Best insurance companies to work for in Australia and New Zealand 2026

Australia and New Zealand’s insurance employers are navigating a workforce that has grown more precise about what it wants and more willing to act when it doesn’t get it. Across the brokerages, general insurers and underwriting agencies that make up this sector, the competition for skilled professionals in claims management, underwriting and risk advisory is intensifying year on year. The findings from IB’s 2026 Top Insurance Employers survey, drawn from employees at firms that met a 75% or higher satisfaction threshold, reveal a sector where the fundamentals are strong but the pressure points are sharpening. 

The clearest signal in the 2026 data is the rebound of flexible work options to second place in the benefits rankings, with its highest score across three survey years at 4.64. That movement is striking in context: hybrid work simultaneously reached a three-year high, with 74.10% of respondents working in a hybrid arrangement. A sector with near-record hybrid adoption should, in theory, be satisfying its employees’ flexibility needs. The data says otherwise. 

The explanation lies in what hybrid delivers. In 2026, 16.79% of employees say they prefer a model where working arrangements are their own choice, yet only 6.47% actually have that arrangement. That 10.32 percentage point shortfall is the greatest unmet demand in the dataset. Employers have built a hybrid infrastructure, but much of it operates on employer terms rather than employee preference. The distinction matters, and employees are drawing it clearly. 

 

The practical consequence is showing up in job mobility data. In 2026, 37.50% of insurance employees say they would move for a role offering better working options, the highest figure across the three years of this survey and a sharp reversal from 2025, when the equivalent figure dropped to 30.85%. 

That dip, which coincided with broader labour market caution post-pandemic, turned out to be temporary. The rebound tracks almost exactly with the renewed premium employees are placing on genuine flexibility. 

For a specialised sector where underwriting, claims, and actuarial capability take years to develop, a switching intent figure approaching four in 10 represents material retention exposure. The employees signalling willingness to move are not, for the most part, expressing generalised dissatisfaction as the survey question is framed specifically around working options. These are people who would otherwise stay, but whose current arrangement does not fully match their preference. 

 

One data point in this year’s benefits rankings warrants particular attention. Medical coverage entered the top 10 for the first time, ranking ninth with a score of 3.881. For an industry built around the financial value of health protection, the fact that employees at insurance companies now rank private medical coverage as a top 10 workplace benefit creates both an alignment opportunity and a visible inconsistency for any employer who does not offer it competitively. 

Insurers who sell health products to clients while their own people flag it as an unmet priority face a reputational tension that is increasingly difficult to overlook. 

Elsewhere in the benefits data, corporate wellness programs recorded the strongest sustained growth of any benefit across all three survey years, from 3.721 in 2024 to 3.894 in 2026. The direction of travel is consistent. Employees are placing more value on holistic wellbeing support, and employers who invested early in wellness infrastructure are seeing that validated. 

Underlying all of this is a finding that deserves direct attention from HR leaders. In 2026, 46.10% of employees at the sector’s top employers – nearly half – said their employer had not consulted them on benefits or working conditions in the past 12 months. That figure is a three-year high, and it has been rising consistently. The “yes” rate peaked at 59.01% in 2025 and has since fallen by more than five percentage points in a single year. 

The data present a coherent causal chain. Employers cannot close gaps they have not measured. The arrangement shortfalls, the flexibility premium, and the rise in switching intent do not persist because these employers are indifferent to their workforce. For a growing proportion, they persist because the conversation is not happening often enough. Pulse surveys and manager check-ins are mechanisms, but they need to operate continuously, not as annual events. 

The employers recognised in this report have earned that recognition from the people who work for them. The data also shows exactly what comes next. 

 

The conditions shaping Australia and New Zealand’s insurance talent market in 2026 are not accidental. They are the product of several years of compounding pressure – pandemic disruption, rising general insurance premiums, digital transformation, regulatory change, and economic uncertainty – that has reshaped how insurance professionals evaluate employers and make career decisions. 

