Ceded reinsurance premium in the US managing general agent (MGA) market climbed 18% to $21.2 billion in 2025, according to Gallagher Re’s newly published MGA Market Report supplement, “Reinsurance Capital Supporting MGAs.” The jump outpaces underlying business growth — US MGA premium itself rose a more modest 10% to over $125 billion on Gallagher Re’s own estimate — signaling more dollars ceded even as the market matures. Behind the topline number sits a bigger structural story: by Gallagher Re’s tally, rated reinsurers now supply 65% of the capital backing MGA programs, and Munich Re and Hannover Re are re-entering the space after years on the sidelines.
Ceded Premium Hits a Record High, But Cession Rates Are Actually Falling
Gallagher Re’s Program Carrier Composite — a panel of 25 fronting and program carriers the reinsurance broker tracks annually — ceded $21.2 billion of premium into the reinsurance market in 2025, an 18% increase over year-end 2024, the firm said in its 2026 MGA Market Report. Measured over a longer horizon, the 2025 figure marks a 59% increase over the 2023 total, underscoring how quickly delegated-authority premium has flowed toward reinsurance capital since the pandemic-era hard market.
Yet the dollar increase masks a countervailing trend inside the composite: carriers are keeping more of what they write. The panel ceded 64% of non-affiliate gross written premium to reinsurers in 2025, down from a 74%-77% cession rate in 2022-2024, meaning the rise in ceded dollars is mostly a function of a bigger MGA pie rather than carriers offloading a larger slice of it. That distinction matters for anyone reading the 18% figure as evidence that fronting carriers are becoming more dependent on reinsurance — on a percentage basis, the opposite appears to be happening even as absolute cession volumes grow.
MGA Premium Growth Slows as the Segment Matures
The underlying MGA market itself grew at a more measured pace. Gallagher Re estimates US MGA premium exceeded $125 billion in 2025, up roughly 10% year over year, a deceleration but still enough for the broker to call MGAs the growth epicenter of the industry. Its own composite of 25 program carriers grew gross written premium 14% to $33.1 billion in 2025, outpacing the broader MGA segment’s expansion rate.
Even so, Gallagher Re cautions against overstating the segment’s footprint: MGAs still account for only about 12.5% of total US P&C premium. That relatively contained share has not stopped rate pressure in adjacent lines, where sidecar-backed MGAs continue pushing casualty rates down even as carriers like Markel hold firm. Looking ahead, Gallagher Re expects MGA growth to remain stable at approximately 10% in 2026, adding another $3 billion of premium into the program carrier composite — a forecast that assumes no material shift in the current economic environment, and one that will keep distribution-side scrutiny elevated for business owners already worried about coverage gaps.
Munich Re and Hannover Re Lead a Rated-Capital Comeback
The more consequential shift is in who is supplying the capital behind MGA-fronted programs. Composite carriers still source 65% of their MGA premium reinsurance from rated balance sheets, representing 71% of reinsurance recoverables at year-end 2025, leaving the remainder with unrated or alternative capital providers — a split Gallagher Re frames as evidence that rated reinsurers are reasserting themselves in the MGA ecosystem after several years of alternative capital gaining ground.
Two names stand out in that reassertion. Munich Re and Hannover Re posted the largest year-over-year growth among top reinsurers backing MGA programs, up 74% and 84% respectively, with Allianz and Lloyd’s not far behind at +49% and +51%. Lloyd’s nonetheless remains the single largest reinsurance counterparty for North American MGA business, assuming $1.7 billion of premium, or 7% of gross recoverables, in 2025. Concentration at the top of the market is notable but not extreme: the top five reinsurance entities assumed $4.8 billion, or 22.7%, of total MGA-related reinsurance premium in the composite, while the top ten assumed 34% of the total, leaving substantial capacity spread across a long tail of participants.
Rated reinsurers’ MGA push arrives as broader property-catastrophe capacity loosens: Guy Carpenter reported property-cat reinsurance renewals softening at the July 1 date, freeing capital that traditional reinsurers appear to be redeploying into growing MGA-fronted lines.
Composite Surplus Growth and Carrier Concentration Signal Room to Run
Capital adequacy on the carrier side is not a constraint on further expansion. The program carrier composite reported surplus growth of 16.5% in 2025, excluding three carriers with abnormal capital movements, with total composite surplus up $1.5 billion (+13.9%) and net income up $92 million (+9.2%) — supporting continued cession volume even as carriers retain more of what they write.
The composite also remains concentrated at the top: State National and Transverse together control 22% of Gallagher Re’s program carrier composite, and 13 of the 25 carriers each wrote over $1 billion in premium in 2025. That consolidation echoes a longer trend the broker flagged in a prior-year report, when its narrower, earlier composite had swelled by 70% over two years — from about $10 billion of premium in 2022 to $17.6 billion by 2024, per Gallagher Re. Together, the figures describe an MGA-fronting complex that has scaled quickly and still has headroom for growth into 2026.
