Best Insurance Agency Franchises: Low Capital, Renewal Revenue

Three brands, three incompatible definitions of revenue

Brightway’s 2026 filing puts the median gross commission revenue of a one-producer agency at $63,601 and a five-plus-producer agency at $1,544,605. Goosehead reports per producer instead of per agency. We Insure reports on 68 agencies, every one of them open more than five full years. One category, three units of measure, and not a single headline figure that lines up against the others.

Those three are the only insurance agency systems in our database carrying a current Item 19 detailed enough to underwrite against. Everything below comes from their 2026 filings.

	Brightway	Goosehead	We Insure
Item 7 investment	$43,425 to $186,900	$66,000 to $111,500	$59,916 to $137,888
Initial fee	from $25,000	$50,000	$40,000 to $50,000
Franchised outlets, end of 2025	351	1,009	130
Net unit change, 2023 to 2025	+66	-404	-94
Item 19 measures	agencies	producers	agencies
Item 19 sample	272 agencies	1,427 producers	68 agencies

The unit-count row is the one most buyers skim past. Brightway added 66 franchised locations across three years while Goosehead fell from 1,413 franchised outlets to 1,009 and We Insure from 224 to 130. Two of these systems are shrinking while publishing revenue tables that read well.

Brightway’s median is a staffing decision

Brightway’s Table 1-A covers the 272 locations open the full 2025 calendar year, sorted by how many producers each one employed:

Producers	Locations	Median revenue	Average revenue
1	119	$63,601	$98,913
2	48	$138,134	$224,283
3	43	$512,497	$620,172
4	27	$650,930	$782,157
5+	35	$1,544,605	$1,739,710

Brightway states that it considers a location fully staffed at three producers. Only 105 of the 272 locations in the sample get there. The other 167, or 61%, run on one or two people and post medians under $140,000 in gross commission revenue before Brightway takes its share.

So the honest read on Brightway is that you are buying a hiring problem with a brand attached. The $1.5M tier is real and 35 agencies reached it, but getting there means recruiting, licensing, and keeping five commissioned salespeople in a market where captive carriers are bidding for the same people. A $655,298 Brightway median circulates in aggregator databases, including ours. It comes from the prior year’s filing and covers only the fully-staffed subgroup, so a solo owner should not plan against it.

Brightway is also the only one of the three that grew: 285 franchised locations at the start of 2023 to 351 at the end of 2025, with 45 signed agreements not yet open. One caveat on validating that growth. Brightway’s Item 20 discloses that current and former franchisees have signed confidentiality clauses limiting what they can tell you about the system, so build your call list expecting some of it to go quiet. Our best B2B service franchises breakdown covers the adjacent low-capital options.

Goosehead’s 1,427 sample counts people, not agencies

Goosehead’s Item 19 sample size, 1,427, is larger than its franchised outlet count of 1,009. That looks like an extraction error until you read the definition.

Goosehead measures producers. Item 19 defines one as an individual who works for a franchisee as an agent and devoted full-time effort to a production role between January 1, 2023 and December 31, 2025, and the disclosure states plainly that the 1,427 franchise producers represent 866 franchised businesses. A single agency can field several producers, which pushes the count above the outlet count. Only 866 of the 1,009 franchised outlets open at the end of 2025 contributed a qualifying producer, so roughly one in seven open franchises is absent from the sample.

The tenure buckets compound this. The same disclosure classifies 799 producers at one year of tenure, 674 at two, and 592 at three. That sums to 2,065, well above 1,427, because a producer gets measured in more than one tenure year across the window. The unit being counted is closer to a producer-year than a person.

Goosehead’s March 2026 filing also changed how it reports, splitting new business from renewal commissions and capping measured tenure at three years. The median third-year producer earned $68,541 in new business gross revenue and $33,020 in renewal gross revenue, drawn from sub-samples of 592 and 459 producers, so adding them gives a direction rather than an exact figure. The prior filing reported a single $248,707 median for 908 producers at three or more years of tenure, an open-ended bucket that included fifteen-year veterans. We covered that older disclosure and its quartile spread in our Goosehead Item 19 deep dive. The gap between the two filings comes from that definitional change rather than any collapse in producer earnings.

