Statistics

B2B Lead Gen Statistics & Benchmarks

Sourced b2b lead gen market data, cost benchmarks, and industry statistics, every figure cited to its origin.

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Marketing Agencies

Marketing Agency New-Business Statistics (2026)

Marketing agencies still depend on referrals for 66 to 74% of new business, and only 14% call their own sales pipeline "very healthy." 59% have tried outbound sales as a new-business strategy, but only 9% call it very effective. Cold-booked B2B meeting no-show rates climbed from 18% in 2020 to 32% in 2025. This page collects the sourced new-business numbers behind those patterns, every figure linked to its source.

Marketing Agency Industry Statistics (2026)

IBISWorld counted 114,014 advertising agency businesses in the US as of 2026, up 4.4% year over year and a 6.7% CAGR from 2021 to 2026. Other estimators put the total agency count anywhere from 41,250 to 120,000 to 134,000, a spread wide enough that it reflects differing definitions of "agency" more than genuine disagreement about growth. Industry-average utilization runs around 60%, with a 65 to 80% range considered peak-profit territory, and only 20% of agencies track profitability by client, project, or service line. This page keeps the count-spread and its definitional caveat visible rather than averaging it away, and cites every figure to its source.

Agency Business Development Cost Benchmarks (2026)

Hiring a dedicated in-house Director of New Business costs a marketing agency $150,000-plus a year before technology, bonuses, benefits, and ramp-up time, and 76% of agencies that make that hire lose the person within two years. The outsourced-agency alternative runs $3,000 to $9,950 a month in published retainers among major B2B appointment-setting vendors, or $150 to $900 per meeting on a pay-per-meeting model, with a fully-loaded in-house SDR costing $700 to $1,150 per meeting once amortized. VA Horizon publishes a $300 one-time setup, then $250 to $450 per held, double-confirmed meeting, positioned inside the legitimate part of the pay-per-meeting band and under both the retainer and in-house-SDR cost per meeting.

Agency Proposal Win-Rate Benchmarks by Service Line (2026)

R3 Worldwide reported the average 2024 agency pitch win rate at 22%, dropping to 19% for mid-sized agencies. Pitchsite's 2026 benchmark, built on Proposify, PandaDoc, and HubSpot data, put the blended average at 43%, with branding and creative agencies winning 52% of proposals, the highest segment measured, and PR agencies winning just 33%, the lowest. The average agency loses $28,800 to $60,480 a year pursuing proposals that do not close. Both headline averages are real and sourced; the segment breakdown is the more useful number, since it lets an agency compare its own win rate against its actual service line rather than an industry-wide blend.

Client-Side Marketing In-Housing Trend Statistics 2026

The ANA’s 2026 State of In-Housing report, surveying 404 jurors from its In-House Excellence Awards, found 35% agree marketers are in-housing more than ever against just 7% who see work moving back to outside agencies, and 34% observed in-house teams expanding their scope of work against 7% who saw the reverse. Cost savings as the top-cited reason for in-housing dropped sharply, from 30% in 2023 to just 9% in 2026, while 53% now expect an in-house team to deliver strategic, big-idea creative work, not just cheaper production. A prior wave of the same ANA survey put member in-housing prevalence at 82% in 2023, up from 78% in 2018, 58% in 2013, and 42% in 2008, a historical trendline reported across industry trade coverage of the study rather than independently re-fetched from ANA’s own site this research cycle.

Agency Client Engagement Length Statistics 2026: What the Data Can and Can’t Show by Service Line

No publisher currently breaks out average agency-client engagement length by service line, SEO versus PPC versus branding versus a project-only contract, in a disclosed-methodology report this research could locate. The closest genuinely sourced proxy is retainer tenure specifically: the ANA/4A’s Client-Agency AOR Relationship Tenure study puts the current average agency-of-record relationship at roughly 7 years, more than double 2016’s 3.2 years, and clients without a mandatory review period stay 8.1 years against 3.8 years for clients who review frequently. That AOR figure describes formal retainer relationships specifically, not every engagement type an agency runs. A separate, revenue-band cut from Predictable Profits’ 2025 Agency Growth Benchmark, as compiled by LoomDeck, found 8-figure agencies hold 92% annual client retention against 78% for 7-figure agencies, a second data point on how relationships hold up once a company scales, though it measures retention rate rather than engagement duration directly.

RFP Response Volume and Win-Rate Statistics for Agencies 2026

Companies across every industry submit an average of 166 RFPs a year, with Management Consulting firms leading at 229 a year, per Loopio’s 2026 Trends Report, built on 1,500-plus companies and more than 250,000 RFPs analyzed. Advertising, Media, and Comms, the industry classification covering agencies that respond to RFPs as sellers, posts the fastest average turnaround of any industry measured, at 22 hours. That report does not break out a win rate for RFP responses specifically. The agency proposal win-rate data already published elsewhere, R3 Worldwide’s 22% overall 2024 average and Pitchsite’s 2026 blended 43% figure, covers proposals broadly rather than formal RFPs, so read the two data sets as adjacent, not identical.

B2B Buying Committee Size Statistics for Agency-Selection Decisions

Large, strategic B2B deals now involve an average of 17 contacts, and 81% of revenue leaders say their team’s deals are more complex than ever, according to HubSpot’s 2026 Sales Trends Report. Gartner’s Future of Sales research, as cited by The Starr Conspiracy in its own 2025 buying-committee benchmark rather than independently re-verified against Gartner’s own site this cycle, puts the average enterprise-software buying group at 11 stakeholders, with a commonly repeated rule of thumb of 6 to 10 people for a typical complex B2B purchase. That same secondary citation puts buying-committee size at 5.4 stakeholders on average in 2015, growing to 8 to 13 by 2025, nearly doubling in a single decade. An agency pitching into a deal this size is rarely pitching one decision-maker.

Agency EBITDA Margin and Profitability Benchmark Statistics by Revenue Band, 2026

Digital marketing agencies sell at roughly 4.9x EBITDA in the $1 million to $3 million EBITDA band, rising to 6.1x at $3 million to $5 million and 9x at $5 million to $10 million, per a practitioner-compiled synthesis of M&A advisor conversations and named prior industry reports from First Page Sage. Top-performing agencies with strong growth metrics and professional deal representation can reach 8x to 12x, well above their size band’s average multiple. On the profitability side, 8-figure-revenue agencies average 25% to 32% net profit margin against 18% to 22% for 7-figure agencies, per Predictable Profits’ 2025 Agency Growth Benchmark as compiled by LoomDeck, a figure this research corroborated only through LoomDeck’s compilation rather than Predictable Profits’ own site directly. A healthy agency P&L runs 50% to 60% gross margin, with anything under 40% flagged as a danger threshold.

Marketing Technology Landscape Statistics 2026: How Many Martech Products Exist

The Marketing Technology Landscape 2026, chiefmartec.com’s annual count run by Scott Brinker, tallied 15,505 total martech products as of its May 2026 publication, growing just 0.79% year over year after 15 straight years of continuous expansion, a deceleration the report itself frames as a possible “peak martech” moment. A flat headline number still hid real turnover underneath it: 1,488 new products were added to the landscape while 1,367 were removed. That count measures the total number of distinct products in the market, not how many tools an individual agency or marketing team runs day to day, a per-team figure this research could not locate in a disclosed-methodology report.

Holding Company vs. Independent Agency Market-Share Statistics 2026

COMvergence’s Final 2025 Global New Business Barometer, tracking media-buying and planning holding companies specifically, assessed more than 4,400 media account moves and retentions across 49 countries totaling $37.4 billion in reviewed billings, and found industry-wide account retention fell to 21%, the lowest rate in eight years. Publicis Media alone captured $10.5 billion in total new business in 2025, roughly one-third of all media spend that changed agencies globally that year, against $5 billion collectively captured by independent agencies over the same period. This data set tracks the dominant real-world form of holding-company structure, the major media-buying networks, Publicis Media, IPG Mediabrands, Dentsu, Havas Media Network, Omnicom Media, and WPP Media, not creative or full-service agency consolidation broadly, so read the figures below as media-agency-network market share specifically.

Marketing Freelancer and Consultant Self-Employment Statistics 2026

A self-employment gap table built specifically for marketing occupations, by comparing BLS Employment Projections’ 2024-2034 National Employment Matrix against BLS OEWS May 2025 wage-and-salary counts for the same occupation codes, puts Advertising and Promotions Managers at a 20.5% gap, Advertising Sales Agents at 11.6%, Public Relations Specialists at 10.3%, Public Relations Managers at 10.0%, Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists at 4.5%, and Marketing Managers at 2.9%, against Web Developers at 18.4% as a cross-occupation anchor. The page publishing this table states directly that the two BLS programs use different reference periods and methods, so the gap approximates rather than exactly measures self-employment, and that occupations with large freelance segments are likely understated by this method. Set against that occupation-level picture, MBO Partners’ 2025 State of Independence in America, its 15th annual edition, counted 72.9 million independent workers in the US in 2025, with 5.6 million earning $100,000 or more annually, up 19% from 4.7 million in 2024 and nearly double 2020’s 3 million. That figure describes the independent workforce as a whole rather than marketing specifically, but it is the scale the occupation-level gap table above sits inside.

Agency M&A and Consolidation Deal-Volume Statistics 2026

JEGI Clarity, the marketing and media-focused M&A advisory that publishes an annual State of the Industry report, stated in a November 2024 release that digital marketing services deal volume exceeded the quarterly average of 300 transactions over the last seven years across the two quarters it covered, with private equity buyers representing 32% of year-to-date M&A activity in the sector. A separate multi-year compilation from Legacy Advisors puts numbers on the years leading up to that: 835 US deals in 2021 (558 in a comparable global-sector count), falling to roughly 420 global deals in 2022, about a 25% decline, then roughly 340 to 350 global-estimate deals in 2023, about a 22% further decline. Legacy Advisors describes 2024 through 2026 only in qualitative terms, deal flow that “picked up” in the second half of 2024, activity that “exploded” in 2025, and 2026 as “shaping up to be one of the most active years... in recent memory,” without publishing a deal count for any of those three years. This page does not invent one either.

Marketing Budget In-House vs. Agency Spend Statistics 2026

Two independently published secondaries land on identical figures from Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey, a poll of 402 CMOs: martech claimed the largest single share of marketing budget at 22.4%, followed by in-house labor at 21.9% and external agency spend at 20.7%, with paid media taking the largest overall category share at 30.6%. In-house labor and agency spend sit within a percentage point of each other rather than agencies holding a clear lead, and 39% of CMOs in that same 2025 wave said they planned to cut agency budgets. The 2026 wave of the same survey shifted the mix further: labor’s share rose to 24.5% and martech fell to 19.4%. No agency-specific percentage for the 2026 wave surfaced in what this research could retrieve, so the 20.7% agency figure below is the most recently confirmed data point available, not necessarily this year’s exact number.

Martech Spend as a Share of Marketing Budget Statistics 2026

Martech’s share of marketing budget fell to 19.4% in 2026, a five-year low, down from 26.6% in 2021, according to Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey as reported by Chief Marketer, which named the 2026 wave’s 401-CMO sample directly. A separate report from CMSWire, naming the 2025 wave’s 402-CMO sample, put the same figure at 22.4% for that prior year, giving a three-point trend line of 26.6% in 2021, 22.4% in 2025, and 19.4% in 2026. Both figures reach this page through trade-press coverage of Gartner’s survey rather than a direct fetch of Gartner’s own newsroom page, which returned a bot-protection block on every attempt this research made. Despite the falling share, 62% of the 401 CMOs surveyed in the 2026 wave said they still planned to increase martech investment, a gap between shrinking budget share and rising intent that the source article itself frames as a real tension in how CMOs are managing technology spend.

Digital Ad Spend by Channel Statistics 2026

IAB’s own 2026 Digital Video Ad Spend & Strategy Report, developed with Advertiser Perceptions and Guideline, projects US digital video ad spend at $80 billion in 2026, up 11% year over year, “nearly 20% faster than the total ad market,” with digital video expected to exceed 60% of total TV and video ad spend for the first time. Within that category, social video is growing 13%, outpacing connected TV’s 11% growth, also for the first time. A separate channel-by-channel breakdown compiled by PPC Chief, attributing each figure to eMarketer or MAGNA Global by line item, puts Search at $260 billion, up 7.2%, Social Media at $220 billion, up 14.6%, Display at $150 billion, up 5.8%, Digital Video at $95 billion, up 12.0%, Retail Media at $60 billion, up 14.1%, and Other Digital at $50 billion, up 8.0%. Search holds the largest single share, at 31% of total digital investment. PPC Chief’s $95 billion digital-video figure does not match IAB’s own $80 billion figure above, most likely reflecting different scope definitions between the two reports; this page cites each figure separately with its own source rather than averaging or reconciling them.

Cold Email Performance Trend Statistics 2020-2026: The Decline in Context

Cold email reply rates have declined across several vendor benchmark reports: roughly 7% in 2023, falling to 5.1% in 2024, both per Martal Group, alongside a 27.7% open rate reported for 2024. Instantly’s Cold Email Benchmark Report 2026, covering data from January 1 through December 18, 2025, put the platform-wide average reply rate at 3.43%, with no year-over-year comparison included in that report itself. Saleshandy’s own platform data for the first half of 2026, drawn from 53.1 million cold emails and 60,000 sequences, puts the average reply rate at 3.7%, a slight uptick from Instantly’s 2025 figure. This is a genuine multi-year decline, but it is not one continuous, single-source series: the four data points above come from three different vendors, Martal Group, Instantly, and Saleshandy, each measuring its own customer base with its own definition of a reply. Woodpecker’s own analysis frames the 5.1%-to-3.43% comparison directly, attributing the decline to inbox saturation, tighter Gmail and Outlook spam enforcement, and AI-generated outreach volume, though that specific comparison stitches together two different platforms’ data rather than one company’s longitudinal study.

