A few years ago, a major catastrophe would bring Henry Maley calls from carriers looking for a few dozen desk adjusters. These days they ask for as many as 200.
Maley, senior vice president of sales at Mobile, Alabama-based independent adjusting firm Mid-America Catastrophe Services, told Insurance Business at ITC Vegas that the requests are growing as experienced adjusters retire and carriers look to close files faster, with fewer people sent out to inspect damage.
“I used to get calls for 25, 50 desk adjusters,” he said. “Now I’m asked to provide 100 to 200 with the carriers.”
Desk adjusters handle claims remotely, working from photos, drone imagery, documents and phone calls instead of visiting the property. Carriers bring in independent firms such as Mid-America when a large event outstrips their own staff.
“So carriers staff, and they don’t always staff accordingly,” Maley said. “So when they get hit with a major event, they need people.”
The industry has already had one close call. According to Maley, “we were really in ‘24 one hurricane away from not being able to provide enough bodies to work the hurricanes.”
Retirements are a big part of the problem. “One of the things that are going on is we have more and more people are retiring in the industry,” he said.
There were about 376,100 claims adjusters, examiners and investigators in the US in 2025, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment of claims adjusters to fall 6% by 2035. It still expects about 21,600 openings a year on average, as workers retire or leave for other jobs.
Sedgwick’s Andrew McCallum, vice president of specialty operations, has warned that as much as 40% of the catastrophe claims resources available in 2024 could no longer be deploying by 2027, as Insurance Business reported in its look at why the next catastrophe capacity crunch may be adjusters.
Maley was also frank about the business side. “Every year is not a good year. This year has been a very bad year for the independent adjusting firms,” he said.
Carriers are changing how they inspect claims. In the previous 30 days, Maley said, three carriers had told him they did not want a field inspection on a roof.
“They want to use drones or any way possibly to keep the adjusters off the roof,” he said. “That’s more of a safety issue, but I see that more so they’re able to do more with less.”
Maley has previously told Insurance Business how drone inspections moved from novelty to standard practice in claims, helped by sharper imagery and wider acceptance from state regulators.
Parts of the industry, he said, are also turning to inspectors rather than trained adjusters, “not using a talented individual, which I think takes away from the industry, but they’re using inspectors to try to produce a product.”
He does not expect artificial intelligence to take people out of the process either. AI “is not going to be a tool that can make judgment calls and exceptions,” he said. “There’s always going to have to be somebody overseeing the process.”
Retirements are also changing who Maley deals with at carriers.
“A lot of people that are taking over these positions are very busy and don’t have the time to develop the relationships that we have had in the past,” he said.
When he sees a contact nearing retirement, he said, he now makes a point of getting to know whoever is likely to take over.
Bringing new people into claims has been a long-running problem. Rohit Verma, who led Crawford & Company until the end of 2025, argued that claims has a structural disadvantage in the insurance talent war, with fewer candidates drawn to claims roles and an aging workforce.
