1,122 Texas insurance agencies are run by one person licensed before Windows 95

Texas has 14,100 licensed property and casualty insurance agencies. For 1,122 of them, the state's records list exactly one principal, and that person got their first insurance licence before Windows 95 went on sale on August 24, 1995. 133 of those principals were licensed before 1980.

Most of the people who sell insurance in Texas are new. Of 253,384 Texas-resident agents with an active licence, 142,656 (56%) got their first licence in 2021 or later. 42,147 of them were first licensed in 2025 alone. Only 12,926 (5%) have been licensed since before Windows 95.

Source: ProfessionLens, September 2026. Data: Texas Department of Insurance licence files, data.texas.gov, pulled 2026-09-29.

One principal, licensed three decades ago

We counted an agency's principals as the people the state links to it as owner, partner, member, officer or director, or designated responsible licensed person. 12,776 of the 14,100 agencies have at least one such person on file. 10,281 have exactly one.

Half of those single principals were first licensed after April 2013. The table shows the rest by decade:

Source: ProfessionLens, September 2026. Data: Texas Department of Insurance.

Counting every agency where all principals were licensed before Windows 95, not only the single-principal ones, gives 1,270.

A licence date is a stand-in for age, not a birth date. Someone first licensed in 1990 was probably born before 1970, but the state does not publish ages. "One principal" also only means one responsible person on the state's record. A son or daughter who works at the agency without a principal role would not show up.

Where they are

Houston has the most, 143 of its 1,649 agencies with a principal on file (9%). Dallas has 92 of 722 (13%) and San Antonio 72 of 687 (10%). The share is higher in some smaller cities: Lubbock has 22 of 127 (17%) and Tyler 13 of 75 (17%). Austin, where many agencies opened recently, has 39 of 577 (7%).

Source: ProfessionLens, September 2026. Data: Texas Department of Insurance. Every city is in by-city.csv.

Why the agent count skews so young

The files list only licences that are active today. An agent licensed in 2008 who quit in 2010 is not in them. So the 56% licensed since 2021 counts both a wave of new agents and the many earlier ones who have since left. The files cannot separate the two.

Iowa publishes a similar file, so we ran the same count there. Of 25,969 Iowa-resident producers with an active licence, 10,859 (42%) were first active in 2021 or later and 2,430 (9%) before Windows 95. Texas has the younger workforce on both measures: 56% and 5%. Iowa's file gives each producer's first active date in Iowa, which is close to, but not the same as, the earliest licence date we used for Texas. We are adding other states that publish their files.

How we counted

• Source: three Texas Department of Insurance datasets on data.texas.gov, downloaded on 2026-09-29: agency licences (3yqc-fcdt), individual licences (kxv3-diwf, 964,833 rows) and agency-to-person relationships (kvqi-vsrr).
• Agencies: Texas-based agencies with a General Lines Agency or Personal Lines Property and Casualty Agency licence, one row per NPN.
• First licensed: the earliest issue date across all of a person's active licences. 776 people carry an issue date in 1920, which is a placeholder in the state file; we dropped those dates.
• Agents: Texas-resident people holding a general lines, personal lines P&C or life agent licence.
• Adjusters and non-resident licensees are left out.
• Iowa: Insurance Division producer file (idh-be.iowa.gov dataset 669), downloaded 2026-09-29, Iowa residents only, one row per NPN, by first active date.

The counts, the decade table and the city table are in the dataset files linked below. We publish no names.