Remote and Hybrid Work Adoption Statistics 2026: Context for Marketing Agency Owners

Owl Labs’ 2025 State of Hybrid Work survey, its most recent edition, fielded in July 2025 among 2,000 full-time US workers, found 63% working fully in-office, 28% hybrid, and 9% fully remote. That is a small shift from the prior 2024 edition’s 62% in-office, 27% hybrid, and 11% fully remote, with in-office and hybrid both ticking up slightly and fully remote work ticking down. Neither Owl Labs edition breaks its results out by industry. Both surveys segment respondents only by company size and, in the 2025 edition, by company sector such as private, public, or nonprofit, never by function or industry such as marketing, advertising, or professional services. These figures should be read as general US-workforce context useful to an agency owner setting their own policy, labeled clearly as general workforce data rather than agency-specific or marketing-industry-specific statistics.

Small Business Marketing Budget as a Share of Revenue Statistics 2026

The US Small Business Administration recommends businesses with under $5 million in annual revenue spend 7% to 8% of gross revenue on marketing, an assumption built on profit margins in the 10% to 12% range, per two independently published secondaries that both cite the SBA’s own guidance. That runs more conservative than the broader company-wide figure from The CMO Survey, Deloitte and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, whose latest wave put marketing budgets at approximately 9.4% to 9.6% of company revenue, a small discrepancy between two secondaries reporting the same survey, up from 7.7% in the survey’s own prior-year wave, with marketing’s share of total company budget at 11.4%. A separate, enterprise-only figure lands on the same 7.7% number by coincidence: Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey, 402 CMOs, all at companies with $1 billion or more in revenue, put marketing budgets at 7.7% of company revenue, with a median of 6% or less. That is a different survey measuring a different, much larger company population than The CMO Survey’s broader sample, and the two 7.7% figures come from unrelated surveys rather than confirming each other.

CAN-SPAM Enforcement Statistics for Agencies Running Cold Email on Behalf of Clients 2026

The FTC’s largest CAN-SPAM Act penalty on record went to Verkada Inc. in 2024, a $2.95 million settlement filed by the Department of Justice in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, over more than 30 million commercial emails sent across a three-year period with no functioning opt-out mechanism, unhonored unsubscribe requests, and no physical postal address in the emails themselves. A year earlier, Experian Consumer Services, doing business as ConsumerInfo.com, paid $650,000 to settle a similar FTC and DOJ action, for sending marketing emails disguised as account or transactional notices to consumers who had signed up only to manage their credit report, without a clear opt-out mechanism. Both cases matter to an agency running email campaigns on a client’s behalf specifically because CAN-SPAM liability cannot be handed off to whoever operates the sending tool, a rule this site’s own CAN-SPAM guide already covers in detail alongside the maximum per-email penalty figure. The FTC’s total CAN-SPAM enforcement history is commonly cited as roughly 169 cases since the law’s 1999 passage, an average of roughly 6 to 7 cases a year. This research could not independently verify that count against a single directly loaded FTC page, so it is presented here as a commonly repeated figure rather than a hard-sourced one.

Agency Firm-Size and Headcount Distribution Statistics 2026

114,014 advertising-agency businesses operate in the US as of 2026, up 4.4% year over year and growing at a 6.7% compound annual rate since 2021, per IBISWorld. Those businesses collectively employ 325,536 people, growing at 5.8% average annual employment growth over the same period, which works out to an average of 2.9 workers per firm. That 2.9-worker average is a mean, not a full establishment-size-band breakdown, so it can confirm that agencies skew small on average but cannot on its own support a claim like “X% of agencies have fewer than five employees.” A separate figure corroborates the same small-firm pattern from a different angle: 95% of professional-services firms are under 50 employees, per RSW/US’s 2025 survey, an agency-adjacent proxy rather than an agency-specific figure.

Business Funding (MCA)

State Commercial Financing Disclosure Law Adoption Statistics 2026: How Many States Now Regulate MCA Marketing

Eleven states now have an operative commercial financing disclosure law covering MCA marketing, up from just two at the end of 2022, per a timeline calculated from effective dates published by Alston Consumer Finance and Venable LLP. California and Virginia were first, both effective in 2022; Utah, Connecticut, Florida, and New York followed in 2023; Georgia and Kansas joined in 2024; and Missouri, Texas, and Louisiana brought the count to eleven in 2025, with Louisiana widely described as the first state to adopt the law with no de minimis exemption at all, though the exact effective date and the precise transaction-count threshold defining a covered “provider” carry some disagreement across sources this research pass found and were not independently resolved against the enrolled bill text. The trend did not stop at new state adoption. California’s SB 362, effective January 1, 2026, tightened its own already operative law rather than simply adding a new state to the count: any communication after a financing offer that states pricing, a fee, or a financing amount must now simultaneously disclose the Annual Percentage Rate, and using “rate” or “interest” language to describe non-APR pricing can be treated as deceptive.

Federal Reserve Senior Loan Officer Survey: Bank Credit-Tightening Statistics 2026

The Federal Reserve’s July 2026 Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey, covering the second quarter of 2026 and based on responses from 56 domestic banks collected by July 2, 2026, found bank lending standards for commercial and industrial loans to small firms “basically unchanged, on net.” Loan demand from small firms was described the same way, basically unchanged, not tightening and not loosening. Compared with the July 2025 survey a year earlier, banks reported easier standards across every loan category except consumer loans, meaning the credit environment for small business borrowers eased somewhat over the prior twelve months rather than tightening further. The SLOOS is conducted quarterly, timed to the Federal Reserve’s own FOMC meeting calendar, and is the Fed’s own named, quarterly published instrument for measuring exactly this: whether banks are tightening or loosening the standards they apply to business lending.

Small Business Subchapter V Bankruptcy Filing Statistics 2026

Business bankruptcy filings rose 16.9% year over year, to 26,941, in the twelve months ending June 30, 2026, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, outpacing the 12.0% rise in non-business filings over the same period. Total bankruptcy filings across all categories reached 608,511, up 12.2% year over year from 542,529, and filings have risen every quarter since June 2022, though the same release notes the current level still “remains far lower than historical highs.” No independently sourced Subchapter V-specific election count, isolated from the broader business-bankruptcy total above, could be located in the Administrative Office’s public reporting for this period, and this piece does not invent one. Subchapter V is the streamlined small-business reorganization track inside Chapter 11, and the 26,941 business-filing figure above is the closest disclosed, current government data on the broader trend it sits inside.

Restaurant Industry Financing and Cash Flow Statistics 2026

Restaurant operating expenses rose 36% from 2019 to 2026, driven by average hourly restaurant-employee earnings up 41%, wholesale food prices up 35%, and double-digit increases in utilities, occupancy, supplies, and credit-card swipe fees, according to the National Restaurant Association’s July 2026 analysis of its own data alongside U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures. Against a pre-pandemic cost structure of roughly 33% food, 33% labor, and 29% other expenses supporting a typical 5% pre-tax margin, the NRA’s own modeling finds sales now need to run 29% above 2019 levels just to break even, and 36% above 2019 levels to maintain that original 5% margin. The same analysis found 42% of restaurant operators said their restaurant was not profitable in 2025, a direct, named survey finding. Underlying BLS menu-price data shows restaurant prices rose 36% from February 2020 to May 2026, meaning menu prices and the operating-cost increase they were meant to offset moved almost exactly in step, not ahead of it.

Trucking and Owner-Operator Industry Statistics 2026

Nearly 580,000 active motor carriers were registered with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration as of June 2025, and the industry is overwhelmingly small-operator in structure: 91.5% operate 10 or fewer trucks, and 99.3% operate 100 or fewer, according to the American Trucking Associations. The classic single-truck or small-fleet owner-operator is the modal trucking business, not a rare exception inside a large-carrier-dominated industry. The trucking freight bill totaled approximately $906 billion in gross revenues in 2024, per the same source, with the industry moving 11.27 billion tons of freight, representing roughly 72.7% of the nation’s freight by weight. That combination, a massive freight-moving industry built overwhelmingly out of small operators, is the concrete data behind why trucking is repeatedly named alongside restaurants as a classic MCA-heavy vertical.

Minority and Women-Owned Small Business Statistics 2026: A Financing-Access Gap MCA Brokers Should Understand

Startups owned by people of color were 20 percentage points less likely than white-owned startups to be fully funded by the lenders they applied to, despite applying at similar rates, according to a Federal Reserve Small Business Credit Survey special report on demographic funding outcomes, dated 2023, the most recent dedicated coverage of this specific finding found for this piece. The gap is an approval-outcome gap, not an application-rate gap: minority-owned startups ask for financing about as often as white-owned startups, they are simply approved less often once they do. The same 2023 report found 51% of Black-owned firms cited credit availability as a financial challenge, versus 25% of white-owned firms, roughly double. Firm age is part of the underlying picture: 57% of Black-owned firms and 42% of Hispanic-owned firms started in 2020 or later, versus 18% of white-owned firms, and younger firms independently carry thinner credit history, a factor traditional underwriting weighs heavily and MCA underwriting weighs less. The Census Bureau’s Annual Business Survey, run jointly with the National Science Foundation, is the federal government’s own dedicated annual survey of employer-firm ownership by race, ethnicity, gender, and veteran status, and is confirmed to cover this exact ground; its most current headline figures should be pulled directly from its published tables.

Construction Industry Payment Delay and Cash Flow Statistics 2026

64% of subcontractors reported being slow-paid by general contractors, with an average days-sales-outstanding of 51 days, according to Billd’s 2026 National Subcontractor Market Report. Billd is a private company’s own commissioned survey, not a government or trade-association source, and this figure’s full sample size and methodology disclosure could not be confirmed from the accessible report content, a caveat worth naming any time this figure is cited. Construction industry discussion more broadly describes a wider days-sales-outstanding range, roughly 70 to 94 days, with a large majority of subcontractors reporting delays of 30 days or more, though those broader figures trace to the same private-tracker source class as Billd’s own number and were not independently re-verified for this piece. What is consistent across every figure in that source class is the direction: construction subcontractors are a chronically slow-paid segment, the concrete, recurring cash-flow reason contractors show up repeatedly as MCA customers.

E-Commerce and Online Seller Revenue Growth Statistics 2026

U.S. e-commerce retail sales reached $326.7 billion, seasonally adjusted, in the first quarter of 2026, representing 16.9% of total retail sales and up 9.8% year over year from Q1 2025, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Adjusted e-commerce sales rose 2.7% quarter over quarter, outpacing the 1.5% sequential growth in overall retail over the same period, meaning online selling continues to grow faster than retail as a whole. That growing pool of online sellers is a demand signal worth reading against MCA’s own usage data: 7% of small businesses regularly used MCA in 2025, identical to the 2017 rate, per the Federal Reserve’s Small Business Credit Survey as reported by deBanked, meaning MCA usage has not grown even as the online-seller population it could serve keeps expanding. A growing prospect pool sitting next to a flat usage rate is a market with room to grow into, not one already saturated by its own historical usage.

NFIB Small Business Optimism Index Statistics 2026: What Owner Sentiment and Credit-Conditions Expectations Signal for MCA Demand

The NFIB Small Business Optimism Index rose to 99.80 in July 2026, up from 97.40 in June 2026, its highest level since August 2025, according to data aggregated by Trading Economics from NFIB’s own monthly release, since NFIB’s own press-release pages returned an access error to this research pass. The index is a composite of ten seasonally adjusted components, including credit-condition expectations and sales-growth expectations, based on roughly 620 NFIB member responses, with a historical range running from a record low of 80.10 in April 1980 to an all-time high of 108.80 in August 2018, against a 1975 to 2026 average of 97.99. This piece is deliberately scoped to the index’s credit-conditions and sales-outlook components rather than its hiring or employment-plans component, which is covered separately for the staffing sector elsewhere in VA Horizon’s content. The exact current numeric reading of the credit-conditions sub-component specifically could not be isolated from the topline composite figure in this research pass and should be pulled directly from NFIB’s own monthly Small Business Economic Trends report before being cited as a standalone figure.

Factor Rate vs. Bank Prime Rate Spread Statistics 2026

The Bank Prime Loan Rate stood at 6.75%, unchanged across the week of August 7 to 13, 2026, per the Federal Reserve’s own H.15 Selected Interest Rates release, one of several base rates banks use to price short-term business loans. MCA factor rates, by contrast, commonly range from 1.1 to 1.5 as a one-time multiplier applied to the funded amount, a structurally different unit that cannot be directly compared to an annualized rate like prime without first converting it to an effective APR using a stated advance term. That conversion requirement is not academic. California’s SB 362, effective January 1, 2026, now requires exactly this kind of APR-equivalent disclosure on qualifying commercial financing offers, turning the factor-rate-to-APR conversion this piece describes from a useful comparison exercise into an active compliance requirement in at least one state. This piece presents the calculation methodology transparently rather than placing a factor rate and the 6.75% prime rate side by side as if they were directly comparable numbers on their own.

ISO and MCA Broker Compensation and Earnings Statistics 2026

MCA closers and sub-agents working company-supplied leads typically split commissions in a 25% to 35% range, paired with a base salary and draw, according to a 2026 practitioner consensus on the industry forum DailyFunder, with 40% to 50% reserved as a very generous split for signing incentives or retaining proven talent. The same forum sets monthly funded-volume benchmarks at $75,000 to $125,000 for an average producer, $250,000 or more for a very good producer, and $400,000 or more for a top performer. No government wage survey tracks an MCA-broker-specific salary figure, so the closest available adjacent data comes from two general sales roles: Indeed’s general “Broker” salary page averages $89,090 a year across a $36,571 to $217,032 range, and Payscale’s “Loan Officer” page averages a $56,929 base salary with commission pay ranging from $755 to $82,000, the widest variable-pay band Payscale tracks for that role, based on 643 salary profiles current to June 30, 2026.

Small Business Formation (New Business Applications) Statistics 2026

578,926 new business applications were filed with the US Census Bureau in July 2026, the most recent month reported as of this writing, according to a Finder.com analysis of the Bureau’s published application data. The same analysis puts the full-year 2025 total at 5.62 million business applications, with 3,658,194 filed so far in 2026 through the same July cutoff. Finder’s figures are a secondary read of Census data rather than a direct citation of the Bureau’s own release: the page does not specify whether its numbers come from the Business Applications series or the narrower High-Propensity Business Applications series, two distinct metrics the Census Bureau tracks side by side, or whether the figures are seasonally adjusted. The Census Bureau’s own Business Formation Statistics program, confirmed directly through its August 12, 2026 newsroom release (CB26-130), is produced jointly with the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, the University of Maryland, and the University of Notre Dame, and publishes twelve separate application and formation series every month, though its release pages render the headline figures as charts rather than as extractable text.