The labour market context matters here. Australia’s financial and insurance services sector is projected to grow over the five years to November 2026 at a rate above the national average. Employment in finance and insurance in Australia reached 543,500 in February 2026, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, a sector large enough that talent competition is real and sustained. 

Yet wage growth has not kept pace with that expansion. Financial and insurance services recorded the weakest wage growth of any sector tracked by KPMG in Australia through the year to September 2025, at 2.5%, below both the national average and the sectors it competes with for skilled professionals. 

New Zealand’s labour market has spent two unsettled years marked by rising unemployment, declining job advertisements, and cautious business confidence. It is now moving back into growth, and that recovery is rebuilding hiring confidence – but it has also conditioned candidates to move carefully rather than opportunistically. 

Ensure Recruitment’s Murphy has seen this caution in real-time candidate behaviour. 

“Insurance professionals have navigated significant disruption. As a result, they’re making more considered career decisions and are no longer changing employers solely for a salary increase.”  

More than 75% of Ensure’s placements across Australia and New Zealand in the past 12 months came from existing relationships, referrals or direct approaches, a signal of how difficult traditional advertising has become for reaching experienced talent. 

 

The wider workforce data confirms what IB’s survey finds at the sector level. Randstad’s Workmonitor 2026, drawn from over 27,000 workers across 35 markets, found that while pay remains the top attractor for 81% of talent, work-life balance has become the greatest lever for retention: nearly half of workers cite it as the main reason they stay, versus just 23% for pay. 

For the second year running, work-life balance ranked higher than pay when evaluating job offers – a shift that began with Randstad’s 2025 Workmonitor and was confirmed again in 2026. 

The nuance the data adds is that flexibility and autonomy are not the same thing. Randstad’s Workmonitor Pulse survey from May 2025 found that 59% of workers globally would prefer autonomy over their working hours to a higher salary, and more than half would choose control over their hours ahead of control over their working location.  

The distinction is one Tyler Wren’s Bloxham sees playing out directly in candidate expectations across the trans-Tasman market. 

“What employees are actually asking for now is genuine personalisation. They want employers to move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach and offer adaptable options that reflect their specific life stage.” 

For insurance employers who have built hybrid models and assumed the flexibility question is resolved, that is a direct challenge to that assumption. 

 

The engagement picture adds a further layer of complexity. Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found that global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since 2020, costing an estimated US$10 trillion in lost productivity.  

In Australia and New Zealand specifically, engagement sits at 21%, only marginally above the global figure, while 60% say it is a good time to find a job locally – though that is a sharp 12-point fall year on year. 

The driver behind the global decline is not frontline disengagement but manager strain. According to Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report, manager engagement fell from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025 – a nine-point drop that matters for insurance employers, where middle management carries the operational load of hybrid oversight, development conversations, and team cohesion. 

Murphy states the consequence plainly: “The strongest insurance cultures share several common traits. Employees understand the organisation’s purpose, leaders are visible and accessible, development is actively encouraged, and there is clear alignment between what leadership says and what employees experience day to day.” 

The same principle applies to structural changes in how and where people work. The employers absorbing that risk most effectively are those investing in manager capability as directly as they invest in policy.  

What the market data and the recruiters’ evidence collectively establish is the context in which IB’s own survey findings land. The sector is growing, talent is mobile, autonomy is valued above flexibility, and the manager layer is under measurable strain. The employers recognised in this report are operating inside all of that and being rated highly by their own people despite it.

 

The sector talks a lot about culture as a retention tool, but your data suggests employees rarely cite it as a reason to move. What is actually going on? 

It is one of the more counterintuitive findings we see. Only 8.4% of professionals cite culture as their primary reason for changing jobs. But that does not mean culture is unimportant – it means that when culture is working, people do not name it. They just stay. 

Where culture becomes visible is in what an organisation consistently rewards, tolerates, and prioritises at a practical level. You measure true culture by whether internal mobility is actually happening – whether junior brokers are transitioning into mid-market roles or whether claims assessors are being upskilled into technical specialists. When that movement is occurring, you have a strong culture. When it is, no amount of value statements will compensate. The truest measure of a strong culture is one that an annual engagement survey will never fully capture. 

