US employers barely added jobs in September, and insurance remains one of the weakest parts of the labor market.

Employers added a net 29,000 jobs last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' September employment report, released Friday morning. That was well short of the 88,000 economists surveyed by Bloomberg had expected, and below the 45,000-a-month average of the previous year. The unemployment rate edged up to 4.2% from 4.1% in August.

What does it take to make the list of the best insurance companies to work for in the USA?

Insurance Business America’s Top Insurance Employers 2026 recognizes organizations ranging from a 4,000-person national wholesale brokerage to a 67-person retail agency.

For more than a decade of low interest rates, insurance companies faced a persistent challenge: how to generate the level of investment income their liabilities demanded when public fixed income markets simply weren’t delivering. The answer, increasingly, has been private assets.

That shift has become one of the defining stories in institutional investing. Insurance capital now represents roughly 30% of the world’s invested assets, approaching $40 trillion, and a growing share of that capital is flowing into private credit, asset-based finance, equipment finance, and other non-public opportunities.

Insurers will help maximize their return on AI investments by adopting an enterprise-wide strategy, rather than just focusing on select and segmented areas, which splits the ownership and investment, according to research from Accenture.

The seaside city is making post-Palisades fire progress in a recovery complicated by steep terrain, coastal erosion, wastewater infrastructure and property-specific engineering demands.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is launching a new office to monitor safety compliance for massive artificial intelligence companies, echoing calls by fellow Democrat California Gov. Gavin Newsom to explore a “kill switch” if the technology turns catastrophic.

Hochul said Monday she tapped Marc Gilman, an attorney at the Department of Financial Services, to oversee the state’s new Digital Innovation, Governance, Integrity and Trust office, created by the RAISE Act the governor signed in December 2025. The state law mandates developers follow certain AI safety standards, which are among the strongest restrictions in the US on large AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

Commercial insurance renewal rates fell across five of six major lines in August, the latest Ivans Index shows. The monthly deceleration has now run through most of the year. The index draws on more than 120 million data transactions across 38,000 agencies and 700 carriers and managing general agents.

Year over year, all five of those lines are still producing positive rate changes. Clients are paying more than they were 12 months ago. Month over month, every one of them fell in August, and that gap is where renewal conversations are now being shaped.

New York's health insurers asked for premium increases three to four times higher than what regulators approved, and the gap between the two numbers shows the state's 2027 renewal season.

The Department of Financial Services (DFS) authorized average increases of 6% for individual market plans and 8% for small-group plans covering employers with fewer than 100 workers, cutting requests of 20.6% and 23.7%, respectively. DFS projects those reductions will save approximately 860,000 enrolled New Yorkers around $1.6 billion compared to what carriers had filed.