The 100 Largest Employee Benefits Brokers in the US

Ranked by the premium they place for medium and large employers, from 58,346 US employers' 2024 benefit filings

Every US employer that pays for insured benefits has to file a Form 5500 with the Department of Labor, and has to name the brokers it pays. We read all 2024 filings and built the list below from them. It covers 58,346 employers with 100 or more people on their main health plan. Together those employers cover 80,291,339 people.

This list is one of a pair. The other ranks the insurers behind these benefits, in the 50 largest employee benefits insurers in the US. Both come out of our wider study of what benefits big US employers actually offer, which breaks the same filings down by industry, by state and by plan size.

1. What this list measures

A broker gets on this list by being named in an employer's filing as someone who was paid commission or fees. For each firm we add up the premium on the contracts it is named on, the commission and fees it was paid, the employers it works for, and the people covered at those employers. Premium placed is the main ranking because it is the measure the industry itself uses, and it is the hardest one to distort.

30,931 different firms are named by employers this size. Most show up only once or twice. We only rank firms named by at least 25 separate employers, which leaves 350 firms. Without that cut-off the list fills up with firms that sit on a handful of very large plans and are not really benefits brokers at all.

55,893 of the 58,346 employers name at least one broker, which is 95.8% of them. Plenty name more than one, so the same employer can show up under several firms below.

2. The 100 largest brokers by premium placed

Mercer comes first, with $10.0bn of premium on the contracts it is named on, across 2,230 employers.

What the rate column shows

Commission as a share of premium is not the same across the table. Aon takes 2.31% and Willis Towers Watson takes 2.83%, while HUB International takes 4.43% and OneDigital takes 4.31%. The big consultancies charge roughly half the share that the mid-market brokers do. Bigger employers negotiate harder, and the largest accounts are more often on a flat fee than on commission.

3. The same firms ranked by people covered, and by employers

Premium is not the only way to size a broker. Rank by the people covered at the employers a firm works for and the order changes, because a firm can place a lot of cover for a few very large employers, or a little for very many.

Rank by how many employers a firm works for and the top changes again.

Why the two lists disagree

The firms that lead on people covered are consulting firms that work for fewer but much larger employers. Mercer averages 5,881 people per employer. The firms that lead on employer count are brokers that work for lots of mid-sized companies. Marsh McLennan Agency averages 1,239.

Neither one is the better business. They are just different, and a list that shows only one measure hides that.

4. What brokers get paid

Employers this size reported $5.1bn in broker commission and $1.3bn in fees for 2024.

The ten firms at the top of section 2 got $2.4bn of that commission, or 47.2%. All 100 firms got $3.6bn, or 71.8%. Put the other way round, the other 30,831 firms named in the filings share about a third of the money.

Counting employers instead of money gives a different picture. Of the 55,893 employers that name a broker, 26,877 use one of the ten biggest by employer count. That is 48.1%.

Eleos Life helps brokers and platforms offer life and disability cover to their customers.

5. How we built this list, and what it does not show

The source is every 2024 Form 5500 filing with an insurance schedule, read straight from the Department of Labor's public filing system and checked against its own list of filings on 17 September 2026.

Four things matter if you plan to quote these numbers.

People on plans are not staff numbers

The people figure counts everyone on the plan at the start of the year, taken from each employer's biggest health filing. It is not the size of the workforce. It can include family members and former staff who kept their cover, and it leaves out staff who turned the cover down.

Only insured benefits show up

These filings cover benefits bought from an insurer. Big employers that pay claims out of their own money do not file for that benefit, so you cannot see who advises them on it. That makes firms who mostly work with those employers look smaller than they are.

Company names are grouped by hand

Filings spell the same firm in many different ways. We group them using a published list of spellings. It is a careful effort, not a full record of which company owns which, so some parts of a big group may sit apart from the parent.

Commission is only what the filing shows

It is the money reported on these contracts. It is not the firm's revenue, and not everything it earns from benefits work.

Premium placed does not add up to a market total

A contract that names several brokers counts its full premium under each of them. Contracts name 2.19 brokers on average, so adding this column up across every firm gives more than the market is worth. Each row is sound as a measure of that firm, but do not add the column up or read it as a market share.

For the insurers behind these plans, see the 50 largest employee benefits insurers in the US. For what employers actually put in a benefits package, and where the gaps are, see what benefits big US employers offer.

Filings can still be changed, and late ones still come in, so these figures describe the record as it stood on 17 September 2026.