Small Business Age and Time-in-Business Statistics 2026

Businesses aged 26 years or older accounted for 62.0% of total US employment in 2015, the largest employment share of any firm-age class, according to the US Census Bureau’s Business Dynamics Statistics, published on its own Random Samplings blog. The same 2015 data shows firms aged 1 to 5 years running the highest job creation and destruction rates of any age class, close to 20.0% each, against firms aged 26 years or older, whose creation and destruction rates were both close to 10.0%. These figures describe employment share and job-flow rates by firm age, a different measurement than a firm-count snapshot showing what percentage of businesses fall into each age bracket, a figure the Census Bureau’s own program page confirms exists in its Business Dynamics Statistics tables through 2023 but which this piece could not extract from that program’s interactive interface. The 2015 employment-share figure, first published in 2017, remains the most current specific breakdown available in accessible commentary, and its year is stated wherever it appears here.

Small Business Survival Rate Statistics by Year of Operation 2026

Of businesses in the cohort tracked from March 2020 to March 2024, 76.8% survived to Year 1, dropping to 63.8% by Year 2, 57.9% by Year 3, 56.3% by Year 4, and 51.2% by Year 5, according to DesignRush’s reporting on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Business Employment Dynamics Business Survival Rate Tables. That curve puts the widely repeated claim that half of small businesses fail within five years inside a real, government-sourced range rather than an unsourced rule of thumb. A second, weaker source, VantaInsights, independently lands in a similar range, roughly 80% surviving Year 1 and roughly 45% surviving Year 5, attributed to the same BLS program, though VantaInsights explicitly self-describes its figures as approximations derived from published cohort data rather than a direct citation of one named BLS table. Neither source is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ own site directly; every BLS Business Employment Dynamics page attempted for this piece returned an access error, so both figures above should be read as third-party reporting on BLS data.

Small Business Cash Flow Volatility and Seasonal Revenue Statistics 2026

The median small business held 27 cash buffer days, operating cash balance divided by average daily outflow, according to JPMorgan Chase Institute’s “Cash is King” report, based on 597,000 small businesses and more than 470 million transactions tracked from February through October 2015. The bottom 25% of firms held 13 buffer days or fewer, the top 25% held 62 days or more, and the gap varied sharply by industry: restaurants held the fewest buffer days of any sector, at 16, while real estate firms held the most, at 47. A separate, later JPMorgan Chase Institute study, “Small Business Cash Liquidity in 25 Metro Areas,” based on 1.4 million small businesses using Chase Business Banking deposit accounts in April 2020, found 50% of small businesses operating with fewer than 15 cash buffer days and only 40% holding more than 21 days. These are two distinct studies five years apart rather than one continuous series, and no JPMorgan Chase Institute update to either figure has been published since 2020.

Nonbank and Fintech Small Business Lending Market Share Statistics 2026

The share of small business financing applicants who sought credit from online or fintech lenders rose from 17% in the Federal Reserve’s 2020 Small Business Credit Survey to 29% in its 2025 survey, an increase for the fifth consecutive survey year, according to America’s SBDC’s summary of the Fed’s 2026 Report on Employer Firms. Large banks remained the single most-applied-to financing source overall in that same 2025 survey. A separate cut of the same Fed survey program found the large-bank application rate itself falling from 44% in the 2023 survey to 39% in 2024, a 5 percentage point year-over-year decline, while application rates at small banks, online lenders, finance companies, and credit unions mostly held steady, per Fed Communities’ summary of the 2024 Small Business Credit Survey. Both figures describe where small businesses applied for financing. Neither measures how much of total loan origination or dollar volume nonbank lenders fund, a distinct, supply-side statistic this research did not locate.

Biz2Credit Small Business Lending Index Statistics 2026: What’s Getting Approved

Biz2Credit’s Small Business Lending Index reports big banks approving roughly 13% to 15% of small business loan applications in early 2026, small banks approving 18% to 20%, and alternative or online lenders approving 25% to 30%, a multiple-times gap between the most conservative and most permissive lender categories. These figures came through a search-engine synthesis of Biz2Credit’s published index rather than a clean single fetch of its live table, so treat the exact percentages as approximate pending a direct re-pull of the current month’s numbers. The same Q1 2026 SMB Quarterly Credit Monitor found small business financial health improving: aggregate operating margin rose from 4.6% to 10.2% year over year, businesses generated $1.40 of operating profit for every $1 of debt owed, and total debt repayment volume rose 24%. Separately, a Forbes piece citing the underlying Federal Reserve dataset reports small banks fully approving 57% of applicants in the most recent measured period, the highest full-approval rate of any lender category tracked.

SBA 7(a) and 504 Loan Volume Statistics 2026: The Alternative MCA Brokers Compete Against

SBA 7(a) lending posted three consecutive strong quarters in FY2025: $8.73 billion in Q1 (up 38% year over year), more than $10 billion in Q2, the second-highest single quarter in the program’s history, and $8.66 billion in Q3, described by AmPac Business Capital as the most sustained run of high lending volume since the SBA began tracking in 1991. More than half of all 7(a) loans in early FY2025 were under $150,000, and more than 80% were under $500,000, a size range that overlaps directly with the deals MCA brokers typically work. Crestmont Capital’s secondary corroboration puts the full FY2025 total at approximately 77,600 loans totaling $37 billion, up from 70,242 loans and $31.1 billion in FY2024. Neither figure was pulled directly from SBA.gov’s own data tables in this research pass, both bounced to a downloadable dataset that could not be parsed as text, so both totals here are trade-press reporting of SBA data rather than a direct government fetch.

Equipment Finance Industry Statistics 2026: Volume, Originations, and the Index That Tracks Them

The Equipment Leasing and Finance Association’s Monthly Leasing and Finance Index, rebranded the CapEx Finance Index in September 2024, surveys 25 companies representing a cross-section of the roughly $1 trillion US equipment finance sector. It tracks new business volume, receivables aging, charge-offs, credit approval ratios, and headcount, and it is released one day before the Commerce Department’s own durable-goods report, making it the only near-real-time read on commercial equipment-financing activity available before that federal data lands. ELFA’s own site confirms the index was live and active as of June 2026, with a report headlined “Demand Rebounds and Continues Upward Trend.” This page could not extract the exact year-over-year percentage, credit-approval-ratio, or delinquency figures behind that headline from ELFA’s report this research pass, so no specific current-month number is repeated here. Pull the exact figures directly from elfaonline.org’s knowledge hub at the time of writing rather than relying on a number that may already be a month or more stale.

Embedded and Platform Capital Statistics 2026: How Much PayPal, Shopify, Stripe, and Lightspeed Fund

PayPal has funded more than $30 billion cumulatively in business loans and merchant cash advances as of March 2025, per PayPal’s own release quoted by trade publication deBanked. Shopify Capital originated $1.4 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone, up from $821 million in the same quarter of 2025, a mix of roughly 82% loans and 18% MCA. Stripe Capital originated 81,000 merchant cash advances and business loans in 2025, though Stripe has not disclosed the dollar volume behind that count. Pipe originated $300 million across 15,000 merchants over the two years through early 2026, down sharply from $1.2 billion in 2021 alone, and Lightspeed Capital funded $350 million in the twelve months ending March 31, 2026, with its MCA-specific revenue growing 73% year-over-year. Every figure below was re-verified this pass through a direct fetch of a named, dated deBanked article, an upgrade from the unverified proxy-search snippets this data originally carried. It is still trade-press reporting, not each company’s own primary SEC or investor disclosure, so a final check against the original source is worth doing before treating any single figure as fully audited.

MCA Industry Statistics (2026): What the Fed's Own Survey Data Shows

7% of small businesses (under 500 employees) regularly used merchant cash advances in 2025, per the Federal Reserve's Small Business Credit Survey, identical to the 2017 rate. MCA had a 12% application rate in 2025, behind business line of credit (43%), business loan (32%), and SBA loan (20%), and a 48% full-approval rate, behind auto and equipment loans (71%) and mortgages (55%) but ahead of business lines of credit (45%). The 2025 survey reached more than 6,500 small employer firms surveyed September through November 2025. This page deliberately does not cite a total MCA market-size figure. At least four industry-research aggregator sites publish current market-size estimates that disagree with each other by more than 2x, with no shared methodology disclosed anywhere in what is publicly available. The Fed's usage-rate data below is the more defensible number, and it is the only market-size-adjacent framing this page uses.

MCA Enforcement Tracker: FTC, State AG, and TCPA Actions (2026)

The MCA industry has an active, recent enforcement record: the FTC has brought at least four dated actions since 2022, including a $20.3 million judgment and permanent industry ban against Jonathan Braun of RCG Advances in February 2024, and the New York Attorney General settled with Yellowstone Capital for roughly $1 billion in total debt relief, with $534 million in merchant debt automatically canceled, the largest MCA enforcement action found in this research. Eleven states now require commercial financing disclosure, and TCPA class-action filings tied to cold-calling and cold-texting operations rose 283% year over year in September 2025 alone. Every compliance resource built for this space is written for lawyers or for merchants who already got burned. This tracker is written for ISOs, brokers, and funders who need to know their own exposure. It is informational, not legal advice; confirm current requirements with your own counsel before making a compliance decision based on it.

Shared / Cross-Sector

B2B SDR Hiring Economics: Cost, Ramp, and Turnover Statistics (2026)

A fully loaded in-house B2B SDR costs an estimated $98,000 to $173,000 a year, takes an average of 5.7 months to ramp to full productivity, and turns over at roughly 34% annually, close to 3 times the average across other industries. Converted into a per-meeting figure, published vendor estimates put a fully loaded in-house SDR at $700 to $1,250 per qualified meeting booked. This page collects the sourced numbers behind those figures. Every stat below links to its source and is labeled by how directly it is verified: most of this section is DIRECTIONAL, meaning it comes from a real but secondary or aggregated estimate rather than a single primary study you can pull the number from yourself.

B2B Appointment Setting Cost, Broken Out by Industry (2026)

Published appointment and lead pricing varies enormously by industry: roofing vendors publish $175 to $200 per booked appointment, solar vendors publish $150 to $600, and commercial insurance and staffing vendors mostly hide behind a monthly retainer instead of a per-meeting rate at all. Nobody in any of these categories breaks a rate card out by vertical the way this page does. VA Horizon publishes a per-meeting rate in every one of these industries, from $200 in business funding to $600 in SaaS, plus one flat $300 setup fee, and every row below puts our rate next to the closest published competitor number we could find for that industry.

AI SDR Market Statistics: Pricing, Churn, and Enforcement Records (2026)

AI SDR tools price from about $900 a month (AiSDR) to roughly $5,000 a month (11x), but a documented pattern sits behind those numbers: a TechCrunch investigation found 11x displaying customer logos, including ZoomInfo, without authorization, the FTC settled with Air AI for an approximately $18 million judgment and a permanent marketing ban in March 2026, and a secondary industry analysis puts AI SDR contract cancellation at 50% to 70% within 90 days. This page tracks the pricing, enforcement, and churn data behind the AI SDR wave, with every figure linked to its source.

Commercial Insurance

Insurance Producer Shortage Statistics (2026)

The insurance industry faces an estimated 400,000-worker deficit as boomer-generation agents retire, with roughly 47,000 annual job openings projected for insurance sales agents through 2034. The workforce skews sharply older: 1.37 million workers are 55 or older, against just 214,000 aged 20 to 24. Replacing a departed producer costs 75% to 150% of that producer's salary, $15,000 to $50,000 in direct cost, and January 2026 alone saw 11,300 insurance jobs lost industry-wide. This page collects the sourced numbers behind that shortage, every figure linked to its source.

Commercial Insurance Market Statistics (2026)

Commercial P&C net premiums written reached $918.6 billion in 2024, up 7.1% year over year, and insurance agencies and brokers employed 996,100 people that same year. CIAB's own Q2 2025 survey shows the market softening, overall rates up just 3.7%, down from 4.2% in Q1, with five lines posting outright declines, while CIAB's Q3 2025 resource is titled plainly "Soft Market Clear in Q3 2025." This page tracks the CIAB quarterly rate survey by line and refreshes as new quarterly data publishes, so the rate figures below reflect the most recent CIAB survey available at time of writing.

Commercial Insurance Lead Cost Benchmarks (2026)

Exclusive commercial insurance leads cost $25 to $200 a lead, shared or personal-lines-adjacent leads run $5 to $30, and live-transfer calls run $30 to $120 or more, per sourced 2026 pricing guides. Among appointment-setting vendors, only Superhuman Prospecting publishes real numbers: Flex cold-calling from $1,197 a month and Premium SDR bundles from $2,950 a month or more, both monthly subscriptions rather than per-meeting rates. VA Horizon publishes a $300 one-time setup, then $300 to $550 per held, double-confirmed meeting, positioned above the raw lead and live-transfer tiers to reflect a meeting that has already cleared two confirmation checkpoints.

Commercial Insurance Appointment Setting Vendor Pricing (2026)

Among the commercial insurance appointment-setting vendors reviewed in this research, only Superhuman Prospecting publishes real pricing: Flex cold-calling from $1,197 a month and Premium SDR bundles from $2,950 a month, both against a documented 4.9-star G2 rating and 5.0-star Clutch rating across 46 reviews. Client Focus Corp, Quality Contact Solutions, and MarketReach all decline to publish pricing, and Hit Rate Solutions leads with a labor-cost framed headline, "From $7 an hour," rather than a per-appointment rate. That gap, one vendor transparent, the rest gated behind a form, is close to universal across this category, and VA Horizon's own published $300 setup plus $300 to $550 per-meeting range is built to be the exception, not the norm.

