Florida has more PEO clients than any other state in the country. Alliant Insurance Services is building deeper into that market.
Mary Hayes has joined the national brokerage as assistant vice president in its employee benefits group, based in Florida. Her focus is PEO advisory: helping employers determine whether a professional employer organization structure fits their workforce, and guiding them across HR, payroll, benefits administration, workers' compensation, and compliance.
Florida accounts for 25% of all US PEO clients nationally, the highest concentration of any state, based on the National Association of Professional Employer Organizations' (NAPEO) October 2025 research. More than 230,000 businesses across the country currently operate through a PEO, working with a combined 4.5 million employees. The model gives smaller and mid-market employers access to benefit plan pricing that would otherwise require a much larger workforce to negotiate, because the PEO pools employees from multiple client companies when dealing with carriers.
Hayes brings a background that spans both sides of the PEO market. She spent three years as vice president of sales at Engage PEO, a national HR services company, preceded by four years as a business development manager at AlphaStaff, a Florida-based PEO. From 2020 to 2023 she was a broker at Aon. That sequence of PEO sales experience followed by time on the brokerage side is increasingly the profile large benefits consultancies are seeking, as employers ask advisers to model PEO costs against self-funded and fully insured alternatives rather than evaluate each option in isolation.
The state's concentration of PEO clients reflects a business environment where compliance complexity and workforce costs make outsourced HR administration a practical choice across multiple sectors. Florida has no state income tax, which drives business formation, but employers in sectors such as construction, healthcare, and hospitality carry workers' compensation obligations that vary significantly by class code and experience rating. A PEO's pooled group rates give smaller employers access to pricing they could not negotiate independently.
Broker involvement in structuring and evaluating PEO arrangements has grown as the products have become more complex. HUB International launched a dedicated national PEO consulting practice in May 2025, citing rising demand from small and mid-sized employers and expanding regulatory requirements as the drivers.
Alliant has added PEO advisory headcount across several regions in 2026. Hayes joins a Florida practice where the PEO conversation is already a standard part of how mid-market employers approach benefit cost management at renewal.
Before her time at Engage PEO, Hayes ran an agency as a Nationwide producer across Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida. She holds property and casualty and life and health licenses in multiple states. Kevin Overbey, president of Alliant Employee Benefits, said Hayes brings a broad understanding of workforce challenges and a focus on delivering measurable value to clients.