We Insure discloses cleanly and is shrinking fastest

We Insure gives the most readable table of the three: a straight percentile ladder on gross commission revenue for its 68 Established Agencies, meaning those open more than five full years as of December 31, 2025. The median is $362,544, with $187,202 at the 25th, $585,927 at the 75th, and $131,057 at the 10th.

Read the segment label carefully. Those 68 agencies are the survivors of a system that went from 224 franchised outlets to 130 in three years, and We Insure says so in its own footnote, calling them the mature end of the system and warning that their performance should not be read as representative of newer agencies. Florida alone shows 11 outlets reacquired by the franchisor in each of 2023, 2024, and 2025. The sample is large enough to mean something and small enough that survivorship dominates it.

Every brand here sits in our financial services franchise directory with its Item 7 and Item 19 data pulled from the current FDD.

Renewals are where the franchisor’s cut doubles

Every insurance franchise pitch leans on recurring revenue. Item 6 shows who collects it. Brightway retains 20% of new business commissions and 50% of renewal commissions, remitting the rest to the agency owner. Goosehead charges 20% of gross revenues on policies in their initial term and 50% on policies in renewal terms. We Insure retains 25% on new business and 45% on renewals, with a monthly minimum of $600 from months 6 through 18 and $1,000 after that.

The pattern is identical and it inverts the usual franchise incentive. In most categories your effective royalty stays flat as the business matures. Here it climbs, because the book you spent three years building is the part the franchisor prices highest. Technology fees stack on top: $200 per location per month plus $209 per active user at Brightway, $400 and $225 at We Insure, $590 and $420 at Goosehead.

The licensing gate is a person you have to hire

The Item 7 licensing line runs $100 to $2,000 at all three brands, so the regulatory cost is trivial. The staffing requirement behind it is not. Brightway requires a Designated Agency Principal who is licensed, fully trained, approved in writing, and working 40+ hours a week, replaceable within 30 days if that person quits. We Insure requires a Designated Responsible Licensed Producer, and Goosehead lets a trained manager run the operation provided the manager meets all license requirements. In each case the license can sit with an employee rather than the owner, which is what makes these viable for buyers coming from outside insurance and what makes key-person risk the real exposure.

Who owns the book when you leave

This is the question buyers in this category ask last, if at all, and the answer is in Item 17 of each document.

Goosehead’s Item 17 is the most direct: on expiration or non-renewal, the franchisor will buy your business, and it may elect to exclude the furniture, fixtures, equipment, and lease from the assets it purchases. Goosehead also holds a right of first refusal to match any offer you receive and imposes a two-year post-term non-compete. Its Item 3 shows the franchisor litigating those covenants against a former franchisee, with a temporary restraining order granted in August 2024.

Brightway takes a different route to a similar place. Its Item 17 requires you, on termination or expiration or transfer, to turn over all customer lists and any other information about former, existing, or potential customers, to assist in transferring your telephone numbers to Brightway, and to buy an E&O tail policy. Its purchase option covers personal property at depreciated book value, not the book of business at a multiple. Its Item 20 notes that two of its three company-owned locations exist to manage the books of franchises that have left the system. We Insure routes exits through a Conditional Assignment covering phone numbers, domains, and social accounts, plus a non-compete and customer escrow accounts.

None of that makes these bad deals. It does mean the asset you think you are building may not be the asset you get to sell, which changes the arithmetic on a business whose entire pitch is compounding renewal income. Get the valuation formula in writing before you sign, and read our guides on transfer and assignment restrictions and what a resale is actually worth. If the low entry cost is what drew you here, the home-based comparison covers the same capital band elsewhere, and our readiness quiz scores you against what a producer-driven business actually demands day to day.

Brands mentioned in this post

• We Insure