Insurance Agent and Broker Base Commission Rate Benchmarks by Line (2026)

Per ProducerFlow’s citation of the Big I Market Share Report, 2023 data, the most recent cited, the national average commission rate across all lines was 11.4%. The same citation breaks the number out sharply by line: surety commissions averaged approximately 27%, the highest of any line, more than double the blended average, while private passenger auto averaged 7.7%, the lowest. Homeowners multi-peril averaged 12.4% and excess workers’ compensation averaged 7.8%, both above the all-line blend. This page did not access Big I’s own Market Share Report directly, only a secondary citation of it, and the underlying figures are 2023-vintage. Treat the exact percentages as directional until they are checked against Big I’s own published report.

General Liability Insurance Rate and Claims Trend Statistics (2026)

CIAB’s Q2 2025 P&C Market Survey found overall commercial rates rising 3.7%, decelerating from 4.2% in Q1 2025, the 31st consecutive quarter of increases. The same survey named five lines posting outright rate declines that quarter: cyber, D&O, employment practices liability, terrorism, and workers’ compensation. General liability was not one of the five, meaning it continued in the still-rising group alongside property, up 1.9%, and umbrella and excess liability, up 11.5%. No independently confirmed CIAB-published percentage change specific to general liability was located, and this page does not invent one. A secondary trade-press mention referenced a different rate figure attributed to what may be a separate index rather than CIAB’s own survey; since that index could not be confirmed, no number from it appears here.

Employment Practices Liability (EPLI) Insurance Market Statistics (2026)

Employment practices liability, EPLI, was one of five commercial lines CIAB’s Q2 2025 P&C Market Survey found posting an outright rate decline that quarter, alongside cyber, D&O, terrorism, and workers’ compensation. That finding is independently corroborated: Risk & Insurance’s own reporting on the same underlying CIAB survey data names the identical five lines separately. No independently confirmed CIAB-published percentage decline specific to EPLI was located, since CIAB’s own survey page and PDF were both rate-limited on repeated access attempts during this research, and this page does not invent one. What is confirmed is the direction: EPLI is a softening line inside a market that was still rising 3.7% overall that same quarter, not the size of that softening.

Business Formation Statistics 2026: New Business Applications as a Leading Indicator for Commercial Insurance Demand

The U.S. Census Bureau’s Business Formation Statistics for July 2026 recorded 578,926 total seasonally adjusted business applications, up 8.1% from June, including 151,857 High-Propensity Business Applications, the subset statistically likeliest to become an actual employer business, up 1.4% from June. Projected business formations within four quarters reached 29,959, up 0.7% from June. The Finance and Insurance sector, NAICS code 52, recorded 20,287 business applications in July 2026 alone, up 2.2% from June, a live, monthly, government-published count of new entities forming in that sector. Every one of those new entities has, by definition, no incumbent commercial insurance relationship yet, the exact forward-looking signal a renewal date can never provide.

Surplus Lines and E&S Market Premium Growth Statistics 2026

Total US surplus lines premium reported to the 15 stamping-office states reached $47.6 billion in the first half of 2026, up 2.8% year over year, with item and transaction filings rising 16.9% to 4.3 million, per The Insurer’s coverage of WSIA’s own data. California led at $11.4 billion (up 4.0%), Texas followed at $9.8 billion (up 5.0%), and Florida was the only major state to post a decline, falling 5.6% to $9.4 billion. The Insurer separately reported that full-year 2025 stamping-office premium reached $90.3 billion, up 7.8% year over year, a figure not yet independently re-confirmed beyond that report. Growth decelerating from 7.8% for all of 2025 to 2.8% in the first half of 2026 mirrors the broader softening already showing up in the admitted commercial market.

Cyber Liability Insurance Market Statistics 2026: Claims, Premiums, and Rate Trends

CIAB’s Q2 2025 survey is reported to have put cyber liability’s rate change at a decline of 1.5%, one of five commercial lines, alongside D&O, EPLI, terrorism, and workers’ compensation, that posted an outright rate decrease that quarter; this specific magnitude comes from secondary reporting on the survey rather than an independently confirmed direct read of it. NetDiligence’s 15th annual 2025 Cyber Claims Study, analyzing 10,402 cyber insurance claims from incidents occurring between 2020 and 2024, is reported to have found the average claim payout rose to $118,000 in 2025, up from $96,000 in 2024, a figure that likewise reaches this page through secondary coverage of the study. The frequency and severity numbers tell two different stories. Business email compromise was reportedly the most frequent claim type at 33% of all claims but carried a comparatively lower average payout of $68,000, while ransomware, less frequent at 28% of claims, is reported to have driven 52% of total claims costs on the strength of its higher severity per incident.

Commercial Auto Insurance Loss Trend and Rate Statistics 2026

Commercial auto is reported to have posted a $4.9 billion underwriting loss in 2024, its 14th consecutive year of losses, with claim severity in commercial auto liability rising 93.5% between 2015 and 2024 even as claim frequency has fallen since the pandemic. The same reporting attributes the severity increase to social inflation running roughly 8% annually, more than double the 3% economic inflation rate, and cites an AM Best projection that the line remains under-reserved industry wide by $4 billion to $5 billion; these figures reach this page through secondary coverage rather than an independently confirmed direct pull. Triple-I’s own January 2026 analysis, authored by senior research actuary William Nibbelin and citing Milliman’s Jason Kurtz, states directly that general liability and commercial auto are the only two major commercial lines forecast to stay above a 100 net combined ratio for 2025, meaning they remain the only major lines still unprofitable on an underwriting basis industry wide.

Workers’ Compensation Market Statistics 2026: NCCI’s State of the Line Combined Ratio and Rate Trends

NCCI’s 2026 State of the Line report put the workers’ compensation calendar-year combined ratio at 91 in 2025, up from 86 in 2024, while the accident-year 2025 combined ratio was 102. 2025 still marked the line’s 12th consecutive year with a calendar-year combined ratio below 100, an underwriting gain, even as that gain narrowed year over year. Net written premium fell 0.2% in 2025 to $41.6 billion among private carriers, and the industry’s redundant reserve position fell to $14 billion, down from $16 billion in 2024, a second consecutive year of decline. Frequency and severity moved in opposite directions: lost-time claim frequency declined 2% in 2025, while medical and indemnity claim severity each rose 4%. Construction-industry claim frequency has fallen nearly 40% since 2015. Separately, CIAB’s Q2 2025 survey found workers’ compensation was one of five commercial lines to post an outright rate decline that quarter, evidence the line is softening on price at the same time its underlying underwriting results are quietly tightening.

Professional Liability and E&O Insurance Market Statistics 2026

A.M. Best’s Market Segment Outlook for 2026 U.S. Commercial Lines is reported to assign a Stable outlook to medical professional liability, grouped with property, workers’ compensation, surety, and title and mortgage insurance as accounting for more than 40% of segment premiums combined, in contrast with Negative outlooks assigned to general liability, commercial auto, and D&O. This figure reaches this page through search-summary coverage of the named report rather than an independently confirmed direct pull of the underlying PDF, a caveat worth carrying forward with the figure. Stable does not mean untroubled. A.M. Best is separately reported to have stated, in a May 2026 briefing on the medical professional liability market specifically, that the segment posted “another year of increased underwriting losses as direct premium growth slowed.” That finding also reaches this page through secondary trade-press coverage rather than a direct, independently confirmed quote pull, and it describes the medical professional liability sub-line specifically rather than the full professional liability and E&O category broadly, a scope worth keeping in mind before applying it past that sub-line.

Reinsurance Renewal Rate Statistics 2026: What January 1 Treaty Pricing Means for Commercial Rates

Guy Carpenter’s U.S. Property Catastrophe Rate-on-Line Index fell 12% at the January 1, 2026 reinsurance renewals, the second straight year of double-digit softening after a 6.2% decline at January 1, 2025. Guy Carpenter has tracked this index since 1990, and despite two consecutive years of falling prices, the index still sits roughly 66% above its 2017 level on a cumulative basis. The softening was not a U.S.-only story. Guy Carpenter’s Global Property Catastrophe Rate-on-Line Index also fell 12% at the same January 1, 2026 renewal, with the Europe regional cut falling even further, down 15%, evidence that reinsurance capacity is loosening worldwide, not only in the U.S. market a commercial producer actually sells into.

Industry Combined Ratio and Underwriting Profitability Statistics 2026

Full-year 2025 U.S. property and casualty results are reported to show a combined ratio of 92.9%, down from 96.6% in 2024, described as the industry’s strongest underwriting performance in more than a decade. The same reporting puts the estimated net underwriting gain at approximately $63 billion, up from $23 billion in 2024 and a sharp reversal from a $22 billion underwriting loss in 2023, with net premiums written rising 4.7% to $977 billion and policyholders’ surplus increasing to $1.2 trillion from $1.1 trillion in 2024. The 2025 improvement is reported to have been driven substantially by a near-90% drop in hurricane-related claims compared with the prior year, which analysts frame as a one-year reset after 2023 to 2024 catastrophe volatility rather than a structural improvement in underlying risk. These figures reach this page through secondary reporting rather than an independently confirmed direct pull of the original data, a caveat worth carrying into any conversation that repeats them.

Agency M&A and Consolidation Deal Volume Statistics 2026

MarshBerry recorded 649 announced U.S. insurance brokerage M&A transactions through November 30, 2025, a 1.3% faster pace than the 633 deals announced through the same point in 2024, putting the year on track to finish as the second- or third-highest volume year on record. Private-capital-backed buyers accounted for 471 of those 649 deals, 72.6% of total volume, while independent agencies were buyers in 89 deals (13.7%) and bank buyers accounted for 7. The buying pool is also concentrated: the top 10 buyers accounted for 45.1% of all transactions, and the top three alone, BroadStreet Partners, World Insurance, and Hub, accounted for 20.2% of total 2025 deal volume. Specialty distributors were acquisition targets in 102 deals, 15.7% of the total, and the pace was fastest early in the year, with Q1 2025 recording 127 deals, up 11.4% from 114 in Q1 2024.

InsurTech and MGA Venture Funding Statistics 2026

Gallagher Re’s Global InsurTech Report is reported to have found Q1 2026 insurtech funding reached $1.63 billion, with 95.2% of it directed to AI-focused companies, including $444.84 million raised by AI-liability- and cyber-adjacent categories specifically. The same source is reported to have found Q2 2026 global insurtech funding climbed further to $2.44 billion, its highest quarterly level in four years, with AI-focused companies securing $2.42 billion across 95 transactions, 99.1% of all Q2 2026 insurtech funding. Every individual funding round larger than $5 million in Q2 2026 is reported to have gone to an AI-focused company. These figures reach this page through secondary reporting rather than an independently confirmed direct pull of Gallagher Re’s own report, a caveat worth carrying into any conversation that repeats them.

Independent Agency Count Decline Statistics 2026: How Many Fewer Agencies Are Left After a Decade of M&A Consolidation

The 2024 Big I and Future One Agency Universe Study counted approximately 39,000 independent P&C agencies nationally, down from approximately 40,000 in 2022, a decline of roughly 1,000 agencies, about 2.5%, over that two-year window. The same study attributes the decline to ongoing M&A consolidation and succession and ownership-transition pressure, and separately found the average independent agency appointed with 17 carriers. The study also found that 1 in 3 agencies expect an ownership change within five years, a leading indicator pointing toward continued count decline rather than a stabilizing population. This is a multi-year trend figure, distinct from any single-point-in-time snapshot of the agency population published elsewhere.

Producer Licensing Statistics 2026: What NIPR’s National Numbers Show

The National Insurance Producer Registry’s Producer Database is reported to hold records for roughly 9.2 million producers and entities nationally, covering all 50 states, D.C., the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, and Puerto Rico. In 2025, NIPR is reported to have processed approximately 185.9 million credentialing and reporting transactions, a 29% year-over-year increase and more than 150% growth over the prior five years, along with roughly $1.38 billion in state licensing and regulatory fees. These figures are national aggregates across all lines and producer types, not a state-by-state breakdown of active P&C-specific licenses, and no citable source publishing that state-level cut was located for this page. This page states the confirmed national scale of the system rather than an invented state-level figure.

Agency Organic Growth Rate and NUPP Benchmark Statistics by Revenue Band 2026

The 2026 Big I and Reagan Consulting Best Practices Study update found organic growth ranging 6.2% to 10.2% across agency revenue bands in 2026, down from 8.7% to 11.3% in 2025, with pro forma EBITDA margins ranging 23.2% to 30.7%, and top-quartile agencies under $1.25 million in revenue reaching 42.5%. Five of seven revenue categories still exceeded the 12% healthy sales-velocity threshold, led by sub-$1.25 million agencies at 16.6%, and NUPP itself ranged 0.0% to 1.7% by revenue band against a 1.5% to 2.0% healthy target, a different cut than the blended NUPP figure published elsewhere on this site. The same study’s “Rule of 20” composite score, organic growth rate plus half of EBITDA margin, ranged 19.3 to 26.1 across revenue bands in 2026, down from a 19.0 to 29.5 range in 2025. This page does not publish a producer-to-CSR staffing ratio by revenue tier, since that specific cut sits behind a paid, members-only report this session could not access.

Small Business Underinsurance and Coverage-Gap Statistics 2026

A 2026 survey by ERGO NEXT, the small-business-insurance brand formerly known as Next Insurance and now part of Munich Re’s ERGO group, found 73% of small businesses are underinsured, meaning their coverage does not protect against the most significant risks the business faces. The survey, fielded April 29 through May 12, 2026 among 501 U.S. small business owners, founders, and sole proprietors, also found 25% of surveyed businesses carry no insurance at all, and 14% are unsure what their existing policy even covers. Adoption ran counter to what tenure alone would predict: 82% of businesses under one year old carry insurance, versus 67% of businesses one to five years old. Asked why coverage falls short, 84% of respondents said they prioritized other expenses over insurance in the past six months, 46% cited cost, and 32% said insurance was too confusing to identify their own coverage gaps.

