Insurance intermediaries in Italy: what the IVASS register shows in 2026

Key figures

How many insurance intermediaries Italy has

Italy keeps a single public register for everyone who distributes insurance, the Registro Unico degli Intermediari (RUI), run by the supervisor IVASS. On 14 October 2026 it held 230,634 entries. 84.5% of them are in Section E, the collaborators who sell on behalf of an agent, a broker, a bank or a consumer-credit firm. Registrations of agents and brokers, individuals and companies holding a mandate or a client appointment in their own name, number just over thirty thousand.

April to October 2026: who joined and who left

This issue compares two IVASS extracts, 16 April and 14 October 2026, a window of 181 days. Over those six months the register gained 6,774 registration numbers. All of the growth came from Section E (+6,796, 3.6%) and from EU intermediaries passporting in (+130). Every other section shrank: agents −85, brokers −12, direct sellers −45.

A word on how to read joiners: they are registration numbers present in October and absent in April, so registrations still live on 14 October. Anyone who joined and left within the six months is missing, which makes the figure an undercount; it covers individuals and companies, and section changes are counted separately. Section A took in 272 new registrations and lost 373, 233 of which were already inactive in April. Section B had 118 joiners and 173 leavers. Counted as businesses, agencies went from 11,059 to 10,977, while broking firms held steady (2,815 and 2,817).

Section E moves on a different scale: 13,612 joiners against 6,760 leavers. Of the joiners, 9,619 carry a registration date after 16 April; the other 3,993 show an earlier date, and the file does not tell re-registrations from corrections.

458 people changed section while keeping the same number. 166 collaborators became agents and 72 became brokers; 180 agents and brokers moved the other way, into Section E.

Agencies and broking firms, counted as businesses

Section A has 24,971 registrations, individuals and companies together, so it is not the number of agencies. When an agency is incorporated, the register lists the company and, next to it, the agents responsible for it. A field called «titolo individuale» tells the two apart: agents without it work inside a company that is already registered.

Here an agency means a business that trades: a company registered in Section A, or an individual agent working in their own name. Counted that way there are about 11,000 agency businesses, 10,977 (7,920 companies, 3,057 sole traders) and 2,817 broking firms (1,668 companies). That is about 26 broking firms for every 100 agencies.

Where agents and brokers are based

Agencies are spread across the country roughly in line with population. Brokers cluster. Rome and Milan host 30.9% of broking firms but only 13.1% of agencies, and Naples comes third for brokers with 179 firms, ahead of Turin (97).

Lazio has 48.0 broking firms per 100 agencies and Campania 47.4. In Basilicata the whole region counts 6 broking firms; Calabria has 21.

Ten provinces with the most broking firms

An ageing profession, with younger collaborators

The median individual agent is 56 years old, and only 3.5% are under 35 (560 people out of 15,991). Among individual brokers the median is 57, and 24.0% have turned 65. Section E is younger, with a median of 50 and 30,119 people under 35, against 719 among agents and brokers combined.

Section E grows fastest, and banks own a large part of it

Between 14 October 2025 and 13 October 2026, 20,406 new Section E collaborators joined and were still registered at the time of the extract. New agents in the same period: 685. New brokers: 333.

Collaborators registered today, by year they joined

82,567 people, 42.4% of all collaborators on file, work for at least one Section D firm, meaning a bank, a consumer-credit lender or an investment firm. The ten largest Section D firms account for 60.0% of those links.

Large networks are more common among brokers than agents: 84 broking firms have 100 or more collaborators, against 66 agencies.

How many insurers an Italian agent works with

The register lists every mandate between an agent and an insurer. Of the 10,958 active agents holding at least one, 24.7% work with a single insurer, 31.2% with two, 34.3% with three to five and 9.7% with six or more.

These are legal entities, not groups. An agent appointed by Allianz S.p.A. and by Allianz Global Life shows two mandates, and the top ten includes specialists in health, assistance and legal expenses (UniSalute, Redion Italy Insurance, listed as Europ Assistance Italia until April under the same IVASS code, D.A.S., UCA) that usually sit alongside an agency’s main insurer.

Websites declared to the register

Intermediaries can record their websites in the RUI. 33.4% of incorporated agencies and 36.1% of broking companies have done so. Among sole traders the shares drop to 19.1% for agents and 10.4% for brokers. Treat these as floors: a site that was never declared does not show up.

EU intermediaries operating in Italy

4,461 intermediaries based elsewhere in the EU or EEA are cleared to work in Italy, 130 more than in April, and 4,370 of them do so under freedom to provide services, without an Italian branch. The main home countries are France (1,080), Austria (829), Germany (743) and Luxembourg (424).

Inactive intermediaries and the October 2026 removals

The October file flags 1,404 entries as inactive, 1,059 of them agents and 333 brokers. Between April and October 296 inactive entries were removed, 245 became inactive and 154 returned to work.

On 12 October 2026 IVASS published a decision removing intermediaries inactive for more than three years (ref. 0225844/26 of 12/10/2026). It covers entries that, on the date of the 14 September 2026 opening notice, had been inactive for more than three years. The 14 October file still lists 260 entries inactive since before 14 September 2023, so the removals are not yet visible in the data; the next extract will show how many actually leave.

Method, source and downloads

Every figure comes from the RUI open data published by IVASS under CC BY 4.0. The snapshot uses the 14 October 2026 extract and the comparison sets it against the 16 April 2026 one. No internal Aron data was used. Two scripts read the IVASS files and write the JSON and CSV files below, so rerunning them on the same extracts returns the same numbers.

• Section: first letter of the registration number. Numbers starting with UE form the annex list of EU/EEA intermediaries.
• Active: entries without the inactivity flag. Every analysis except the headcounts uses active entries only.
• Agency businesses and broking firms: companies plus individuals registered as trading in their own name.
• Location: registered office, or place of business for sole traders. Entries without an address are left out of the regional tables.
• Mandates: insurers counted by IVASS code, not by group.
• Comparison: a number found only in October is a joiner, one found only in April a leaver. The same digits under a different letter count as a section change.
• Registrations by year: current registrants only. 2007 includes the migration from the registers that preceded the RUI; 2026 stops on 13 October.

The register holds no premium or commission data, and we did not infer gender from names.

Disclosure: MioAssicuratore S.r.l. (RUI B000558613), the company behind Aron, is a broker registered in Section B and is included in the data analysed here.

Download the data

• Registrations by section rui-sezioni-2026-10-14.csv
• April to October 2026 comparison by section confronto-2026-04-16_2026-10-14.csv
• Agencies, brokers and Section E firms by province rui-province-2026-10-14.csv
• Current registrants by year of registration rui-iscrizioni-per-anno-2026-10-14.csv
• Agents holding a mandate, by insurer rui-mandati-imprese-2026-10-14.csv
• Every figure on this page (JSON) rui-2026-10-14.json
• April to October comparison (JSON) confronto-2026-04-16_2026-10-14.json