# How to Find a Company's Insurance Carrier (and Broker, and Renewal Date)

*Benefit Signals — updated 2026-09-13. Canonical: https://benefit-signals.com/resources/find-a-companys-insurance-carrier*

To find a company's group insurance carrier, search its name or EIN in the DOL EFAST2 filing system, open the most recent Form 5500, and read the Schedule A attachments. Line 1(a) names the insurance carrier, line 1(d) gives the contract number, lines 1(f) and 1(g) give the policy year dates, and line 3(a) names the agent or broker who received commissions. The search is free, and the filings are open to public inspection.

Brokers ask this question a dozen ways -- who writes their medical, who is their carrier, who holds the account -- and most of the time they end up guessing from a job posting or a LinkedIn profile. There is a better answer, and it has been sitting in a federal filing cabinet the whole time.

Here is the method, what it will and will not tell you, and the two situations where it fails.

## The five-minute manual method

- **Get the EIN if you can.** Company names are messy; EINs are not. If you do not have it, the sponsor name search works, but expect to sort through subsidiaries and similar names.
- **Search EFAST2.** Go to [efast.dol.gov](https://www.efast.dol.gov/) and run a filing search on the plan sponsor name or EIN. Filings are public and the search is free.
- **Open the most recent Form 5500 for the welfare plan,** not the retirement plan. A company with both will show two filings; the benefits information lives on the welfare plan filing.
- **Download the complete filing with attachments,** then find the Schedule A records. There may be several -- one per insurance contract, or one per grouped unit.
- **Read the fields.** Line 1(a) is the name of the insurance carrier. Line 1(d) is the contract or identification number. Line 1(e) is the approximate number of persons covered at the end of the policy year. Lines 1(f) and 1(g) are the policy or contract year, from and to. Line 3(a) is the name and address of the agent, broker or other person who received commissions, listed in descending order of amount paid. Part III line 8 checks the benefit and contract type -- health, dental, vision, life, disability, prescription drug, stop loss, HMO, PPO, indemnity.
- **Repeat for the prior two years.** A carrier or broker change between filings is the most useful thing you will learn all week.

Source: [2024 Schedule A (Form 5500), U.S. Department of Labor](https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ebsa/employers-and-advisers/plan-administration-and-compliance/reporting-and-filing/form-5500) (as published for plan year 2024). The full anatomy of the form is in [our Schedule A guide](https://benefit-signals.com/resources/schedule-a-form-5500).

## What you can learn, and what you cannot

| Question | Answer from the filing? | Field or caveat |
|---|---|---|
| Which carrier writes their medical? | Yes | Part I line 1(a), with NAIC code on 1(c) |
| What is the policy number? | Yes | Part I line 1(d) |
| When does the policy year end? | Yes | Part I line 1(g) |
| Who is the broker of record? | Usually | Line 3(a), top entry by amount paid |
| What does the broker earn? | Yes, on this contract | Line 2 totals; line 3(b)-(d) itemized |
| How many lives are covered? | Approximately | Line 1(e), per contract, at policy year end |
| What do employees pay? | No | Contribution structure is not on Schedule A |
| Are they happy with their broker? | No | Nothing in a filing reports satisfaction |
| What will they do next year? | No | Intent is not in the record |

## The two situations where this fails

**The employer is too small to file.** Welfare plans below the filing threshold generally do not file a Form 5500, so a small employer can be fully insured and completely invisible in this data. Finding nothing is not evidence that they have nothing. This is the single most common misreading of the filed record, and it is why a "comprehensive" small-group claim from any Form 5500 vendor should make you suspicious.

**The filing is stale relative to what you need.** Filings arrive months after the plan year closes. Carrier and renewal date usually hold up well; a broker seat that changed six months ago will not appear yet. Read across two or three filing years rather than trusting one snapshot, and treat the most recent filing year as a fact about the record, not about today.

## Reading a carrier change between years

When you pull three years of filings on one employer, four patterns are worth noticing, and each one means something different at the point of contact.