Cyber Insurance Claims Frequency and Severity Statistics 2026

NetDiligence’s 15th annual 2025 Cyber Claims Study analyzed 10,402 total cyber insurance claims spanning incidents from 2020 through 2024, adding 4,108 new claims in 2025 alone, including 1,691 tied to 2024 incidents, with 9,171 of those claims meeting the study’s $1,000 minimum financial threshold for inclusion. Ransomware and business email compromise remain the top two named causes of loss in the study. The clearest frequency-versus-severity finding in the study: large companies represented only 2% of the claims dataset by count, but accounted for over half of all incident costs, driven by scale and incident complexity rather than by how often a large company gets hit. That concentration sits alongside a softer pricing trend elsewhere in the line, with CIAB’s Q2 2025 survey reported to have put cyber liability’s rate change at a decline of 1.5% the same period.

Surety Bond Market Statistics 2026: Contract and Commercial Bond Coverage

The Surety and Fidelity Association of America, SFAA, is reported to be the designated statistical agent for surety and fidelity data in every state, D.C., and Puerto Rico except Texas. SFAA’s membership, reported at more than 420 companies, is reported to account for over 97% of surety and fidelity premium written in the United States, a coverage level comparable in standing to WSIA for surplus lines or NCCI for workers’ compensation elsewhere in this vertical. This page does not state a total dollar figure for the surety bond market. A specific premium-volume estimate circulates in secondary reporting, but it could not be independently verified against SFAA’s own published statistics table this session, so it is not repeated here as fact.

Merchant Services

PCI DSS and Small-Business Data Breach Statistics 2026

In extreme cases, the top 2.5% of small and midsize businesses, financial loss from a data breach accounted for more than 7% of the business’s revenue, per Verizon’s 2026 Breach Impact Study, drawn from roughly 70,000 cyber-insurance claims. Separately, Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report Retail Snapshot recorded 997 retail-sector incidents with 806 confirmed data disclosures in its dataset, with three patterns, System Intrusion, Basic Web Application Attacks, and Social Engineering, accounting for 95% of retail breaches. The retail data also shows the type of data attackers compromise has shifted: internal data rose from 65% of compromised data types last year to 84% this year, as attackers increasingly monetize whatever data they can reach rather than targeting payment cards specifically. Verizon’s own report frames the old “retail breach means payment-card breach” assumption as outdated, so this piece does not assert a standalone payment-card-share figure in its place.

FedNow Instant Payments Adoption Statistics 2026

FedNow, the Federal Reserve’s own instant payment rail for banks and credit unions, had more than 1,500 participating financial institutions across all 50 states by its second anniversary, a 44% increase from the year before, according to the Federal Reserve’s own Fed360 payments-industry newsletter. The same December 2025 update confirmed FedNow’s per-transaction limit had been raised from $1 million to $10 million, a real jump in how large a single instant transfer can be since the rail launched in July 2023. No FedNow transaction-volume figure, in dollars or in transaction count, accompanied either announcement, and this page does not estimate one. Both numbers reflect the Fed’s December 2025 status update tied to FedNow’s second anniversary, meaning they describe roughly mid-2025 participation, not a fresh measurement taken in 2026.

Level 2 and Level 3 Commercial Card Volume Statistics 2026

US commercial card purchase volume, combining Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover, reached $2.230 trillion in 2024, up 4.5% over 2023, per the Nilson Report’s own commercial-card tracking. On the federal side, the GSA SmartPay program, the government’s own commercial and purchasing card system, recorded $39.4 billion in total program spend for fiscal year 2025, averaging $480 per transaction. Neither figure isolates volume by Level 2 versus Level 3 processing tier, the enhanced-data classification that determines a commercial transaction’s interchange qualification. No source located in this research confirms a specific split between the two tiers, so this page presents the aggregate commercial-card volume those tiers apply to. A Level 2/Level 3-specific breakdown does not appear to exist in any public source found this session.

Top Merchant Acquirers Market Concentration Statistics 2026

The five largest US merchant acquirers in 2025 were Fiserv, JPMorgan Payments, Worldpay, Global Payments, and Bank of America, ranked by Visa and Mastercard purchase volume, per the Nilson Report’s own published ranking of the top 59 US merchant acquirers. Exact dollar figures for that 2025 list remain paywalled, so only the named order is public. A year earlier, in 2024, Nilson’s own numbered ranking put JPMorgan Payments at the top by transaction count for the first time, at 40.98 billion transactions, ahead of Fiserv at 40.72 billion, the prior year’s leader, and Worldpay at 34.15 billion, holding third place, across a ranking covering nearly 60 companies and 34 million US merchant locations. No source located in this research computes a specific concentration percentage, such as what share of total volume the top five control, so this page presents the two confirmed rankings rather than an estimated concentration figure.

Card-Not-Present Fraud and Chargeback Rate Statistics 2026

The Federal Reserve’s most recent payments-fraud-specific study, published October 2018 and covering 2012 through 2016 data, found card-not-present fraud ran 14.23 basis points of transaction value in 2015, versus 9.32 basis points for card-present payments and ATM withdrawals combined. By a separate card-network survey using updated terminology, remote card fraud reached 18.71 basis points of value in 2016, versus 9.34 basis points for in-person payments, and the dollar value of remote fraud grew 34.6% in that single year, from $3.40 billion to $4.57 billion. On the chargeback side, Visa’s Acquirer Monitoring Program flags a merchant as Merchant-Excessive once its combined fraud-and-dispute ratio crosses 1.5% in most regions, provided the account also logs at least 1,500 combined fraud and dispute reports in a month, with enforcement in effect since October 1, 2025. 2015 and 2016 are explicitly the newest years the Fed has published fraud-specific detail for, stated here rather than implied as current.

Contactless and Tap-to-Pay Adoption Statistics Among US Small Businesses 2026

The Federal Reserve’s November 2024 payments study release, its newest publication to break out this specific figure, found 19.7% of in-person general-purpose card transactions were contactless in 2022, with 87.5% using chip technology overall, including 29.1% that used chip-and-PIN specifically. In-person payments made up 63.8% of all general-purpose card transactions that year, and total general-purpose card payments reached 153.3 billion transactions worth $9.76 trillion, up 6.0% by count and 10.5% by value from 2021. 2022 is stated here as the actual vintage of the contactless figure, not implied as current: the Fed’s newer July 2026 press release, covering 2024 data and counting 236.6 billion total noncash payments, more than triple the 2000 figure, does not break out a contactless-specific share, which is why the 2022 figure remains the most recent one available for that specific metric.

EMV Chip Adoption and Counterfeit Fraud Liability-Shift Statistics 2026

Globally, 97% of card-based transactions were EMV chip transactions as of the fourth quarter of 2025, per data reported collectively to EMVCo by American Express, Discover, JCB, Mastercard, UnionPay, and Visa, a global figure rather than a US-specific one. In the US specifically, the newest available figure is narrower: 87.5% of in-person general-purpose card payment value used chip technology in 2022, per the Federal Reserve. The mechanic behind why chip adoption matters is the EMV liability shift, which took effect in the US in October 2015: after that date, a merchant not using a compliant chip-card reader could be held liable for counterfeit-card fraud that a chip transaction would have prevented. The Federal Reserve’s own fraud report documents the shift’s measured effect: the share of in-person card fraud value involving chip authentication rose from just 3.2% in 2015 to 26.4% in 2016, while total in-person card fraud value fell 20.8% over the same period even as remote fraud rose.

Visa Chargeback Monitoring Program Statistics: Thresholds and Merchant Terminations

Visa’s Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP) sets a Merchant-Excessive threshold at a combined fraud-and-dispute ratio of 1.5% in most regions (2.2% in the CEMEA region), provided the merchant also logs at least 1,500 combined fraud and dispute reports in a month, and applies a parallel acquirer-level structure: an “Above Standard” tier from 0.5% up to just under 0.7%, and an “Excessive” tier at 0.7% or higher, using the same minimum count. Enforcement began October 1, 2025, with these thresholds effective as of April 2026, per Chargebacks911’s report of Visa’s program rules. Mastercard operates a comparably named program, commonly referred to as its Excessive Chargeback or Excessive Fraud Merchant program, but this page could not independently confirm Mastercard’s own specific published thresholds. Treat any Mastercard percentage cited elsewhere as unconfirmed until checked directly against Mastercard’s own rules. A merchant terminated after crossing either network’s threshold commonly also faces the MATCH list, from which removal is not automatic for five years absent re-listing.

Buy Now, Pay Later Adoption Statistics 2026

More than 1 in 5 American consumers with a credit record had used a buy now, pay later service in 2021, up from 17.8% in 2020, per the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. By fall 2023, a narrower measure found only 9% of overall consumers were actively using BNPL, per the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, a figure that still represents a 40% increase from two years earlier. Neither figure isolates a small-business point-of-sale segment. Both describe consumer-side BNPL usage across all purchase types and channels, not what share of small-business checkout volume runs through a BNPL option specifically. That gap matters for a merchant services agent fielding a merchant’s question about whether to add BNPL as a payment option, since the confirmed data speaks to consumer demand broadly, not to small-business adoption rates directly.

Payment Processing and ISO M&A Deal Statistics 2026

Two named deals anchor the biggest confirmed acquiring-industry consolidation of this cycle. Global Payments agreed in April 2025 to acquire Worldpay from GTCR and FIS, a deal reported at $22 billion to $24.25 billion depending on final structure, completing in January 2026; the same restructuring divested Global Payments’ TSYS Issuer Solutions business to FIS for $13.5 billion, also completing January 2026. Separately, Fiserv completed three 2025 acquisitions aimed at embedded-payments distribution: Payfare, Pinch Payments, and an agreement to acquire Money Money Serviços Financeiros S.A. This is a self-compiled, dated list of named deals pulled from company-history sourcing, not one publisher’s official industry-wide M&A tally, since no dedicated payments-M&A-tracking firm’s published deal count for this period was located in this research pass.

Restaurant POS Market Statistics 2026: What Toast’s Public Filings Show

Toast, Inc. served approximately 120,000 US restaurants as of its Q2 2024 Form 10-Q, and reported $4.96 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2024, per its Annual Report on Form 10-K filed February 26, 2025. Both figures come from a Wikipedia summary attributing them to Toast’s own SEC filings, not a direct read of the filings themselves, and 2024 is the newest year confirmed in this research pass; Toast’s more recent 2025 results were not independently retrieved. Both numbers are worth reading as a proxy for the scale of the restaurant-POS category one named, public competitor occupies, not a claim about the full restaurant-POS market across every vendor.

Square and Block Small-Business Payment Volume Statistics 2026

Block, Inc.’s Square segment processed $241 billion in payments in 2024, per the company’s Form 8-K filed February 2025, serving approximately 4 million sellers the same year. That figure is up from $228 billion in gross payment volume for full-year 2023, and up from $23.8 billion in 2014, the year of Square’s 2015 IPO filing, a genuine decade-plus growth arc drawn from the company’s own disclosed numbers. 2024 is the newest year confirmed in this research pass for both gross payment volume and seller count; a 2025 update was not independently retrieved.

E-Commerce Share of US Retail Sales Statistics 2026

US retail e-commerce sales reached $326.7 billion, seasonally adjusted, in the first quarter of 2026, accounting for 16.9% of total retail sales of $1,929.0 billion, up 9.8% year over year, per the US Census Bureau. On a not-seasonally-adjusted basis, Q1 2026 e-commerce sales were $302.3 billion, 16.8% of total retail sales. This is a national aggregate figure, not a small-business-specific one. The Census Bureau’s e-commerce estimate is drawn from the same Monthly Retail Trade Survey sample used for total retail sales, and as of an April 2025 benchmark revision, that series excludes nonemployer firms, meaning very small sole-proprietor businesses with no paid employees, a sourced, specific reason the national figure likely understates or misrepresents the smallest end of the small-business population.

Merchant Services Sales Agent Earnings Statistics 2026

No federal occupational code covers merchant services sales agents specifically. The closest legitimate proxy, Sales Representatives, Wholesale and Manufacturing (SOC code 41-4012.00), had a median wage of $34.65 per hour ($72,080 per year) as of the most recent BLS wage-data year, with total employment of 1,310,500 in 2024 and 114,800 projected annual job openings over the 2024-2034 projection period, per O*NET OnLine’s republished Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That figure describes a base-wage sales role, not a commission-and-residual-heavy merchant services agent, whose real earning potential runs on a compensation structure this occupational code was never built to capture.

Interchange Rate Change Statistics 2026: What Visa’s Own Schedule Confirms

Visa’s own published rate document, Visa USA Interchange Reimbursement Fees, carries a current edition dated April 18, 2026, with “Rates Effective April 18, 2026” stated across every fee category: consumer debit, consumer prepaid, consumer credit, commercial and purchasing, business, and international transactions. The same document’s Credit Performance Threshold table is explicitly dated “Effective April 18, 2026, based on 12 months of activity ending September 30, 2025,” showing Visa recalculates its own volume-based qualification tiers annually against a fixed measurement window feeding into each new rate edition. This research pass confirmed that one specific, dated edition directly from Visa’s own document. It did not independently confirm the widely repeated industry claim that Visa updates interchange rates twice a year, every April and October, so that cadence should be read as commonly reported in trade and processor content, not as verified here.

Debit vs. Credit Card Usage Share Statistics 2026

Debit cards accounted for 120.6 billion transactions worth $4.99 trillion in 2024, and credit cards accounted for 67.1 billion transactions worth $6.51 trillion, per the Federal Reserve’s National Payment Volumes data. By count, that is 64% debit and 36% credit; by value, it flips to 43% debit and 57% credit, since the average credit transaction runs larger than the average debit transaction. Notably, 2024 marked the first measured three-year period since 2000 in which credit card payments grew more, by number, than debit card payments. This is a national-transaction-level figure across all merchants and channels, not a split segmented specifically to small-business points of sale.

New Business Formation Statistics 2026: The Total Addressable Market for Merchant Services Agents

US business applications reached 578,926 in July 2026, seasonally adjusted, up 8.1% from June 2026, per the US Census Bureau’s Business Formation Statistics program. Of those, 151,857 were High-Propensity Business Applications, the Census Bureau’s own term for applications statistically likely to become employer businesses, up 1.4% from June. Applications with planned wages numbered 35,024, and applications from corporations numbered 44,738. This is a total-addressable-market proxy, not a merchant-services-specific demand figure. The Census Bureau tracks every new US business application, not new merchant accounts, so every figure below should be read as a signal of the pool of future potential card-accepting merchants, not as merchant-services industry demand directly.

