Why 60% of Commercial Submissions Go Unquoted

Here is a number that should bother every independent agent: 60% of commercial insurance submissions never result in a quote.

That figure comes from IVANS research, and it represents an enormous amount of wasted effort. Every unquoted submission consumed an agent's time — filling out ACORD forms, logging into carrier portals, entering applicant data, waiting for a response — all for nothing.

This article examines why this happens, what it actually costs agencies, and what the data suggests about fixing it.

The Data: How Bad Is It?

The 60% figure is not an outlier. Multiple data sources converge on the same conclusion: the majority of commercial submissions fail to produce a quote.

Industry Research

IVANS (2022): More than 60% of commercial submissions go unquoted. The root cause is out-of-appetite submissions — agents sending risks to carriers that will not write them.

First Connect (2025): In a survey of 344 independent agents:

• 64% of agents experience quote-decline rates between 10% and 50%
• 71% of agents struggle to understand carrier appetites
• 86% of agents report challenges with product availability

SortSpoke (2023): Approximately 25% of all inbound submissions fall outside carriers' risk appetites before the underwriter even reviews them.

QuoteSweep's Carrier Research

QuoteSweep tracks appetite data for 553 commercial insurance carriers across 76 lines of business and all 50 states plus DC. Here is what that data reveals about the structural problem:

• 474 standard/admitted carriers, 55 E&S/surplus carriers, 17 dual-market carriers — the commercial market is fragmented across hundreds of carriers, each with different appetites
• Only 131 of 553 tracked carriers have verified online quoting portals. The rest require phone, email, or wholesale broker submission
• 435 carriers verified at high confidence (from PDF appetite guides or carrier website data). The remaining 114 are enriched from industry knowledge — meaning even the data itself has varying reliability
• 486 of 553 carriers have been portal-verified by QuoteSweep's research team — confirming the actual agent experience of logging in, navigating, and submitting

The fragmentation is the problem. No single agent can keep 553 carriers' appetites in their head. No spreadsheet stays current when carriers update their guidelines quarterly. And no API-based rater connects to more than approximately 48 of them.

Why Submissions Fail: The Appetite Mismatch

The root cause of unquoted submissions is not lazy underwriting or slow systems. It is appetite mismatch — submitting risks to carriers whose appetite excludes them.

Appetite mismatch happens for three structural reasons:

1. Appetite Data Is Scattered and Stale

Carrier appetite information exists in:

• PDF appetite guides — published annually or semi-annually, often outdated by the time you read them
• Carrier websites — buried in agent portals behind logins, rarely structured for comparison
• Institutional knowledge — "I know Hartford writes restaurants in Ohio" — but does it write restaurants with liquor sales over $200K?
• Carrier rep conversations — useful but not scalable across dozens of carriers

QuoteSweep's research found that of 553 tracked carriers, only 174 have appetite data parseable from PDF guides and 265 from structured website data. The rest relies on industry knowledge — inherently less reliable and less granular.

2. Carrier Appetites Change Constantly

Carriers adjust their appetites based on loss ratios, market conditions, reinsurance costs, and strategic priorities. A carrier that wrote restaurants in Texas last quarter may have pulled back this quarter.

Static appetite data — whether in your head, a spreadsheet, or an annual PDF — cannot keep up with this cadence. This is why even experienced agents with strong carrier relationships still submit out-of-appetite risks. The appetite they knew last month is not necessarily the appetite today.

3. Agents Cannot Economically Check Every Carrier

A typical independent agent logs into 3–5 different carrier portals to quote a single commercial risk. Each portal visit involves:

• Logging in (credentials, MFA)
• Navigating to the right product
• Entering applicant data (ACORD fields, class codes, state, limits)
• Waiting for the carrier's response (6–10 minutes per carrier based on QuoteSweep benchmarking — Hartford averages approximately 6.3 minutes, Travelers approximately 9.7 minutes)

At 45–60 minutes per submission across 5 carriers, the economics force agents to guess which carriers will write a risk rather than check all of them. And when they guess wrong, they join the 60% of submissions that produce nothing.

What It Actually Costs

Let us quantify the waste. For a mid-size independent agency:

Assumptions:

• 10 commercial submissions per week
• 60% go unquoted (industry average)
• Each submission takes approximately 45 minutes of producer or CSR time
• Blended cost of that time: approximately $40/hour

Weekly cost of wasted submissions:

• 10 submissions x 60% failure rate = 6 wasted submissions/week
• 6 submissions x 45 minutes = 4.5 hours/week wasted
• 4.5 hours x $40/hour = $180/week wasted

Annual cost: Approximately $9,360 per year in staff time producing nothing. For a producer earning commission, the opportunity cost is even higher — those hours could have been spent on prospects that actually convert.

