Workers Comp Carrier Exit: What Everest's $2B Sale Means for Your Mod
Everest sold $2 billion in commercial renewal rights to AIG, including a sizable workers' comp book. Your mod doesn't change when carriers do, but your claim handling might.
When a workers' comp carrier exits or sells its book, your experience modification rate stays with you (NCCI Experience Rating Plan Manual, Rule 3.E). The mod is tied to your loss and payroll history, not to any carrier. What changes is claim handling, audit practices, and whether the acquiring carrier's risk appetite still includes your class of business.
A workers' comp carrier exit doesn't happen quietly. Everest Group sold roughly $2 billion in commercial insurance renewal rights to AIG (Everest SEC 8-K, October 2025). Workers' comp made up about 20% of that book. By January 2026, AIG started writing policies for Everest's existing clients, and Everest's Q1 2026 filings show a 28% year-over-year decline in workers' comp premium as the transfer rolls through (Everest 10-Q, Q1 2026).
If you're a mid-market contractor in the Southeast and Everest was your WC carrier, your policy is in motion. You didn't choose this. The question isn't whether your coverage continues. It will. The question is whether anything behind that coverage has quietly changed.
Your mod doesn't leave with your carrier
This is the part that creates the most confusion during a carrier transition. Your experience modification rate (EMR, also called "the mod") belongs to you, not to the carrier that wrote your policy.
NCCI's (National Council on Compensation Insurance) Experience Rating Plan Manual is explicit on this point. Rule 3.E states that the experience continues with the employer. When you switch carriers, voluntarily or otherwise, the new carrier uses the same mod calculated from your prior loss history and payroll data. No reset. No recalculation. No interruption.
The only scenario where experience can discontinue requires all three conditions to happen at once: a change in ownership, a change in governing classification, and a change in hazard group. A carrier transition by itself triggers none of those. Your mod follows you.
So if your mod is 1.14 today and AIG picks up your renewal from Everest, your mod is still 1.14. The formula hasn't changed. The inputs haven't changed. The carrier holding the policy is the only thing that moved.
What actually changes in a workers comp carrier exit
The mod is portable. Claims handling isn't.
Every carrier has its own reserving philosophy, its own audit staff, and its own timeline for reviewing open claims. When a book of business moves, the outgoing carrier typically retains all existing policy liabilities and continues administering open claims. New claims filed after the transition date go to the acquiring carrier's claims team.
That handoff creates a seam. Reserves set by the old carrier's adjusters on claims still inside your experience period stay on your worksheet at whatever level they were last valued. The new carrier has no incentive to revisit those reserves. The old carrier, now that you're no longer their policyholder, may have less incentive to manage them aggressively.
For a $6 million payroll contractor, a single claim reserve sitting $50,000 higher than it should can move your mod 4 to 6 points. Over a three-year experience period, that's real money on every renewal.
The risk appetite question
Carrier exits aren't always clean. Sometimes the acquiring carrier wants the entire book. Sometimes it wants the profitable half.
Everest's exit was driven by a $1.7 billion loss reserve charge for US casualty lines announced in January 2025 (Everest Group, January 2025). The company attributed the charge to underwriting decisions that amplified social inflation impacts. By October 2025, Everest had decided to exit retail commercial insurance entirely and secured a $1.2 billion adverse development cover from Longtail Re to backstop prior-year liabilities (Everest Group, October 2025).
AIG built what it described as a "digital twin" of the Everest portfolio to evaluate which accounts to pursue at renewal. That kind of selective onboarding is normal. It also means some contractors will get a renewal offer from AIG that looks like their current program. Others will get a quote with different terms, higher retentions, or classification scrutiny they haven't faced before. Some won't receive an offer at all.
The broader market adds pressure. NCCI's 2026 State of the Line report shows a calendar-year combined ratio of 91% for 2025, still profitable, but the accident-year ratio crossed 102% (NCCI, May 2026). Industry reserve redundancy dropped to $14 billion from $16 billion the prior year. Medical severity climbed 4%. Carriers are still making money on workers' comp, but the cushion is thinner. A carrier inheriting a book during this environment will underwrite it more carefully than one that built the book during the soft years.
In our reviews of Southeast contractor worksheets through carrier transitions, the most common problem isn't a coverage gap. It's a claims-handling gap: reserves that nobody actively manages because the old carrier's adjuster moved on and the new carrier's adjuster hasn't built a relationship with the employer. The damage shows up two to three years later, when those reserves are still sitting on the worksheet at their original valuation. By then, the contractor's mod has been inflated across multiple renewal cycles, and nobody connects it back to the transition.
What an audit would check
An audit looks at the worksheet data that bridges a carrier transition: claim reserves carried by the outgoing carrier versus current paid losses, classification assignments inherited by the new carrier, and whether payroll reporting changed format or timing during the handoff. The goal is to confirm that the mod going into your next renewal reflects clean data, not transition artifacts.
Request a free worksheet review before your next renewal and we'll check whether your carrier transition left anything behind.