US Card Purchase Volume Statistics for Merchant Services (2025-2026)

Total US card purchase volume, credit, debit, and prepaid combined, reached $12.498 trillion in 2025, up 5.0% year over year, per the Nilson Report. Visa alone processed $7.028 trillion (up 6.8%), and Mastercard processed $2.958 trillion (up 6.3%), for a combined Visa and Mastercard total of $9.986 trillion (up 6.6%). Combined credit card volume across American Express, Discover, Mastercard, and Visa reached $6.512 trillion (up 6.1%). This page collects those figures in one sourced place, the transaction volume behind every merchant a merchant services agent prospects.

Payments Telemarketing Enforcement Tracker: TCPA and FTC Actions (2025-2026)

TCPA lawsuit volume against telemarketers rose sharply through 2025: 880 lawsuits were filed between January 1 and April 30, 2025, up 44% year over year, and by September 2025, 2,128 lawsuits had been filed year to date, up more than 50%, with 78% of that September's filings being class actions. The clearest payments-specific case is National Retail Solutions (NRS Pay), which settled a TCPA class action for up to $6,510,240 over unauthorized prerecorded ringless voicemail calls. The FTC separately settled with payment processor Paddle.com for $5 million in June 2025, and secured refunds from First American Payment Systems over surprise exit fees, per FTC announcement coverage. This page tracks each action with its dates and, where available, its case number.

SaaS

SaaS Outbound Benchmarks: Deliverability, Dial Volume, and Channel Risk (2026)

Since February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo require SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication for any sender exceeding 5,000 emails a day, and enforce a 0.3% spam-complaint threshold (Google recommends staying under 0.1%), with 2025 enforcement moving from warning to outright rejection. Separately, the average number of dial attempts needed to reach a contact rose to an estimated 21, up from 17 the year before, and LinkedIn's own User Agreement explicitly prohibits automated messaging and contact-adding. Every number below is cited to its source and labeled by how directly it is verified. Cold-email open and reply-rate figures circulating elsewhere in this category could not be independently verified in this research and are deliberately excluded from this page.

SaaS Demo No-Show Statistics, Broken Out by Source and Deal Size (2026)

Demo show rate varies enormously by where the demo came from: an industry-estimate benchmark puts inbound branded-search demos at 78% to 88% show rate, cold outbound at 32% to 48%, and outbound-SDR-sourced demos in between at 48% to 62%. That means the corresponding no-show rate, calculated as the complement of the same figures, runs roughly 12% to 22% for inbound versus 52% to 68% for cold outbound, a difference of several multiples depending entirely on source, not on any single "average" no-show number. A second cut of the same data shows deal size matters too: PLG-priced demos under $5,000 ACV show at 65% to 78%, against 42% to 52% for strategic, $1 million-plus ACV deals. A general demo no-show range circulates elsewhere in this category, but could not be independently verified in this research and is not used here.

SaaS SDR Turnover Statistics, and What They Actually Cost a Demo Pipeline (2026)

SDR turnover runs an estimated 34% annually, roughly three times the average across other industries, with median tenure of 14 to 18 months. Ramp time to full productivity rose from 4.3 months in 2020 to 5.7 months in 2025, a 32% increase, both figures attributed to Bridge Group's research through secondary aggregators. For a SaaS pipeline specifically, that math compounds badly: a rep who leaves at median tenure has spent roughly a third of their time at the company still ramping, and software already has the lowest SDR quota attainment of any industry measured (an estimated 41.2%), meaning the rep who does stay often still misses target once fully ramped.

SaaS Cost Per Meeting Benchmarks: Mainstream and Enterprise Tiers (2026)

A converging vendor-blog estimate puts SaaS appointment setting at $150 to $600 per meeting for a standard, mainstream B2B ICP, rising to $800 to $1,500 or more for complex or enterprise targets, tiered further into basic ($150 to $300), ICP-matched ($300 to $500), and full BANT-verified with no-show replacement ($400 to $750). The one named agency in this category that publishes real pricing, CIENCE, structures its per-meeting commission on top of a $5,000 setup fee and roughly $2,499 a month in platform and strategic-team fees. Downstream cost data corroborates the same order of magnitude: median cost per SQL runs $762 and cost per MQL runs $198 in B2B SaaS, both attributed to Directive Consulting's 2024 data. VA Horizon publishes $300 setup plus $350 to $600 per held, double-confirmed demo, sitting inside the market's own mainstream range.

Series A and Series B SaaS Funding and Valuation Multiple Statistics 2026

Median Series A deal size reached $19.6 million on a $78.7 million median post-money valuation in the first quarter of 2026, across the broader venture market rather than AI-only companies, according to the Q1 2026 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. Median Series B deal size reached $40 million on a post-money valuation of $120 million to $160 million or more in the same report. An AI premium sits underneath both medians: non-AI Series A pre-money valuations run closer to $40 million to $42 million, well below the broader-market figure above, while US startups raised more than $400 billion in the first half of 2026 alone, surpassing every previous full-year total on record, with AI dealmaking named as the primary driver of that jump.

Rule of 40 Benchmark Statistics for B2B SaaS Companies 2026

An estimated 11% to 30% of private SaaS companies were hitting the Rule of 40 benchmark, growth rate plus profit margin at or above 40%, as of 2025, and companies that reliably clear it have commanded valuations roughly 121% higher than peers that do not, per Bessemer Venture Partners’ State of the Cloud research as relayed through secondary coverage this cycle (Bessemer’s own report pages were not independently reachable, so treat the exact range and premium as directional pending a direct check). Two confirmed capital-efficiency figures from SaaS Capital’s 2026 survey put that range in context: median sales spend across private B2B SaaS companies rose from 13% to 15% of ARR year over year, and companies with net revenue retention of 120% or higher carry a median annual contract value of $61,802, more than double the $26,269 median for companies below that retention line.

SaaS Sales Cycle Length Statistics by Deal Size 2026

SaaS sales cycle length scales directly with deal size: SMB deals average 1 to 3 months to close, mid-market deals average 3 to 6 months, and enterprise deals average 6 to 12 months or more, with the largest, most complex enterprise deals sometimes running as long as 18 months, per Databox-cited research aggregation. AI adoption level correlates with a separate cycle-length gap: ICONIQ Growth’s 2025 State of Software survey of 127 companies found high-AI-adoption companies running 20-week sales cycles, versus 25 weeks for lower-adoption peers, a real, dated, disclosed-methodology data point cut by technology adoption rather than deal size.

Win Rate Statistics for B2B SaaS by Deal Size and Multi-Threading 2026

Multi-threading, engaging more than one buyer-side contact, is associated with an average 130% win-rate lift in SaaS deals over $50,000, per Gong Labs’ analysis of 1.8 million B2B deals closed in 2024. Across that same dataset, 77% of deals are multi-threaded, but the deals that close successfully have roughly twice as many buyer contacts as the deals that do not. Team composition tracks the same pattern: closed-won deals include an average of 6.7 members of the seller’s own team, 67% larger than the selling team on comparably staged deals that end up lost, and looping in a sales engineer or technical specialist for demos and technical questions is associated with up to a 30% win-rate lift.

B2B Software Buyer Journey Statistics 2026: How Much Happens Before a Rep Gets Contacted

B2B buyers spend roughly 70% of their buying journey doing independent research before ever talking to a vendor, a finding 6sense states holds regardless of industry, company size, or purchase cost. The average B2B buying journey spans 11 months, with buyers first contacting a vendor after roughly 8 months, about 69% of the way through, and buyers initiate that first contact themselves 83% of the time. Most of that research happens with a favorite already forming: Forrester’s 2024 Buyers’ Journey Survey of 11,352 B2B buyers found 92% start their evaluation with at least one vendor already in mind, and 41% already have a single preferred vendor selected before formal evaluation even begins. Separately, Gartner’s 2024 survey of 632 B2B buyers found 61% would prefer an overall rep-free buying experience, though that figure comes from a Gartner report this research pass could not independently re-verify and should be treated as directional pending a direct check.

B2B SaaS Sales Tech Stack Spend Statistics 2026

No publisher currently breaks out a dedicated sales-tech-stack spend figure separately from company-wide SaaS spend, so the best available baseline is the company-wide number every sales tool purchase counts toward: average annual SaaS spend of $55.7 million (median $20.6 million) across an average of 305 applications (median 240) per organization, up 8% year over year, per Zylo’s 2026 SaaS Management Index. Vendr’s 2025 SaaS Trends Report, a real, confirmed report on general SaaS spend and renewal trends, found AI adoption did not broadly drive up SaaS prices in 2025, that security and compliance tools commanded the highest per-category spend, and that Q4 spend held flat, though Vendr’s own published content does not isolate a sales-tech-stack category the way this page’s title implies.

Free-Trial and Product-Qualified-Lead Conversion Rate Statistics 2026

Conversion rate varies sharply by signup model: self-serve freemium converts at 3% to 5% (median, “good”) up to 6% to 8% (top performers, “great”), sales-assisted freemium converts higher at 5% to 7% good and 10% to 15% great, and card-required free trials convert highest of all, 25% to 35% good and 50% to 60% great, per an aggregation of Lenny’s Newsletter and OpenView-sourced data covering more than 1,000 products. A separate, confirmed 2026 benchmark from OpenView and ChartMogul, covering more than 3,200 SaaS companies, puts global average trial-to-paid conversion at 24.8%, with top-quartile performers at 38.2%. No independently verifiable, named-source figure for product-qualified-lead-to-paid conversion specifically was confirmed this cycle, so this page does not publish one; a widely repeated PQL conversion figure exists only in aggregator-style search summaries without a traceable primary study behind it.

Net-New vs. Expansion ARR Mix Statistics 2026: Where SaaS Growth Actually Comes From

Expansion becomes the dominant growth engine for a SaaS company somewhere beyond roughly $20 million ARR, and companies over $50 million ARR generate roughly 60% of their new ARR from existing customers rather than net-new logos, per benchmark research from OpenView, whose SaaS Expansion Benchmarks work is now continued under High Alpha (cited here through secondary coverage rather than a direct read of the current report). The gap between average and top-quartile companies is large: the average SaaS company generates expansion revenue equal to roughly 12% of its starting ARR annually, versus 28% for top-quartile companies, a 16-point gap attributed to systematic expansion programs rather than ad-hoc upselling. A confirmed, independently sourced companion figure backs the same pattern: SaaS Capital’s 2026 survey found companies with net revenue retention of 120% or higher carry a median annual contract value of $61,802, more than double the $26,269 median for companies below that retention line.

VP of Sales and CRO Tenure Statistics 2026: How Long SaaS Sales Leaders Actually Last

Two independent studies converge on a similar range for how long a Chief Revenue Officer really lasts: Pave’s analysis of roughly 14,000 executives puts average CRO tenure at 1.8 years, 21.6 months, and average VP of Sales tenure at 2.0 years, 24 months, both shorter than average CEO tenure (4.3 years) or CTO tenure (3.7 years) in the same dataset. Harvard Business Review separately reports average CRO tenure at 25 months, calling it among the shortest of any C-suite role. The business impact of that churn is measurable: HBR’s analysis found 62% of companies see their revenue growth rate decline or stay flat in the fiscal year immediately following a CRO change, and Pave’s data shows roughly 1 in 3 CROs turning over every year.

B2B SaaS IPO and M&A Exit Statistics 2026

Public SaaS listings generated $119.4 billion in exit value from 62 IPOs in the second quarter of 2026 alone, with acquisitions adding another $112.7 billion across 995 deals in the same quarter, according to PitchBook’s Q2 2026 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. That report describes both IPO and M&A activity as accelerating through the quarter, though this page reached the figures through a secondary summary of the report rather than an independently read copy, so treat them as a strong reported signal rather than an audited final count. The valuation backdrop behind those exits has been a rough ride. The SaaS Capital Index, a running measure of public SaaS company valuation multiples, peaked at 16.9 times ARR in 2021, had fallen to roughly 7 times ARR entering 2025, dropped further to a decade-plus low near 3.2 times ARR by mid-2026, and had recovered to approximately 3.8 times ARR by late July 2026, per L40’s analysis of the index. A company exiting into today’s market is exiting into a multiple still under a quarter of its 2021 peak, even after the recent partial recovery.

PLG vs Sales-Led GTM Motion Mix Statistics 2026

No single, dedicated survey splits the SaaS market cleanly into a percentage that runs product-led growth versus a percentage that runs a sales-led motion, and this page does not invent one. What is confirmed and closely adjacent comes from ICONIQ Growth’s State of Software 2025 survey of 127 software companies (Q2 2025 data): high-growth, AI-native companies run 47% of go-to-market headcount in sales roles and 31% in post-sales roles, while more traditional SaaS companies in the same survey run a heavier 55% sales and lighter 23% post-sales split, reported through SaaStr’s coverage of the survey rather than an independently fetched copy of ICONIQ’s own report. Read that split against buyer behavior. Gartner’s 2024 survey of 632 B2B buyers found 61% would prefer an entirely rep-free buying experience, corroborated by Gartner’s own press release headline though its underlying report was not independently reloaded for this page. That preference is one plausible reason the highest-growth, most AI-native companies carry a larger post-sales headcount share than more traditional peers, since post-sales is the team a self-serve-leaning company leans on once a signup has already happened, not before it.

B2B SaaS Contract Renewal and Renegotiation Statistics 2026

No confirmed figure states how often a B2B SaaS contract gets renegotiated at renewal, and this page does not invent one. What is confirmed, directly from Zylo’s 2026 SaaS Management Index (its 8th annual edition, tracking more than 40 million licenses and over $75 billion in categorized SaaS and cloud spend), is the cost pressure sitting behind every renewal conversation: average annual SaaS spend reached $55.7 million (median $20.6 million) across 305 average applications (240 median) per organization, up 8% year over year, and AI-native application spend specifically rose 108% year over year. That spend is not landing smoothly. 78% of IT leaders reported unexpected charges tied to AI features or consumption-based pricing, and 61% of organizations cut a project outright because of unplanned SaaS cost increases. A separate analysis of the same report family found the pullback from multi-year SaaS contract commitments most pronounced among the largest companies, 5,000 employees and up, a trend attributed to lessons learned from past overbuying and to uncertainty around AI-driven pricing changes, reported here as directional since it was not confirmed directly on Zylo’s own page.

