An underwriter's calendar says risk selection. The week says data entry, document chasing, and reporting. More than a third of an underwriter's time goes to non-core work, and every hour of it is paid at underwriter rates.
For an underwriter earning about $117,400 in base wages, that time costs $60,000 a year in loaded compensation. At the national median wage, the figure is $41,600. Your number sits somewhere on that range, and you can calculate it in an afternoon.
This article walks through the formula, the three inputs behind it, where the hours go, and which tasks to move off the desk first while keeping judgment with the underwriter.
What Does Manual Underwriting Cost Per Underwriter?
The cost of manual underwriting per person equals loaded annual compensation multiplied by the share of working time spent on non-core tasks. We call this the Non-Core Time Cost model, and it needs only three inputs.
Most cost estimates stop at salary. Salary understates the bill, because employers also pay benefits and payroll costs on every hour an underwriter spends keying data instead of selecting risk.
The Formula
Non-Core Time Cost = (base wage ÷ wage share of employer cost) × non-core time share
Input | What it measures | Source used here |
|---|---|---|
Base wage | Annual wages for an insurance underwriter | BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, May 2025 data |
Wage share of employer cost | Converts wages into loaded annual cost | BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026 |
Non-core time share | Portion of working time spent on data collection and administrative work | Accenture underwriting survey, published September 2025 |
The Wage and Loaded-Cost Inputs
The BLS reports a median annual wage of $81,370 for insurance underwriters in May 2025, with the top 10 percent earning more than $145,160. That median blends health, life, and property and casualty underwriters, so use your own payroll data where you have it.
Benefits and payroll costs sit on top of wages. For full-time private industry workers, wages made up 68.5 percent of employer compensation costs in June 2026. Dividing a wage by 0.685 converts it to loaded annual cost.
That ratio is a private-industry average, not an insurance-specific figure. Replace it with your HR team's actual loaded rate when you have one.
The Result at Three Wage Levels
Applying a 35 percent non-core share gives the following cost per underwriter.
Base wage | Where it comes from | Loaded annual cost | Cost of non-core time |
|---|---|---|---|
$81,370 | BLS median, May 2025 | $118,800 | $41,600 |
$117,400 | Wage at which the model reaches $60,000 | $171,400 | $60,000 |
$145,160 | BLS 90th percentile threshold | $211,900 | $74,200 |
Multiply by headcount to see the team-level bill. A team of 20 underwriters at the median wage carries $831,500 a year in non-core time cost. The same team at the $60,000 level carries $1.2 million.
How Much of an Underwriter's Time Is Non-Core Work?
More than one third. Accenture's underwriting survey found that over a third of an underwriter's time goes to non-core activities such as data collection and administrative work.
Carrier Management's coverage of the same research puts commercial P&C underwriters at 35 percent, down from 38 percent three years earlier. Personal lines underwriters report the same share today, down from 45 percent in the prior study.
What Counts as Non-Core
Accenture defines core work as negotiation, sales, risk analysis, and pricing. Data collection and administrative work fall outside that list.
Broker conversations and negotiation count as core work. Keep them out of the cost calculation, or the number will not survive a review with finance.
Where the Hours Go
A 2025 survey of 350 underwriters and actuaries in commercial and specialty insurance, run by Coleman Parkes for the software vendor hyperexponential, points to the daily workload. The report's media statement says underwriters spend up to three hours a day on manual tasks such as data entry, referrals, and reporting.
The same coverage notes that hours spent rekeying data ranked among the top three data challenges for both underwriters and actuaries. For underwriters it ranked second. Time spent on low-value administrative work and inefficient processes topped their list of barriers.
Why the Share Moves Slowly
Commercial P&C underwriters gained three percentage points in three years. Adoption of new tools is early, with under 15 percent of the underwriting executives Accenture surveyed reporting use of AI-based capabilities at the time of the survey.
Those executives expected usage to reach 70 percent within three years. Until then, the hours stay on the desk and the cost keeps recurring.
What Costs Sit Outside the Per-Person Number?
The formula counts compensation only. It does not price the risk analysis, pricing, and negotiation hours that non-core work displaces, or the strain that work puts on underwriters.
Displaced Underwriting Capacity
Each non-core hour is an hour not spent on the core activities Accenture lists. Hiring does not close that gap on its own. The BLS projects insurance underwriter employment to fall 4 percent between 2025 and 2035, from 125,600 jobs to 120,800.
About 6,800 openings a year are projected over that decade, and all of them come from replacing workers who transfer or leave the labor force. The labor pool is not growing to absorb the extra hours.
Underwriter Burnout
In the hyperexponential survey, 73 percent of underwriters said burnout was a growing concern. The vendor's own statement links that concern to the manual workload underwriters carry.
Burnout sits outside the formula, yet it is a cost of the same manual workload. Treat the per-person figure as the floor of the real bill.
How Do You Calculate Your Own Number?
