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A RocketLevel piece for restoration owners, accounts receivable (AR), and operations leaders, backed by decades of experience in the trade. About a 6-minute read.
If your everyday claim volume has felt thinner lately, the data backs you up. The drop is industry-wide, driven by carriers and the programs that route their work.
Knowing what is behind it turns "things are slow" into an exposure you can measure and act on.
Several things are happening at once.
Claim volume is down. Industry data showed claim volume falling meaningfully in 2025, and it kept falling in the first quarter of 2026. Per Verisk, homeowners claims for full-year 2025 came in at about 5.3 million, down 19% from 2024 and the lowest in five years. In the first quarter of 2026, US property claim volume ran 8.9% below the same quarter a year earlier and 13.1% below its five-year average, with non-catastrophe claims down 8.6%. Catastrophe activity in 2025 stayed light as well, so the storm surge that masks slow years simply did not come.
The phone is quieter for a lot of shops. And the books that lean hardest on a single carrier or program tend to feel that swing first and feel it sharpest, because there is nothing else carrying the load when one source pulls back.
Carriers are tightening. Programs and managed-repair arrangements continue to adjust rates and rules in ways that make the work less profitable: referral fees off the top, mandated reductions, and more documentation overhead. The work that does come through the program carries thinner margins than it used to, which helps explain why, per the 2026 C&R State of the Industry Report from Cleaning & Restoration (C&R) magazine, powered by KnowHow and covering 2025, 64% of restorers use third-party administrators (TPAs) in some form, yet 61% of restorers, including many who use TPAs regularly, would not recommend them to their peers.
Fewer companies carry TPA revenue than the conversation suggests. Per printed page 18 of the 2025 Cost of Doing Business Report from the Restoration Industry Association (RIA), which reflects fiscal year 2024 (FY2024) data: 53% of responding companies reported zero TPA revenue in FY2024, up from 45% in FY2023, only 6% drew more than three quarters of their revenue from TPAs, and in the $5.1M to $10M band more than 70% reported no TPA-derived income at all. (The chart on that page shows 51% at zero, two points below the 53% in the text.)
That finding sits oddly beside the 64% usage figure above, and both can be true. The RIA report measures the share of gross revenue a company draws from TPAs. The State of the Industry Report measures usage and sentiment among a different pool of respondents. For your own book the practical point is unchanged: whatever share you carry, someone else sets its price and its volume. TPAs and Insurance Programs: How They Work and Where They Fit works through the mix question.
Customers are self-rationing. Contractors we talk to report that deductibles have climbed, and that commercial deductibles in the tens of thousands of dollars are no longer unusual. Some property owners choose not to file smaller claims to avoid premium increases. So even when there is a loss, it does not always become a claim.
The residential insurance market itself is tightening: in a ValuePenguin survey of 1,999 US consumers fielded 20 to 21 February 2025, 25% of homeowners said they had received a nonrenewal notice from their insurer, against 19% when ValuePenguin asked a year earlier. That figure is self-reported, and the survey asked about nonrenewal notices received rather than about drops that occurred during 2025, so read it as a consumer survey result rather than carrier data, and the two readings as a signal rather than an established trend.
The J.D. Power 2025 U.S. Home Insurance Study found 47% of home-insurance customers had seen a premium increase in the prior year. That is the 2025 edition's figure. The 2026 study, released in September 2026, did not publish a premium-increase share, so quote 47% with its year.
You are measured on numbers you did not set. Loss ratios, cycle-time targets, and price lists can trail what you are actually paying for labor and materials this month, and you carry that gap.
Put together, the channel many restoration shops depend on is both smaller and tighter than it was.