SaaS Application Sprawl and Shadow IT Spend Statistics 2026

Two named, differently built reports land on very different SaaS application counts for a similar population, and the gap between them is itself worth knowing before you trust either number alone. BetterCloud’s State of SaaS 2025 report, its 12th annual edition surveying nearly 600 IT professionals, found the average company uses 106 SaaS applications, down 5% year over year from 112 the prior year, an 18% reduction from 2022 to 2024. Nearly 60% of IT professionals in the same survey remain concerned about shadow IT risk specifically, despite that falling headline count. Zylo’s 2026 SaaS Management Index, built from its own platform-discovered scan data rather than IT professionals’ self-reported estimates, counts a meaningfully higher 305 average applications (240 median) per organization. The two figures are not measuring the same thing, one is a survey estimate, the other a scanned actual count, and that gap is stronger, better-sourced evidence of how much shadow IT goes undercounted than either number would be alone.

Vertical SaaS Market Growth and Share Statistics for 2026

The global vertical software market was valued at $147.11 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $164.06 billion in 2026, climbing to $282.98 billion by 2031, a compound annual growth rate of 11.52% for the 2026 to 2031 window, according to Mordor Intelligence. Cloud delivery already accounted for 71.22% of the market in 2025 and is expanding faster than on-premise deployment. A separate estimate puts the 2025 vertical SaaS and software market closer to $130 billion, growing 18% to 22% annually, a different research firm’s number that disagrees with Mordor Intelligence’s on the exact size while agreeing on the direction: vertical software is outgrowing the roughly 12% to 15% CAGR forecast for horizontal SaaS through 2030.

SaaS Sales Org Headcount and Layoff Statistics for 2026

Tech-sector layoffs in 2026 reached roughly 173,900 workers by early August, already above the full 2025 total of 123,941 employees across 269 companies, spanning more than 250 companies and crossing the 100,000 mark by June, four months earlier than 2025 reached the same milestone in October, according to Layoffs.fyi as reported by Salesforce Ben. Sales teams are not exempt from that total. Microsoft cut roughly 4,800 jobs on July 6, 2026, described as primarily in sales and Xbox teams, and Atlassian cut roughly 1,600 jobs, 10% of its global workforce, on March 12, 2026, naming enterprise sales as part of the restructuring, per Computerworld’s 2026 layoff timeline. Neither figure isolates a sales-only headcount total; both are company-wide events that named sales as one of the functions affected.

Software Review Platform Influence Statistics for 2026

G2’s 2025 Buyer Behavior Report, as reported by SaaStr, finds GenAI chatbots trusted more, 17.2%, than a vendor’s own sales reps, 9.3%, as an influence on final purchase decisions, and that 62% of buyers now avoid talking to sales until the evaluation or decision stage, up 17 percentage points year over year. A companion finding from the same report: 29% of buyers start software research with AI search ahead of Google, and 88% of self-described power users will not shortlist software without AI functionality. None of these four figures were confirmed through an independent, direct read of G2’s own report. SaaStr is a named secondary reporting on G2’s findings, and this page cites it that way rather than implying a direct G2 citation.

Global B2B SaaS Market Size and Spending Statistics for 2026

Gartner forecasts worldwide IT spending will reach $6.31 trillion in 2026, up 13.5% from 2025, with the software category, which includes on-premise and perpetual-license spend alongside SaaS, forecast at $1.44 trillion, a 15.1% year-over-year increase representing roughly $190 billion in net new software spend for the year, per Gartner’s April 2026 forecast as reported by Campus Technology and SaaStr. That 15.1% growth figure is itself a revision. Gartner’s own software-spending forecast moved from 15.2% in October 2025 down to 14.7% in February 2026, then back up to 15.1% in April, three successive quarterly updates before landing where it currently sits. Neither the $6.31 trillion IT total nor the $1.44 trillion software figure should be read as a global SaaS-specific spending number.

Venture Funding and Seed-Stage Formation Statistics for B2B SaaS Startups 2026

Total startup funding logged on Carta reached $30.4 billion in the first quarter of 2026, with the down-round rate falling to 11.4%, back in line with 2019 to 2020 levels. Seed-stage median post-money valuation hit an all-time high of $24 million in 2026 on a roughly $3.2 million median round, though non-AI B2B SaaS seed rounds specifically price lower, at $14 million to $16 million pre-money. The AI premium widens at every later stage too: at Series A, a non-AI B2B SaaS startup carries a $55 million median valuation, against $300 million for an AI foundational-model startup raising the same round. By the first quarter of 2026, more than 60% of all venture capital funding logged on Carta’s platform went to AI companies broadly.

Net Revenue Retention and Churn Benchmark Statistics for B2B SaaS by ARR Band 2026

Private B2B SaaS retention clusters tightly across independently named sources: KeyBanc Capital Markets and Sapphire Ventures’ 16th Annual Private Company SaaS Survey found gross retention approaching a 90% threshold, up from 86% in 2023, with net retention holding above 100%. SaaS Capital’s own 15th annual survey of bootstrapped companies between $3 million and $20 million in ARR found a 103% median net revenue retention and a 91% median gross revenue retention, both essentially flat year over year. Retention converts directly into deal economics: SaaS companies with net revenue retention of 120% or higher command a median annual contract value of $61,802, more than double the $26,269 median for companies below that line. Public SaaS companies show a median net revenue retention that has cooled to around 111%, its lowest point in years, though that specific figure is attributed to Meritech Capital through a secondary citation and was not independently re-confirmed against Meritech’s own published data this cycle.

CAC Payback Period Benchmark Statistics for B2B SaaS by Company Stage 2026

The overall median CAC payback period across B2B SaaS and AI-native software companies is 16 months, based on full-year 2025 actuals from 342 companies, 198 of which reported CAC payback specifically, in the 2026 Aleph and Benchmarkit SaaS and AI Performance Benchmarks. That single median hides a wide spread by deal size: sub-$5,000 ACV deals show an 11-month median payback, while $50,000 to $100,000 ACV enterprise deals show a 22-month median, roughly double the smallest tier. The report’s own guidance is to benchmark payback by growth cohort, ACV band, and go-to-market motion against the matching segment, not against the blended 16-month median. A related capital-efficiency figure: revenue per employee runs a median $141,125 in ARR as of 2026, up from $129,724 in 2025, according to SaaS Capital’s 15th annual survey.

Enterprise SaaS Security Review and Procurement Cycle-Time Statistics 2026

No independently confirmed average-weeks or average-days figure for how long an enterprise security review adds to a SaaS deal could be located from a primary or authoritative source, and this page does not invent one. What is sourced and current: 72% of security decision-makers say risk for their company has never been higher, up from 55% in 2024, a 17-point jump, per Vanta’s State of Trust Report Third Edition, surveying 3,500 IT and business leaders across five countries. 61% say they spend more time proving trust and compliance externally, what the report calls posturing, than actually protecting their organization. The reason a single cycle-time number is so hard to pin down shows up in the surrounding data. A single Standardized Information Gathering questionnaire can run past 800 questions on its own, per Vanta’s own guide to security reviews, and KPMG’s 2026 Global Third-Party Risk Management Survey of 851 organizations found only 18% have achieved full integration between vendor risk management and enterprise risk management, with 71% planning further integration over the next three years, meaning the process itself is still being actively formalized, not settled into a predictable, benchmarkable length.

Staffing

Staffing Industry Statistics: The Clean 2026 Summary

The US staffing industry is forecast at $180.2 billion in 2026, per Staffing Industry Analysts' March 2026 update, down from a $243.9 billion peak in 2022. Roughly 27,000 staffing and recruiting companies operate about 54,000 offices nationwide, employing an average of 2.2 million temporary and contract workers in a typical week during 2024, and hiring 12.7 million temporary and contract employees across all of 2023, all per the American Staffing Association. Every figure below is cited directly to ASA or SIA, the two primary trade bodies tracking this data, rather than to a secondary aggregator.

Staffing Industry Quarterly Tracker: Q4 2025 and Q1 2026

Q4 2025 US staffing sales were $29.9 billion, up 2.6% sequentially but down 6.2% year over year. Q1 2026 sales were $27.6 billion, down 4.3% sequentially and down 1.6% year over year, the smallest Q1 sequential decline since 2022 and the narrowest year-over-year gap since 2023, all per the American Staffing Association. Q1 2026 temp and contract employment fell 7.5% sequentially, a loss of 154,000 jobs, but only 4.6% year over year, a sharp improvement from the 10.8% year-over-year drop in Q1 2025. This page is updated as new ASA quarterly releases publish.

Staffing Agency Client Acquisition Cost: A Built Benchmark

No public, audited benchmark for staffing agency client acquisition cost exists. A direct search for one turns up articles that reference the concept without ever publishing a number. This page builds a transparent estimate instead, from two verifiable inputs: vendors' own published monthly pricing and advertised meeting-volume ranges, and a stated range of assumed meeting-to-signed-client close rates, since no staffing-specific close-rate benchmark is publicly available either. The output is a calculated range you can rerun with your own known close rate, not a single audited figure presented as universal fact.

Staffing Agency BD Vendor Pricing, Compared

Of the vendors reviewed with staffing-specific offers, Cleverly publishes the clearest number: $2,997 a month for 10 to 40 appointments. Sapper Consulting publishes tiered monthly retainers of $5,250 to $8,750 on a 13-month term, or $5,750 to $9,250 on a 7-month term. Belkins and Intelemark do not disclose direct pricing; Intelemark instead anchors its pitch against an estimated $60,000 cost to set up one new in-house sales rep, and Belkins cites a $60,000 average deal size and an up-to-50% appointment-setting rate as vendor-published claims, not audited figures. VA Horizon publishes $300 one-time setup plus $300 to $550 per held, double-confirmed meeting, the only structure among those reviewed with no monthly retainer of any kind.

Skilled Trades and Construction Labor Shortage Statistics 2026

Associated Builders and Contractors puts the 2026 construction workforce gap at approximately 349,000 net new workers needed to meet demand, a figure attributed to ABC’s own annual workforce shortage analysis as reported via a GlobeNewswire-published release dated January 15, 2026. That is the lowest annual gap ABC has projected since 2021, and more than half of it represents simply replacing retiring workers rather than supporting new growth. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ own Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey shows the shortage translating into real, current demand: construction sector job openings stood at just over 300,000 on the last business day of June 2026, a figure attributed to BLS’s June 2026 JOLTS release as reported through search-indexed coverage of it, up 14,000 for the month and up 36% year over year.

Staffing Industry M&A and Consolidation Deal-Volume Statistics 2026

Staffing industry M&A activity opened 2026 with its strongest momentum in three years, per StaffingHub’s coverage of the sector: Q1 2026 saw 35 transactions, the highest opening quarter since 2022, building on a 16.7% increase in deal count during 2025. Industry projections now point to 85 to 100 total staffing M&A transactions for 2026. Private equity is driving much of that activity, accounting for roughly half of all 2025 sector transactions, with 2026 continuing to favor larger bolt-on acquisitions of founder-led agencies rather than many small, standalone deals. Two named transactions illustrate the scale: Advent International and Corvex Private Equity’s $1.3 billion take-private of Heidrick & Struggles on December 10, 2025, and HR Path’s running total of approximately 54 IT-staffing bolt-on acquisitions through its Q1 2026 activity.

Direct-Hire vs. Temporary and Contract Placement Mix Statistics 2026

No publicly available dataset breaks down staffing placements by direct-hire dollars versus temporary and contract dollars specifically; that split appears to sit inside the American Staffing Association’s member-only quarterly Employment and Sales Survey, not its free public pages. The closest available public proxy comes from ASA’s own participation figures instead: 57% of staffing and recruiting companies and 76% of staffing offices serve the temporary and contract sector, evidence of how dominant temp and contract work is across the industry’s business mix, even without a dollar-denominated split to cite. ASA’s occupational distribution data adds a second, related proxy: Industrial work accounts for 36% of staffing placements nationally, Office-Clerical and Administrative 24%, Professional-Managerial 21%, Engineering, IT and Scientific 11%, and Health Care 8%. That is a segment mix, not a direct-hire-versus-temp mix, but it shows where the industry’s placement volume concentrates.

Perm Placement Fee Percentage Benchmark Statistics 2026

No staffing association publishes a public, citable annual placement-fee benchmark. NAPS, the National Association of Personnel Services, confirms it runs member-only benchmarking surveys but discloses no public fee percentage on any open page checked for this research. What exists instead is a convergent range from named vendor and practitioner sources: Frontline Source Group puts direct-hire fees at 20% to 30% of first-year base salary and executive-search fees at 25% to 35% of first-year compensation, while altLINE, a company that finances staffing firms, cites a similar 15% to 25% typical range, up to 30% for specialized or executive roles. Neither source ties its figure to a disclosed-methodology survey; both are practitioner ranges stated as observed norms, not a single audited industry benchmark. That convergence across two independent, named sources is still worth treating as directionally reliable, even without a formal study behind it.

Legal and Contract Attorney Staffing Market Statistics 2026

Legal hiring plans point toward real growth on both the permanent and contract sides at once. 58% of legal leaders plan to add new permanent employees in 2026 and 51% expect to bring in more contract talent over the same period, a figure attributed to Robert Half’s 2026 Legal Job Market research as reported via that report’s own coverage. 61% of the same legal leaders say finding skilled legal professionals is more challenging than it was a year ago. The buyer pool behind that demand is itself larger than it has been in a decade. US legal-services industry employment reached 1.24 million jobs in January 2026, its highest level in the past 10 years of reporting, a figure Robert Half attributes to BLS data rather than its own original research. Legal work sits within ASA’s broader Professional-Managerial occupational category, which accounts for 21% of staffing industry placements nationally, though no source breaks legal out as its own tracked ASA segment.

