How many licensed insurance agents are there in each state?

The national count

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) publishes a state-by-state count of licensed producers once a year in its Insurance Department Resources Report (IDRR), built from a survey of its member departments. The most recent edition with a full state table covers calendar year 2022 and puts resident individual producers at 2,257,251 across the 50 states and DC, which the report itself rounds to "2.3 million."

That is not the only number in the report, and it is easy to pick the wrong one. The same table counts 9,459,051 non-resident individual license records, nearly 4.2 times the resident count, because most producers hold a license in their home state plus separate licenses in every other state where they write business. Business entities (agencies, not individuals) are counted separately again. For "how many people are licensed as agents," resident producers is the closest figure to a headcount.

Resident producers per state, adjusted for population

A raw state ranking mostly reproduces the population ranking: California, Texas and Florida lead because they are large states. Dividing each state's resident producer count by its Census population shows which states are relatively dense with licensed agents and which are not.

South Carolina has the lowest rate in the full 51-jurisdiction table at 12.4 per 10,000 residents, well below the next-lowest (District of Columbia, 21.3). NAIC's own report notes that departments do not all count license categories the same way, so an outlier at either end can reflect reporting differences as much as the true size of the local agent pool.

Resident licenses are a small share of the total in every state

Looking at the largest states by total license volume shows the same pattern everywhere: non-resident licenses outnumber resident licenses by roughly 2 to 1 in the biggest states and by far more in smaller ones that sit on major reciprocity corridors.

Why non-resident licenses dwarf resident licenses

Before the late 1990s, a producer who wanted to write business in another state generally had to meet that state's own pre-licensing education and exam requirements from scratch, state by state. The 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act told states to reach reciprocity or uniformity in non-resident licensing by November 2002 or face a federal licensing body (NARAB) taking over the function.

States responded with reciprocity agreements and the National Insurance Producer Registry (NIPR), which lets a producer apply for a non-resident license in another state electronically, usually without a new exam. A 2015 federal law (NARAB II) went further, allowing a producer licensed in their home state to sell in every other state once they meet that state's continuing-education and fee requirements. None of this removes the paperwork: a producer still has to hold a separate non-resident license in each additional state, which is why the non-resident count is a count of license records, not a count of people.

What the spread means for hiring and competition

For an agency owner, the resident-producer rate says more about the local market than the headline national total does. A state with a shallow resident-producer pool relative to its population, such as Washington (36.7 per 10,000) or South Carolina (12.4), likely has a thinner local hiring bench for a resident producer role; recruiting may lean more on training new entrants than poaching licensed ones.

A state with a dense pool, such as Florida or Oklahoma, cuts the other way: more local candidates to hire from, but also more licensed competitors already working the same ZIP codes. Neither figure says anything about how good the local candidates or competitors are, only how many of them are licensed.

Methodology

• Producer counts: NAIC Insurance Department Resources Report (IDRR), 2022 Insurance Producers table, which reports individual and business-entity producer licenses by state as Total, Resident and Non-Resident. Figures are for calendar year 2022, the most recent edition with a full state table at the time of writing.
• Population: US Census Bureau Vintage 2022 state population estimates (July 1, 2022), matched to the same calendar year as the NAIC counts so the per-10,000 rate compares like with like.
• Per-10,000 rate = resident individual producers ÷ state population × 10,000. Business-entity producer licenses (agencies, not individuals) are excluded from this calculation.
• The 12-state chart shows the highest rates; the full NAIC table covers all 50 states, DC, and five territories, not all of which report every column.