over the decades, AI has been amazing at unlocking just the value in the decision support cycle. If you’re not actively working in the space, or your vendors are not actively helping you in this space, it’s only a matter of time that you’ll be left behind.

A: The ultimate winners in that will always be the insureds. Product that’s incredibly tailored to the insured’s needs rather than a generalist product that hopes to cover everything in their operations. It’s going to change the landscape in amazing ways.

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Risk Placement Services (RPS) Programs, a specialty distribution division of Arthur J. Gallagher & Co., named Rick Cullen as president to lead its programs business in mid-2025. He has a one-word answer for what the following 13 months felt like: busy.

Cullen joined with a mandate that split cleanly into two priorities. The biggest surprise, he says, was not a lack of talent but a lack of structure. RPS’s program managers, overseeing more than 40 programs, already had genuine underwriting expertise. What they lacked was an organizational setup that let them actually use it. Building something closer to an insurance-company structure, rather than a brokerage-style operation staffed largely by production-focused personnel, has been central to Cullen’s first year, alongside bringing in underwriters with real carrier-side backgrounds to rebuild credibility with capacity providers.

That structural rebuild sits alongside a deliberate shift in how RPS manages its carrier relationships: consolidating from largely one-off, transactional arrangements toward fewer, deeper partnerships. Cullen points to a handful of A-rated carriers now participating across multiple RPS programs on a quota-share basis, spanning classes as different as trucking, contracting, and health and fitness, largely indifferent to which specific class they are backing so long as RPS is managing it. That willingness to diversify across a shared portfolio, Cullen argues, benefits both sides: a carrier already invested in three programs is far more likely to support a fourth, or help remediate one hitting a rough patch, than a carrier holding a single standalone book.

RPS’s growth strategy leans heavily on a structural advantage Cullen believes no direct competitor can replicate: sitting simultaneously inside Gallagher’s retail and wholesale distribution networks. The firm’s expansion of its golf course program, from an exclusive private country club book into public golf courses, grew directly out of submissions Gallagher’s retail relationships with roughly 2,000 golf courses were already generating, business the original program was never built to capture. That same distribution advantage is guiding where RPS is choosing to grow next: Cullen names wheels, workers’ compensation, environmental, and hospitality as segments where the firm currently captures only a fraction of the volume flowing through Gallagher more broadly, representing deliberate white space rather than opportunistic expansion.

That expansion has come with a deliberate effort to make RPS’s new direction visible to the market, not just internally. Cullen describes months spent explaining the firm’s overhauled structure directly to capacity providers, in person, across the country. 

“We’ve done a whole lot of dog-and-pony shows to a lot of carriers explaining what we’re doing,” he says. “We’ve done it in New York and Dallas and Chicago and London.” That outreach reflects a gap Cullen is candid about inheriting: RPS, he says, had never actually set out what it wanted to become. 

“RPS never really had a capital strategy on what they wanted to look like when they grew up,” he says, framing the past year less as growth for its own sake and more as the firm finally answering that question on its own terms.
 

 

Growth at RPS has come with clear guardrails, however. Cullen points to a recent pullback from larger accounts within the firm’s auto program, made after identifying deteriorating loss ratios in that segment, a decision that reduced premium in the near term but one he frames as central to how RPS measures success. Supporting that discipline is a build-out in actuarial capability that simply did not exist when Cullen arrived: RPS added five actuaries over the past year, up from zero, giving the firm the analytical depth to flag problem segments proactively rather than waiting for a carrier to raise concerns.

Cullen also sees AI changing the day-to-day texture of underwriting at RPS, not by replacing judgment but by freeing time previously spent on administrative work. He points to Gallagher’s Center of Excellence, staffed by more than 12,000 professionals across Gallagher’s India operations rather than a third-party vendor, as an operational advantage that lets RPS direct and prioritize how that support capacity is used. There is an energized mood inside the division, attributed to the pace of structural change and the scale of opportunity now visible across the programs group.

A: One is shoring up our underwriting and structure, and two really laying the field work for strategic management of our capacity. We are looking to become more of a strategic partner for some of our capacity providers, meaning doing more business with fewer carriers.

A: We have both a wholesale network of distribution and frankly the power of Gallagher retail distribution. It’s a huge advantage when we’re developing these products. We eliminate a lot of the execution risk on new programs.

A: We’re underweight in workers comp. We have probably $95.1 billion of workers comp, we write three billion. Environmental, we don’t have any environmental programs today, so we see a lot of opportunity. Hospitality is another one.

A: We are an underwriting shop in a very production-heavy organization. We continually have to make sure we remind people that we can’t grow just to grow. We don’t do better simply when we write more, we do better when we write better.

A: There’s a chance that AI allows us to be even more human to people, because it allows us to talk about specific risks versus spending time on completing an app or scrubbing the data. We think there’s a big advantage for us to set ourselves apart.

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If there is a single theme uniting Great Lakes, JenCap, and RPS heading into the next 12 to 24 months, it is that data accumulated over years is increasingly the raw material for decisions previously made on instinct. All three firms describe AI not as a replacement for underwriting judgment, but as a way of finally putting decades of proprietary information to full use, whether that means feeding telematics insight back to trucking insureds, unlocking real-time decision support from three decades of program data, or freeing underwriters from data entry so they can spend more time on the risk conversations that actually differentiate a program.