Finance and Accounting Staffing Demand Statistics 2026

Finance and accounting hiring leaders are reporting a genuinely tight talent market heading into the second half of 2026. 61% say finding skilled finance and accounting professionals is more challenging than it was a year ago, per Robert Half’s 2026 Finance and Accounting Hiring and Job Market Outlook. That scarcity is not slowing hiring plans: 74% of finance and accounting leaders plan to increase permanent headcount in the second half of 2026, and 63% plan to increase contract or temporary hiring over the same period. That contract-hiring figure is direct evidence that interim finance talent is a live, growing buying motion in 2026, not a shrinking fallback option. Finance and accounting work sits within ASA’s broader Professional-Managerial occupational category, which accounts for 21% of staffing industry placements nationally, the second-largest of ASA’s five tracked categories after Industrial’s 36%.

Independent and Gig Workforce Statistics vs. Traditional Staffing 2026

MBO Partners’ 2025 State of Independence report counted 72.9 million total independent workers in the US in 2025, a figure that dwarfs the 945,000 temporary-help-agency workers the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted in its Contingent Worker Supplement’s most recently published wave, fielded in July 2023. The comparison is real but not apples to apples: MBO’s figure covers a broad definition of independent work, freelancers, consultants, and gig workers with no staffing-agency relationship at all, while the BLS figure counts a narrow category of workers specifically placed through a temp-help agency. Within MBO’s own data, the higher-earning slice of that independent workforce is growing quickly: 5.6 million independents earned more than $100,000 annually in 2025, a 19% increase from 4.7 million in 2024, nearly double the 3 million recorded in 2020, and more than triple the 1.9 million recorded when the study began in 2011. Gen Z now makes up 28% of the independent workforce, and 63% of independents report their independence is fully by choice.

Seasonal and Holiday Hiring Surge Statistics 2026

Retail employers added under 500,000 seasonal positions during the 2025 holiday season, the smallest seasonal gain since 2009, per Challenger, Gray & Christmas’s most recently published holiday-hiring commentary. Transportation and Warehousing was also expected to underperform recent seasonal-hiring patterns, and the same commentary characterized overall seasonal hiring announcements as limited. This is the 2025 season’s data, published in September 2025, since Challenger Gray’s report covering the 2026 holiday season had not yet published as of this research. Summer carries its own seasonal surge, separate from the winter holiday pattern. The National Restaurant Association projected restaurants would add 450,000 seasonal positions during summer 2026, even while flagging a declining prime labor pool that could make that hiring harder than in past years. BLS employment data for the Leisure and Hospitality sector shows the underlying cyclical pattern directly: 16,931,000 employees in July 2026 on a preliminary basis and 16,971,000 in June 2026, consistent with a pattern of summer months running higher than winter months every year in the 2016 to 2026 series.

Driver, CDL and Transportation Staffing Demand Statistics 2026

The American Trucking Associations puts total US truck driver employment at 3.58 million in 2024, a 0.8% decrease from 2023, the clearest, most directly sourced figure available on the size of the driver workforce a CDL-focused staffing firm recruits into. A widely repeated driver-shortage number, by contrast, is not safe to cite as a single figure here: third-party summaries attribute wildly different shortage estimates to ATA itself, ranging from roughly 60,000 to 82,000 for the current shortfall, sometimes citing older ATA reports from 2019 or 2022 rather than a confirmed current number. Separate from that shortage-figure question, a driver placement carries a real compliance layer no other segment on this site fully mirrors: a commercial driver cannot legally operate in interstate commerce without a current DOT Medical Examiner’s Certificate, valid for a maximum of 24 months, and federal rules require motor carriers to maintain a complete, gap-free 3-year Driver Qualification File for every driver, retained for 3 years after the driver leaves.

Small-Business Hiring-Intentions Statistics 2026

The NFIB Small Business Optimism Index reached 99.80 in July 2026, up from 97.40 in June 2026, its highest level since August 2025, a figure sourced via Trading Economics’s aggregation of the official NFIB release after NFIB’s own press-release pages returned an access error during this research. The index is a composite of ten seasonally-adjusted components, including employment plans and job-opening availability alongside capital-expenditure plans, inventory plans, and economic-outlook expectations, based on roughly 620 NFIB member responses. A reading of 99.80 sits above the index’s own 1975 to 2026 average of 97.99, though well below its all-time high of 108.80 in August 2018 and far above its record low of 80.10 in April 1980. No source in this research isolates the exact numeric reading of the employment-plans component specifically; the honest read is that the composite index is rising, and hiring plans are one of the ten inputs driving it, without a standalone hiring-intentions percentage to cite on its own. Staffing’s own 2026 data tells a compatible story: ASA reported Q1 2026 sales down just 4.3% sequentially, the smallest Q1 sequential decline since 2022.

Staffing Agency Profit Margin and Financial Benchmark Statistics (2026)

No audited, publicly available average profit margin for staffing agencies exists. IBISWorld’s industry report and RMA’s Annual Statement Studies, the two sources most likely to carry that figure, both sit behind paid subscriptions. What is public and dated 2026 is what a staffing firm sells for, per CT Acquisitions’ staffing-valuation guide: EBITDA multiples ranging from 4 to 5x for light industrial and commodity firms up to 6 to 8x for IT contract-to-hire and healthcare locum tenens desks, with every specialty in between. What moves a firm inside that range says more about margin health than the specialty label alone. A book carrying 28% or higher gross margin adds half a turn to a full turn to the multiple. Conversion-fee revenue at 15% or more of the book adds one to two turns, because, in CT Acquisitions’ own words, conversion fees run “nearly 100% gross margin.” A single client above 25% of revenue compresses the multiple 10% to 25% in the other direction.

Hospitality and Events Seasonal Staffing Demand Statistics (2026)

The National Restaurant Association projects restaurants will add 450,000 seasonal positions in summer 2026, while flagging a shrinking “prime labor pool” that could make that hiring harder than in past years. Federal employment data confirms the underlying seasonal pattern is real and recurring: Bureau of Labor Statistics figures for the Leisure and Hospitality supersector show 16,971,000 jobs in June 2026 and a preliminary 16,931,000 in July 2026, and the same series has shown summer months running above winter months every year from 2016 through 2026 without exception, for example 16,837,000 in June 2025 against 16,796,000 in February 2025. The 450,000-position figure and the roughly 41,000-job gap between a summer and a winter month in the BLS series are not measuring the same thing, and should not be read as contradicting each other. One counts gross seasonal hires, positions filled on top of existing headcount and departures elsewhere in the sector; the other is a net employment level, which nets hiring against attrition across the entire Leisure and Hospitality supersector, not restaurants alone.

Clerical, Administrative and Back-Office Staffing Volume Statistics (2026)

Office-clerical and administrative work accounts for 24% of all staffing-industry occupational placements, the second-largest of the five categories the American Staffing Association tracks, behind Industrial at 36% and ahead of Professional-Managerial at 21%, Engineering/IT/Scientific at 11%, and Health Care at 8%. Applying that 24% share to ASA’s own published totals implies real scale: an estimated 528,000 of the 2.2 million temporary and contract employees working in an average week during 2024, and an estimated 3,048,000 of the 12.7 million temporary and contract employees hired across all of 2023, sat inside an office-clerical or administrative placement. Both estimates are VA Horizon’s own calculation, applying ASA’s published category share to ASA’s own separately published totals, not a cross-tabulation ASA itself publishes. A separate claim sometimes made about this segment, that it carries the highest VMS and MSP penetration of any staffing category, is not independently confirmed by any source located for this page.

Time-to-Fill Benchmark Statistics by Role Level (2026)

The most current time-to-fill benchmark available places the median at approximately 44 days for nonexecutive roles and 45 days for executive roles, attributed to SHRM’s 2025 Recruiting Benchmarking Report. SHRM’s own site returned a 404 on every path attempted for this page, so the figure comes from two independent secondary sources, LinkUs Group and a separate recruitment-benchmarking blog, that both name and date the same primary report, rather than a direct read of SHRM’s own data. The gap widens at scale: extra-large organizations report 61 days for nonexecutive roles and 60 days for executive roles, both secondaries agree, roughly two and a half weeks slower than the overall median. Industry-specific splits circulating online, technology at 48 days, healthcare at 41, are not attributed to SHRM or any named primary in the source that reports them and are not repeated here as sourced figures.

State-Level Staffing Industry Concentration Statistics (2026)

California and Texas, the two largest state staffing markets checked for this page, show how unevenly the industry concentrates. California reports 1,723,800 annual staffing employment, 334,100 average weekly temp workers, $50.6 billion in 2023 payroll, and an estimated 3,940 offices, all per the American Staffing Association’s own 2025 state fact sheets. Texas reports 1,369,200 annual employment, 265,300 average weekly temp workers, $12.9 billion in 2023 payroll, and an estimated 3,390 offices. The concentration story sits in the ratio between payroll and office count, rather than the raw numbers alone. California runs roughly 3.9 times Texas’s staffing payroll while operating only about 16% more offices and about 26% more annual employment, VA Horizon’s own calculation from ASA’s published figures. Nationally, the same fact sheets report 2.2 million average weekly temp and contract employees, 11.2 million in annual employment, $124.0 billion in sales, and 38,250 offices, though the underlying document mixes 2024 and 2023 data within the same sheet.

Minimum Wage Increases and Bill Rate Compression Statistics (2026)

19 states raised their minimum wage effective January 1, 2026, with three more, Florida, Alaska, and Oregon, increasing later in the year on separate schedules, per HR Dive. The new 2026 state rates range from $10.85 an hour in Montana, the lowest of the 19, up to $17.13 an hour in Washington state, the highest statewide, with California at $16.90, Connecticut at $16.94, and New York City at $17.00. The federal minimum wage remains $7.25 an hour, unchanged since 2009. None of that is a bill-rate figure on its own, pay rate and bill rate are two different numbers connected by markup. When a state-mandated pay-rate floor rises and a client will not accept the full pass-through onto the bill rate, the markup percentage compresses, the same dollars of employer cost divided into a smaller spread. The worked example below illustrates that mechanic. It is a calculation rather than a benchmarked industry compression rate, since no source publishes one.

Government Contractor and Security-Clearance Staffing Compensation Statistics (2026)

Security-cleared professionals reported average total compensation of $101,395 in ClearanceJobs’ 2022 Compensation Report, covering 2021 survey data drawn from 24,089 usable responses out of 52,028 total participants, per PR Newswire’s coverage of the report. That average climbed to a record $114,946 by 2023, a 6% boost within that year, per ClearanceJobs’ 2024 Security Clearance Compensation Report as reported by FedAgent. Neither figure is a direct load of ClearanceJobs’ own report, both come from third-party write-ups naming the report directly, and the two data points span different survey cycles two years apart, useful as a trend line rather than a same-year comparison. Between the two reported figures, average cleared compensation rose roughly 13% over that span, VA Horizon’s own calculation from the two published numbers.

Scientific and Life Sciences Staffing Wage and Employment Statistics (2026)

Two benchmark life sciences occupations show sharply different growth outlooks despite similar pay. Biological Scientists, All Other, SOC code 19-1029.00, report a median annual wage of $98,920 and national employment of 63,700 as of 2024, with 2024 to 2034 growth projected slower than average, 1% to 2%, per O*NET OnLine. Medical Scientists, Except Epidemiologists, SOC code 19-1042.00, report a higher median annual wage of $103,410 and far larger national employment of 165,300, with growth projected much faster than average, 7% or higher, over the same decade. These two occupations are a sample from the broader Life, Physical, and Social Science Occupations major group the life sciences staffing category spans, rather than an aggregate market total. Clinical Research Coordinators fall outside this specific occupational series and are not included in either figure.

Contingent and Temporary Workforce Statistics 2026: The BLS View vs. the Staffing-Industry View

The Bureau of Labor Statistics and the American Staffing Association measure the temporary and contingent workforce differently, and the two datasets genuinely diverge. The BLS Contingent Worker Supplement’s most recently published wave, fielded in July 2023, counted 945,000 temporary-help-agency workers nationally, 0.6% of total US employment, with a broader 4.3% of all workers, 6.9 million people, holding a contingent job as their sole or main position. ASA’s own industry-reported figure for a similar period runs far higher: an average of 2.2 million temporary and contract employees worked in a typical week during 2024. The gap is a methodology difference, not a contradiction. The Contingent Worker Supplement is a periodic household survey, fielded in 2017 and again in 2023, not annually, so any figure drawn from it should be tied to its specific wave rather than treated as a fresh yearly count. Confirm the current published wave before citing either number as current.

Healthcare Staffing Demand Statistics 2026: RN Turnover, Hospital Turnover, and the Cost Behind Both

Registered nurse turnover ran 16.4% nationally, a 2.0 percentage point decrease year over year, with hospital-wide turnover at 18.3%, per a figure attributed to the NSI National Health Care Retention and RN Staffing Report as summarized by Staff Relief Inc. Those figures come from a secondary summary of NSI’s report, not a direct read of NSI’s own published numbers, so treat them as directionally credible and re-verify against NSI’s own release before citing as final. Turnover carries a real, attributed cost: a figure attributed to the same report cycle states every percentage point of RN turnover costs the average hospital $295,000 a year, and one cited example claims replacing 20 travel nurses with employed staff saves $1.32 million, per Kahuna Workforce’s summary. Health care represents a relatively small 8% slice of the staffing industry’s overall occupational mix, per the American Staffing Association, which is exactly why turnover-driven demand carries outsized weight in this specific segment.

FAQ

Statistics questions, answered.

Where do these numbers come from?

Named primary sources: government data, industry reports, and published vendor data. Every statistics page lists the sources behind its numbers, and figures are kept as the original source published them.

Can I cite these statistics?

Yes. Cite the original source named next to each figure, and a link back to the page here is appreciated. Nothing on these pages is invented, and estimates are labeled as estimates.

How often are statistics pages updated?

When the underlying source publishes new data. Pages are dated, so you can see at a glance which reporting cycle a number belongs to.

What does VA Horizon charge in B2B?

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