How long should a commercial or personal lines quote take?
Measure quote preparation, carrier work, waiting, and review separately. Build an agency baseline instead of treating a website demo as a speed promise.
What the published numbers say
Relay’s June 2026 research page reports a 3.6-minute median for its tested HO-3 portal workflow. This is a vendor-published result for the described run. It is not the time from a new client inquiry to an approved proposal.
Relay, June 2026 carrier portal benchmark and limitations · 2026
How to read this
Define the finish line. First rate returned, all selected markets completed, and a proposal ready for a client are different measures. Choose the one that answers your operational question.
Record four stages: source information ready, carrier work started, results returned, and reviewer finished. Note missing-information requests and carrier referrals separately.
Track active work and elapsed time. An agent may spend little time typing but wait much longer for an answer. That distinction helps you choose the process to improve.
Compare similar submissions with and without Relay. Include corrections and review, the number of carriers, the business line, and any stops that required a person. Keep incomplete runs in the record.
Caveats
- Homepage animation and edited recordings explain the workflow. They are not real-time speed measurements.
- A historical single-portal result does not establish a result for every carrier, state, business line, or current model.
- Unmeasured estimates of industry-wide manual quoting time are not a reliable baseline for your agency.
Evaluate the work in your agency
Start with a representative submission. Measure the full preparation-to-review effort and decide whether the output is useful enough that your team wants to use it again. The first result matters more than matching a marketing stopwatch. Build your own baseline →
Common questions
Does the website demo show how long my quotes will take?
No. It is an illustrative walkthrough. Actual time depends on the source information, carrier workflow, missing answers, and the review your agency needs.
Should we count failed or incomplete runs?
Yes. Record the stop, the work needed to recover, and whether a usable result was produced. Removing those cases would make the comparison misleading.
Every number on this page carries a source. Updated 2026-09-05. See how we source what we publish.
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