What CIAB's Own Numbers Say About the Market Right Now
The Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers surveys its member firms every quarter, and its own published numbers tell a consistent decelerating story through 2025. Q2 2025 commercial rates rose 3.7% overall, down from 4.2% in Q1, marking the 31st consecutive quarter of increases but the slowest pace in that streak. Large-account rate increases fell even faster, down to 2.9%, a 45% drop from Q1. Five lines, cyber, EPLI, terrorism, workers' compensation, and D&O, posted outright declines in the same quarter. D&O alone fell 2.5%, its sixth straight quarterly decline, amid more than $1 billion in excess capacity chasing the same accounts.
CIAB's own Q3 2025 resource makes the call explicit in its title: "Soft Market Clear in Q3 2025." That is not an outside analyst's read of the data. It is the trade association representing the agents and brokers themselves, naming the shift directly.
Why Softening Feels Like a Reason to Slow Down
The intuitive read on a soft market is understandable: rates are not spiking, clients are not calling in a panic about their renewal, and the urgency that drove business owners to shop around during the 2022 to 2024 hard market has eased. It is easy to read that as permission to coast on the book you already have and let new-business prospecting slide, especially for agencies already short-staffed against the producer shortage documented elsewhere in this research (see the producer shortage statistics page).
Why It Is Actually the Opposite
CIAB's own framing of the Q2 2025 data notes carriers were "slightly more aggressive in pursuing large accounts," meaning more underwriting capacity is now competing for the same book of business. That cuts against incumbents in a specific way: the fear-based retention tool that works so well in a hard market, the client's own anxiety that switching carriers might mean an even bigger increase somewhere else, weakens as rates flatten. An incumbent agent who has been retaining a client passively on rate-shock fear alone has less of that fear to lean on in 2026 than they did in 2023.
That does not make the pitch to switch effortless. The perceived savings from switching are smaller in a soft market too, and client inertia does not disappear on its own. What changes is the balance: the incumbent's free retention tool gets weaker at the same time as more carrier capacity is actively competing for the account. A well-timed x-date outreach lands into that gap.
The Umbrella Exception Worth Knowing Before You Pitch
One line breaks the softening pattern entirely. Umbrella rates rose 11.5% in the same Q2 2025 CIAB survey, driven by a documented spike in nuclear verdicts. That distinction matters for how a producer frames an x-date conversation: the broad "rates are flattening, now is a good time to talk" pitch does not apply evenly across every line a prospect is carrying, and umbrella needs its own conversation. The full sourced breakdown is on the nuclear verdicts post linked below.
What This Means for X-Date Prospecting Right Now
Nothing in the competitor content pulled for this research connects the 2025 to 2026 softening cycle to a "why you should still be prospecting" argument. Every competitor page reviewed either ignores the market cycle or runs stale hard-market messaging built for a different moment. A producer or agency principal who is currently deprioritizing new-business x-date outreach because "the market is calm" is reading the data backward: calm is exactly when an incumbent's grip on a client loosens, not when it tightens.
VA Horizon's Human + AI SDRs qualify commercial insurance prospects over SMS against the x-dates and criteria you set, so this argument does not require adding headcount to test. The setup is a flat $300, then $300 to $550 per held, double-confirmed meeting, exact rate set on a fit call inside that range.
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- CIAB, Q2 2025 P&C Market Survey
- Insurance Journal, coverage of CIAB Q2 2025 survey
- CIAB, "Soft Market Clear in Q3 2025" resource