How many staff does an agency need per book size?
Plan agency staffing from service demand, role capacity, and revenue. A practical way to use benchmarks without turning a broad ratio into a hiring rule.
What the published numbers say
The 2025 Best Practices release reports $228,321 revenue per employee for selected leading agencies. It provides a comparison point, not a prescribed number of CSRs or producers.
MarshBerry’s service-staff analysis associates higher productivity with higher spending per employee in its top-performing group. It does not support the assumption that lower payroll alone produces a more effective agency.
How to read this
Map the work before counting seats. Separate new-business quoting, renewal work, certificates, endorsements, billing, and client questions. Identify who actually handles each task.
Use a representative week to record incoming tasks, time spent, waiting, and rework. Include leave, training, and supervision when estimating available capacity. A fully booked calendar is not spare capacity.
Compare demand and capacity by role. More producer time does not automatically solve a certificate backlog. A shared service function can help one task while another still needs a licensed reviewer.
Use revenue per employee as a cross-check. If the ratio improves while response times and unresolved work deteriorate, investigate the workload before assuming the team is more productive.
Caveats
- A book stated in premium is different from a book stated in agency revenue. Label the unit before doing headcount arithmetic.
- Accounts with similar premiums can require different amounts of service. Renewal remarketing, schedules, and certificate volume change the workload.
- A published ratio is not a recommended hiring or redundancy decision.
Evaluate the work in your agency
Choose a repeated preparation task and test whether Relay reduces the total effort after review. If it does, reassign that time to the backlog or client work your team already identified. Keep the capacity estimate tied to measured work. Build your own baseline →
Common questions
How many staff do I need for a $2 million book?
First clarify whether that means premium or agency revenue. Then examine service demand, business mix, roles, and current backlog. The dollar value alone does not determine the staff required.
When should we hire instead of automate?
Identify the constraint. Automation may reduce repeated preparation, while a shortage of advice, judgment, relationship management, or review capacity can still require another person.
Every number on this page carries a source. Updated 2026-09-05. See how we source what we publish.
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