Run a time study on your own underwriters, apply your own loaded compensation, and multiply. Published survey shares set the expectation. Your own data sets the number finance will accept.
The Five Steps
Define non-core tasks in writing. List data collection, rekeying between systems, document chasing, referral paperwork, and reporting before anyone starts logging time.
Sample two weeks of activity. Capture time by task category from self-reported logs or workbench timestamps.
Pull loaded compensation from HR. Use wages plus benefits and payroll costs for each underwriting role.
Multiply and total. Apply each underwriter's non-core share to their loaded compensation, then sum by team and line of business.
Rerun every quarter. The trend tells you whether the share is falling.
What Counts as Core and Non-Core
Task | Category | Why |
|---|---|---|
Negotiating terms with brokers | Core | Accenture counts negotiation and sales as core work |
Risk analysis and pricing | Core | Accenture counts both as core work |
Collecting submission data | Non-core | Data collection is named in Accenture's non-core definition |
Rekeying data between systems | Non-core | Underwriters ranked it among their top data challenges |
Referral paperwork and reporting | Non-core | Named as manual tasks in the hyperexponential statement |
Chasing missing documents | Non-core | A form of data collection |
Common Mistakes
Using base wage instead of loaded compensation leaves benefits out of the bill entirely. Finance will catch this, and it weakens every number that follows.
Applying one survey share to every desk hides real differences. Accenture tracked commercial and personal lines separately, and your own desks will vary by line and by seniority.
Which Underwriting Tasks Should Move Off the Desk First?
Start with tasks that repeat on every submission and need no underwriting judgment: data entry, rekeying between systems, and reporting. These are the tasks underwriters themselves name as the problem.
Rekeying Between Systems
When a legacy system and a policy system hold the same account, someone retypes it. Moving that data once, with validation, removes the retyping and the transcription errors that come with it.
This is a data task, not an underwriting task. It needs mapping and checking, and it does not need an underwriter's judgment.
Intake and Data Entry
Submission packages arrive as ACORD forms, loss runs, inspection reports, and broker emails. Someone reads each document and keys its fields into the underwriting system.
Drafting that data for review turns the underwriter's first step from typing into checking. The underwriter still decides what the data means.
What Stays With the Underwriter
Risk selection, pricing, referral decisions, and negotiation stay with the underwriter. AI assists by preparing the data, and a person reviews every recommendation before it is finalized.
Priority | Task | Who decides |
|---|---|---|
Start here | Rekeying between systems | A person validates each field mapping |
Start here | Submission data entry | A person reviews the extracted fields |
Move next | Reporting and referral paperwork | The underwriter reviews each draft |
Keep | Risk selection, pricing, negotiation | The underwriter |
How InsOps Helps
InsOps builds an insurance-trained AI that assists with the data tasks behind underwriting, including moving and validating data between legacy systems and Guidewire. LiLa, our insurance-trained LLM, runs inside your own environment, so PII and PHI never leave controlled infrastructure. A person reviews and validates every field mapping before it is deployed.
Our Integration Gateway connects to Guidewire PolicyCenter, UnderwritingCenter, and other core systems, so underwriting data flows directly into your workflow without custom engineering. InsOps migrates legacy data into Guidewire and keeps it flowing in real time.
Reading broker submissions and drafting risk summaries for underwriter review is a capability InsOps is building toward inside LiLa. If you are evaluating how to reduce non-core underwriter time without adding headcount, contact us to talk through what this could look like for your operation.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does manual underwriting cost per underwriter?
Multiply loaded annual compensation by the share of time spent on non-core work. At the BLS median wage the result is a little over $41,000 per underwriter, and on higher-paid desks it passes $60,000.
What percentage of an underwriter's time goes to administrative work?
Recent Accenture survey data shows more than a third of working time going to non-core work. Accenture counts data collection and administrative tasks in that category.
Why does manual underwriting cost so much?
Non-core work is paid at underwriter rates. Data entry, rekeying between disconnected systems, and reporting repeat on every submission, and each hour carries full loaded compensation.
How do you calculate the cost of manual underwriting?
Run a two-week time study, pull loaded compensation from HR, and multiply each underwriter's non-core share by their loaded cost. Total the results by team and line of business, then rerun the study each quarter.
How does AI assist underwriters with manual work?
AI assists with data tasks such as mapping fields between systems, validating records, and preparing data for review. A person validates each output before it is finalized, so the underwriter keeps every decision.
What metrics show whether manual underwriting work is shrinking?
Track non-core hours per underwriter per week, submissions handled per underwriter, and the time from submission receipt to first underwriter review. All three come from the same time study used to size the cost.
What is a realistic timeline for reducing manual underwriting work, and what are the common failure points?
Measurement takes about two weeks. Reduction runs in phases, starting with one line of business and one data flow before expanding. Common failure points include vague task definitions, skipping the baseline, rolling out across every line at once, and removing review checkpoints.