A Gallagher Bassett survey of MGAs, managing general underwriters (MGUs), PAs, and carriers found that 61.3 percent of respondents reported using AI, though only 35.5 percent said they were actively budgeting for AI tools. A separate Vertafore survey of nearly 200 MGA leaders and professionals found AI adoption closer to 21 percent, with roughly half planning near-term adoption, focused mainly on task automation, underwriting support, and customer service. The two figures differ, likely reflecting different survey populations, but both point the same direction: a market where AI use is still consolidating even as the firms furthest ahead, like JenCap, describe having worked with it for years already, and RPS treats it as core to freeing underwriters for higher-value conversations with agents and insureds. That divide is exactly why some MGA leaders now describe the sector as approaching a genuine strategic inflection point rather than a routine technology upgrade cycle.

Carrier performance on financial stability and commitment to innovation, tracked here since 2023, shows why that gap matters. Financial stability has held consistently strong, closing 2026 at a rated 5 out of 5. Commitment to innovation has moved far less steadily, dipping in both 2023 and 2025 before a partial recovery in 2026, and has yet to match the consistency carriers deliver on financial stability alone. That inconsistency is precisely the space the most disciplined PAs are stepping into: firms with genuine data depth and underwriting rigor, rather than distribution reach alone, are the ones likely to be trusted with an expanding share of quota-share capacity going forward, regardless of how quickly carriers themselves close the gap.

Across three very different corners of the program business, from an independent trucking specialist nearing its 40th year to a Gallagher-backed capacity operation rebuilding its underwriting bench, the same qualities recur: 

• a willingness to say no to business that does not fit
   

• a level of comfort with proprietary data that only comes from sustained tenure in a niche
   

• a habit of reading where a market or a partner’s needs are heading before that shift becomes obvious to competitors

None of this year’s winners describe strategy as a reaction to conditions. Each describes it as a discipline applied consistently over years, one that increasingly compounds through the technology now available to interpret decades of accumulated risk data. That, more than any single program or partnership, is what separates this year’s best insurance carriers and PAs in the USA from the rest of the market.

Best Insurance Carriers and Program Administrators in the USA

• 
  RPS Programs
   
  
• 
  Jencap
   
  
• 
  Gridiron Insurance Underwriters
   
  
• 
  MiniCo Insurance Agency
   
  
• 
  Professional Program Insurance Brokerage, Division of SPG Insurance Solutions, LLC
   
  
• 
  Ryan Specialty National Programs
   
  

Program Administrators

 

• 
  Risk Placement Services, Inc.
   
  
• 
  Jencap
   
  
• 
  Gridiron Insurance Underwriters, Inc.
   
  
• 
  MiniCo Insurance Agency
   
  
• 
  Professional Program Insurance Brokerage, Division of SPG Insurance Solutions, LLC
   
  
• 
  Ryan Specialty National Programs
   
  

• Delos Insurance Solutions
• Great Lakes General Agency
• SolePro
• US Assure

Carriers/Partners

 

• Accelerant
• Allianz
• AmTrust Insurance Company
• Beazley
• Cimarron/Sunz
• DB Insurance
• Eastern Atlantic Insurance
• Old Republic
• Liberty Mutual
• SiriusPoint Programs
• Zurich

 

Frequently Asked Questions

 

Who are the best insurance carriers and program administrators in the USA?

A: The best-rated PAs and carriers in the USA include Great Lakes General Agency, JenCap Group, and RPS Programs, according to Insurance Business America’s 2026 5-Star Program Administrators and Carriers report, alongside the full list of firms achieving 5-Star status. Winners are identified through direct ratings from PAs and their carrier partners on expertise, stability, innovation, and service.

How were the 2026 5-Star Program Administrators and Carriers selected?

A: Nominees were ranked on their largest programs, expertise and stability in carrier relationships, and innovations in program development. Carriers were rated separately by the PAs who work with them, scored one to five across 10 categories, with an average of four or higher required for 5-Star recognition. 

Why are program administrators increasingly investing in AI and data analytics?

A: Firms with decades of proprietary underwriting and claims data are using AI to convert that history into real-time decision support. Industry-wide adoption still varies significantly by survey, with estimates ranging from roughly 21 percent to over 60 percent of MGAs and PAs reporting some AI use as of 2026, though a smaller share has dedicated AI budgets. 

What is telematics doing to trucking insurance programs specifically?

A: Telematics gives PAs real-time visibility into fleet safety, allowing them to turn raw driving data into direct, actionable feedback for insureds rather than using it purely as a pricing input. Roughly 60 percent of insurers were already using telematics somewhere in their underwriting process as of early 2026, though industry data suggests collecting the data alone, without that active follow-through, has not driven meaningful improvement in fleet safety outcomes.

What trends will shape program administration over the next two years?

A: Expect continued consolidation among MGAs without deep proprietary data, growing carrier appetite for quota-share partnerships with fewer, more strategically aligned administrators, and increasing pressure on carriers to close the gap between how much program partners value innovation and how well carriers currently deliver it.