Directory · Iowa · Surety bonds

Who writes surety bonds in Iowa

Top insurer groups from the NAIC market share report; the state's list carries no lines of authority.

Merchants Bonding Co. Group wrote the most surety bonds in Iowa in 2025, $12.7M and 16.0% of the state's premium; the top five groups hold 46%. Iowa's company list doesn't say which lines each company is licensed for, so the ranking below is the NAIC's top 10 groups; every licensed company is on the Iowa page.

By Sam Alishahi, independent insurance broker · All lines in Iowa

Top 10 · NAIC table: 24 - Surety

The insurer groups that write the most surety bonds in Iowa

Top 10 insurer groups by direct premium written in 2025, from the NAIC's Market Share Reports for Property/Casualty Groups and Companies by State. A group is the parent and its insurance companies together; share is the group's part of the state total for the line; loss ratio is losses incurred over premium earned.

#	Insurer group	Premium written	Share	Loss ratio	Member companies here
1	Merchants Bonding Co. Group	$12.7M	15.96%	—	Merchants Bonding Company (Mutual), Merchants National Bonding, Inc.
2	Zurich Insurance Group	$6.8M	8.51%	—	Zurich American Insurance Company, Rural Community Insurance Company, American Zurich Insurance Company, American Guarantee and Liability Insurance Company
3	Travelers Group	$6.3M	7.88%	10%	Travelers Property Casualty Company of America, Standard Fire Insurance Company (The), Travelers Personal Insurance Company, Travelers Casualty and Surety Company of America
4	Cna Insurance Group	$5.7M	7.20%	10%	Continental Casualty Company, Continental Insurance Company, (The), American Casualty Company of Reading, Pennsylvania, National Fire Insurance Company of Hartford
5	United Fire & Casualty Group	$5.1M	6.45%	18%	UNITED FIRE \u0026 CASUALTY COMPANY, United Fire Lloyds, Financial Pacific Insurance Company, Addison Insurance Company
6	Liberty Mutual Group	$5.0M	6.21%	11%	Safeco Insurance Company of America, Liberty Insurance Underwriters, Inc., Liberty Mutual Fire Insurance Company, Liberty County Mutual Insurance Company
7	Swiss Re Group	$3.0M	3.75%	—	Swiss Re Corporate Solutions Elite Insurance Corporation, Swiss Re Corporate Solutions America Insurance Corporation, Swiss Re Corporate Solutions Capacity Insurance Corporation, Swiss Re Corporate Solutuions Premier Insurance Corporation
8	Old Republic Group	$2.6M	3.24%	15%	Old Republic Insurance Company, Great West Casualty Company, BITCO General Insurance Corporation, Pennsylvania Manufacturers' Association Insurance Company
9	Emc Insurance Co. Group	$2.6M	3.22%	1%	EMPLOYERS MUTUAL CASUALTY COMPANY Employers Mutual Casualty Company), EMCASCO Insurance Company, EMC PROPERTY \u0026 CASUALTY COMPANY, Union Insurance Company of Providence
10	Chubb Ltd Group	$2.4M	3.00%	1%	Federal Insurance Company, Ace American Insurance Company, Ace Property and Casualty Insurance Company, Chubb Lloyd's Insurance Company of Texas

Turned down?

Last resort for surety bonds in Iowa

Last resort	Lines	Where	How to get in
Surplus lines and Lloyd's open market	all	all states, under each state's diligent-search rules	Through surplus lines wholesalers; commercial property and liability have no guaranteed plan, so this is their last step	Source

Method and source

Source: the Iowa insurance regulator company list, read 2026-10-18 and the surplus lines list. Admitted = Iowa Data Hub dataset 667 'Insurance Companies Licensed in Iowa' (Iowa Insurance Division, refreshed weekly, CC BY 4.0). Mixes P&C, Life, Health, State/County Mutual, Fraternal, MEWA and Benevolent entities; 'type' carries the company_type column so the merge can filter (counts: {"State Mutual": 32, "Property Casualty": 1010, "County Mutual": 22, "Health": 96, "Life": 390, "Fraternal": 28, "Benevolent": 2, "MEWA": 6}). No lines-of-authority column and no license-date column, so lines=[] and since=''. The source also has business_license_type (e.g. 'Non Iowa Stock Fire And Casualty Company', 'Non Iowa Mortgage Guaranty Insurer', 'Non Iowa HMO') and ownership_type, not carried here. Rows without an NAIC number are benevolent societies, MEWAs and captive reinsurers. Surplus lines = dataset 559 'American Surplus Lines Companies' (US-domiciled insurers not licensed in Iowa that qualified to write surplus lines); all rows have NAIC codes; alien insurers are not in this list (Iowa follows the NAIC Quarterly Listing of Alien Insurers). The surplus list has no domicile or eligibility-date column: 'domicile' here is the mailing-address state (may differ from statutory domicile) and eligible=''. Downloads are ZIPs from /api/dataset-download?path=datasets/<id>/rows.csv; data.iowa.gov robots.txt allows '*' but blocks AI crawler UAs, so a browser UA is used. Attribute: Iowa Insurance Division via data.iowa.gov (CC BY 4.0). "Premium" is direct premium written in the state for the year shown; "share" is that company's part of the state total for the line. A company can be licensed for a line and write none of it, and a surplus lines insurer can write a line without a state license for it.

Open to use. Cite "Alishahi Insurance insurance company directory" and link here. CSV · JSON.

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