Insurance Agencies and Brokerages

The median filer grossed $21,800, or $1,816 a month before expenses. That is an operating business at part-time scale: enough revenue to be worth running properly, not enough to be the only thing in the household.

301,501 filings make this a crowded field. Crowding is not automatically bad, but it does mean the price of the work is set by whoever will do it cheapest.

17.9% of filers grossed $100,000 or more, which is high for this dataset. A substantial share of this field is running an actual business rather than an occasional one.

Independent insurance work suits people who can survive on renewals — the first year pays badly and the fifth is what the model is actually for.

There is no qualification, licence or minimum to appear in this data — you file and you are counted. Read the receipts distribution as the price of that: no barrier at the door means no filter before the numbers.

12.0x between the quarters — $6,145 against $73,699, or $5,629 a month. This is the shape of a field where a minority does very well and the summary statistics quietly borrow their success.

The bottom quarter of Insurance Agencies and Brokerages earns under $6,145 — $43,875 below the $50,020 a typical American job pays. Entering at the bottom and waiting is a live risk here, not a theoretical one, and some people never leave that quarter.

Do not start this if you need income in year one; this model only works if you are still there in year five.

106,098 filers out of 301,501 — 35.2% — reported under $10,000 in gross receipts in 2022. At that share the bottom band is not a warning about beginners; it is a description of a large part of the field.

Read that as a floor, not an estimate. Census publishes gross receipts, not net income, so everyone inside that share earned less than $10,000 suggests once costs came out — and filers who grossed well above $10,000 may still have netted nothing.

A ratio of 12.0x between the quarters is the signature of a winner-take-most distribution. $21,800 is a real number about a real population, but nobody entering Insurance Agencies and Brokerages should plan around it.

Put in money rather than ratios: $6,145 at the 25th percentile, $21,800 at the midpoint, $73,699 at the 75th. $67,554 separates the quarter of Insurance Agencies and Brokerages at the bottom from the quarter at the top.

Between $6,145 and $73,699 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $21,800. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $51,899; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $67,554.

$15,655 below the midpoint, $51,899 above it. That asymmetry is extreme even for this data, and it means every summary of Insurance Agencies and Brokerages that is not a median — including any average you see quoted elsewhere — is describing the top of the range rather than the middle.

Converted to a 2,080-hour year, the receipts run $2.95 an hour at the 25th percentile, $10.48 at the midpoint and $35.43 at the 75th. Read them as revenue per hour worked; the equivalent wage is lower by whatever this work costs to do.

Straight from the Census bands for Insurance Agencies and Brokerages: 66,252 filers under $5,000, 39,832 between $5,000 and $9,999, 56,780 between $10,000 and $24,999, 53,986 above $100,000 and 18,065 above $250,000.