- **Same carrier, same broker, stable premium.** A settled relationship. Long-game prospect; call to be considered, not to displace.
- **Same carrier, different broker name on line 3(a).** The seat already moved. Someone got there first -- find out when, because a broker in year one of a relationship is not a broker you displace.
- **Different carrier, same broker.** The incumbent marketed the group and won. They are engaged and doing the work. Difficult.
- **Coverage lines appearing or disappearing on Part III line 8.** The benefits package is being rebuilt. That is a live conversation about something, even if it is not the medical.

## Doing this at territory scale

Everything above is free and takes a few minutes per employer. The arithmetic is the problem: a modest metro territory holds a few thousand filing employers, and reading three years of Schedule A records for each of them is months of work that is stale before you finish.

That is the job Benefit Signals does in one pass. It reads 3.2 million Schedule A insurance contracts, resolves them to 85,931 employer groups, carries the filed renewal date on the 85,788 that have one, names the carrier and the broker of record on each, and sorts a territory by whose contract year closes next. 46,595 groups carry a decision-maker on file. Change signals -- the incumbent broker's position changed, the business is in motion, or the economics sit out of line for a group that size -- move a group up the list when the ground shifts.

It is $60 a month or $600 a year, with a seven-day free trial on the monthly plan: card at checkout, first charge on day 8, cancel before then and pay nothing. And it reports likelihoods, not certainties -- it tells you where to look first, not what an employer will decide.

Related: [group insurance leads](https://benefit-signals.com/resources/group-insurance-leads), [insurance prospecting tools](https://benefit-signals.com/resources/insurance-prospecting-tools), and -- for when the lookup turns into a yes -- [broker of record letter](https://benefit-signals.com/resources/broker-of-record-letter).

## Frequently asked questions

### How can I find out what insurance company a business uses?

For employer group benefits, search the business in the DOL EFAST2 filing system, open its most recent Form 5500 for the welfare plan, and read the Schedule A attachments. Line 1(a) names the insurance carrier. The search is free and the filings are open to public inspection.

### Can I find a company's health insurance broker?

Usually, yes. Schedule A line 3 lists the agents, brokers and other persons who received commissions or fees on the contract, in descending order of the amount paid, with name and address. The top entry is normally the dominant seat, though groups can carry a general agent or co-broker on the same contract.

### Is this information legal to use for prospecting?

The filings are public records, published by the Department of Labor and marked open to public inspection. Using public filings to research a market is ordinary competitive practice. Your outreach is still governed by the usual rules -- licensing, state insurance regulation, and email and telemarketing law -- so follow those as you would with any list.

### Why can't I find a small company's filing?

Most likely because it is not required to file. Welfare plans below the filing threshold generally do not submit a Form 5500, so many small employers are fully insured and entirely absent from this data. Absence from the filed record says nothing about whether coverage exists.

### How accurate is the renewal date on a filing?

The policy year "To" date on line 1(g) is reported by the insurer for that contract year, so it is a filed fact rather than an estimate. Contract years tend to be stable year over year, which is why a prior filing is still a useful predictor -- but confirm the month in conversation before you build a proposal timeline on it.

### Do I need software for this?

Not for one company. For one territory, yes -- reading three filing years of Schedule A records across a few thousand employers, resolving name variants, and sorting the result by renewal date is not work that finishes by hand before it goes stale.

---
## One lookup is free. A whole territory, sorted by renewal date, is the part we built.

[Start My 7-Day Free Trial](https://benefit-signals.com/auth/register)

[Home](https://benefit-signals.com/) · [Resources for benefits brokers](https://benefit-signals.com/resources/)

## Related reading

- [Schedule A (Form 5500): The Broker's Field Guide](https://benefit-signals.com/resources/schedule-a-form-5500)
- [Group Insurance Leads: How to Build a List That Ranks Itself](https://benefit-signals.com/resources/group-insurance-leads)
- [Broker of Record Letter: How a Broker of Record Change Actually Works](https://benefit-signals.com/resources/broker-of-record-letter)