And that calculation only counts the agent's time. It does not count the carrier underwriter's time reviewing out-of-appetite submissions before declining, or the agent's follow-up time chasing a response that was never going to be positive.

What to Do About It

The solution is not to submit more. It is to submit smarter.

1. Check Appetite Before Submitting

The single highest-leverage change an agent can make is to verify carrier appetite before entering any data into a carrier portal. If you know a carrier will not write the risk, do not waste 10 minutes filling out their application.

QuoteSweep's free appetite checker lets you search by business type, state, and line of business to see which of 553 carriers are likely to write the risk — including confidence scoring based on data source quality. This is the kind of pre-screening that eliminates the majority of wasted submissions.

2. Understand Your Carrier Panel's Actual Appetite

Most agents know their top 5–8 carriers well. They do not know their full panel. If you have appointments with 15 carriers but only regularly submit to 6 of them, you may be missing better options for specific risks.

Map your full carrier panel against their appetites by:

• Business class (restaurants, contractors, technology, manufacturing, etc.)
• State (carrier appetites vary significantly by state)
• Line of business (BOP, GL, WC, commercial auto, umbrella, cyber)
• Premium size (minimum and maximum thresholds)

3. Track Your Own Decline Patterns

If you do not track which carriers decline which risks, you will repeat the same appetite mismatches. Keep a simple log:

• Carrier
• Class code / business type
• State
• Outcome (quoted, declined, no response)

After 3–6 months, you will have your own proprietary appetite intelligence — specific to your agency's submission patterns.

4. Use Multi-Carrier Quoting Tools

Whether you use Tarmika, Semsee, Bold Penguin, or QuoteSweep, the principle is the same: submitting to multiple carriers from a single application reduces the per-carrier time cost. When the marginal cost of checking one more carrier drops from 10 minutes to seconds, the economics change — you can afford to check more carriers, which means fewer missed placements.

For a comparison of available tools, see our commercial quoting tools comparison.

The Compounding Effect

Fixing the 60% problem is not a one-time improvement. It compounds:

• Fewer wasted submissions = more time for productive quotes
• More productive quotes = higher close rates
• Higher close rates = better carrier relationships (carriers track your bind ratio)
• Better carrier relationships = preferred access, better commissions, and more carrier appointments
• More appointments = broader coverage for your clients

The agencies that solve the appetite mismatch problem first will compound these advantages quarter over quarter. The ones that keep guessing will keep wasting 60% of their effort.

The Bottom Line

The 60% unquoted rate is not inevitable. It is a data problem — and data problems have solutions.

The industry is producing the data: carrier appetite guides, online portals, quoting APIs. The challenge is aggregating, verifying, and making it accessible at the moment an agent needs it — before they spend 45 minutes on a submission that was never going to produce a quote.

That is exactly what QuoteSweep's appetite checker is built to solve. Check which carriers will write the risk before you submit. It is free, it covers 553 carriers, and it might save your agency $9,000+ per year in wasted effort.

FAQ

Where does the 60% statistic come from?

The statistic comes from IVANS research cited in Insurance Thought Leadership (January 2022). It is corroborated by First Connect's 2025 survey of 344 independent agents, which found that 64% of agents experience quote-decline rates between 10% and 50%.

Is the problem getting better or worse?

Worse, in most markets. Hard market conditions mean carriers are tightening appetites — making it harder for agents to predict which carriers will write a given risk. At the same time, the commercial insurance market remains fragmented across hundreds of carriers with no standardized way to communicate appetite changes.

Does this apply to personal lines too?

Less so. Personal lines comparative raters (like EZLynx, which connects to 330+ carriers) have largely solved the multi-carrier quoting problem for auto and home. Commercial lines lag behind because of greater risk complexity, less standardized applications, and fewer carrier APIs.

How does QuoteSweep's appetite data stay current?

QuoteSweep maintains carrier appetite data through three sources: PDF appetite guides (re-parsed when carriers publish updates), carrier website monitoring (structured data extraction), and manual portal verification. All data includes confidence scoring and date-verified timestamps so agents can assess freshness. Currently, 435 of 553 carriers have high-confidence data (0.75+ confidence score).