Insurance companies in Phoenix: large service operations, small local agencies

Read this if you live in the Phoenix area and want to know which insurance companies are actually here, if you want a job in the industry, or if you sell to insurers or agencies. It describes the market from Census counts and official records; it doesn't pick carriers for you.

The Phoenix count

County Business Patterns 2023, NAICS 524, Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ Metro Area (CBSA 38060):

Put together, 2,705 Phoenix establishments are small (under 20 employees), 189 are mid-sized and 88 are large (100 or more). County Business Patterns counts establishments with paid employees, not companies, and doesn't count self-employed agents. The metro has 73% of Arizona's insurance establishments and 68% of its insurance jobs; another 19,096 Arizona insurance jobs are coded to no county at all, so some Phoenix-area work may sit outside these figures.

Big sites and small agencies

These are our tabulations of the Census metro file by NAICS code. Carriers average 54 employees per site; agencies about 5. The rest of the related-services group, 11,303 employees by subtraction, works in claims, plan administration and other insurance services, where pay is lower: that group averaged $72,968, against $90,109 at carriers and $84,809 at agencies.

No listed head offices

Neither the data file nor EDGAR shows an SEC-listed insurer headquartered in the Phoenix metro. The large sites belong to insurers based elsewhere and to private companies, and the Census Bureau doesn't name them. The Greater Phoenix Economic Council, the region's economic development organization, groups finance and insurance with back-office and headquarters operations in its advanced business services cluster. For the groups behind them, see the largest insurance companies in the US.

Shopping for coverage in Phoenix

The firm you meet is usually an agency, and the policy comes from a carrier. Before you sign:

• Get the carrier's legal name from the quote or declarations page.
• Check that company and the agent with Arizona's Department of Insurance and Financial Institutions (DIFI), which Arizona Revised Statutes section 20-101 sets up as the insurance regulator.
• Look up the carrier's complaint record and financial information in the NAIC's Consumer Insurance Search.
• If you're buying title insurance with a home, the title agent and the underwriter can be different companies; check both.

Getting hired

With 88 sites of 100 or more employees, Phoenix has as many large insurance workplaces as metro Atlanta, which has four listed insurer head offices. Carrier jobs paid $90,109 on average in 2023. Agency jobs, where new producers often start, paid $84,809. Selling insurance in Arizona requires a producer licence from DIFI.

Selling to Phoenix's insurance sites

The 88 large establishments are few enough to research one by one, and they buy differently from agencies:

Local groups: the Greater Phoenix Chamber for the business community, and GPEC for companies relocating or expanding.

Worked example: call quality analytics

Illustrative example. The vendor, prices and rates are invented; the site counts come from the Census table above.

Valley Call QA (valleycallqa.example) scores insurance service calls for compliance and coaching.

1. List: 88 establishments with 100 or more employees. Assume 60 run phone service or claims teams.
2. Arithmetic: reaching an operations leader at 70% of 60 gives 42 conversations. If 12% agree to score a sample month of calls, that's 5; 3 contracts at $48,000 a year bring $144,000.
3. Sequence: start with the 16 sites of 500 or more, where a single contract covers the most seats.

Identifying who runs each site is the slow part; Bebop researches each account in a list and suggests the contact.

Subject: The call-scoring sample we discussed

Hi [first name],

Good to meet you at [event]. You mentioned your [claims or service] team in [city] handles about [volume] calls a week.

As promised: we can score a sample month of those calls against your script and compliance points and send back a coaching report, at no cost.

If that's useful, which week works for a 20-minute setup call?

[Your name]

Next step: for the statewide picture, including the jobs coded to no county, see insurance companies in Arizona.