Beyond the headline benefits, which practical perks are most under-delivered relative to how much employees actually value them? 

Car parking is a genuinely powerful example that does not get nearly enough attention. It scores very highly in importance among professionals but is only offered to 43.3% of them. It is the kind of practical, day-to-day benefit that removes a real cost and a real friction from someone’s working life, and yet it is absent from the majority of employment packages. 

Superannuation and KiwiSaver contributions above the statutory minimum tell a similar story. They are highly valued and directly tied to long-term financial security, yet only around 35% of employees receive above-standard contributions. The employers who understand this are not necessarily spending more overall – they are spending more intelligently on the benefits that actually register in people’s daily lives rather than on offerings that look good in a brochure. 

 

The pipeline problem in insurance is well documented. Where does the real bottleneck sit, and what are employers getting wrong in how they approach it? 

The honest answer is that much of the challenge is a visibility problem rather than a supply problem. Despite insurance being one of the largest sectors within financial services, it remains largely invisible to students and graduates making early career decisions. Most professionals I speak with entered the industry by chance or through a personal connection – not through a deliberate career choice. That is a structural problem the industry has not taken seriously enough for long enough. 

What is not working is continuing to recruit exclusively from traditional talent pools while expecting the pipeline to replenish itself. The industry needs to become genuinely comfortable hiring for potential and transferrable skills and then investing in development from that point. The future workforce will not be built solely by competing for experienced talent. It will be built by creating talent – and that requires a fundamentally different hiring philosophy than most insurers currently operate with. 

How should employers be measuring whether their culture is genuinely healthy – and what signals matter more than engagement scores? 

Engagement scores have their place, but they are a lag indicator. By the time a score moves materially, the cultural shift that caused it has usually been underway for months. The metrics that give earlier and more honest signals are voluntary turnover among high performers, internal promotion rates, employee referral rates and the tenure of key talent. Exit interview data is underused – most organisations collect it and do not act on it systematically. 

One of the strongest leading indicators I rely on is whether employees would recommend the organisation to people they respect professionally. That is a meaningful test because it asks someone to put their own reputation behind their employer’s. When talented people are consistently willing to do that, it is a powerful signal of cultural health. When they are not, no engagement score will tell you what you need to know as clearly or as early. 

 

For the third consecutive year, Tower Insurance has earned a place on IB’s Top Insurance Employers list, a record that reflects a consistent, daily commitment to how its people experience the business. 

With an 85.41% overall employee satisfaction rating from a workforce of more than 500, Tower’s result is built on some of the strongest scores in this year’s cohort on work-life balance (4.48), flexible work options (4.69), culture (4.48), and diversity and inclusion (4.65).

 

Carly Orr joined Tower as chief people officer in February 2026 and found a culture already defined by something she had not seen elsewhere: genuine leadership accessibility. Tower’s CEO Paul Johnston does not have an office. He sits at an open table near the kitchen, available to anyone who stops by, and people do. 

“He’s really well connected to the business, and oftentimes in our executive meetings he talks about something that some member of staff just happened to stop by and tell him,” Orr says. 

No member of Tower’s executive team sits behind a closed door. The entire leadership group works in an open plan: one day a week, they sit together as a team, and on every other day, they are out in the business. The effect, Orr says, is that listening is not a structured event at Tower. It is a daily condition. 

That philosophy carries through to how Tower measures engagement. The company runs surveys twice a year, but Orr is clear about where the real intelligence sits. 

“I always say it’s just a moment in time. What I comb through is the verbatim; it’s what people take the time to actually type to us.” 

In FY25, Tower recorded its highest-ever employee engagement score of 8.2, with a response rate well into the 90th percentile. Its peer relationships score of 9.0 places the company in the top 5% of global finance companies on that measure, a result Orr connects directly to what happens in the office day to day rather than to any specific program. 

 

Tower’s flexibility philosophy is deliberate. The standing principle of “if it works for your team and your role, it works for them,” puts the test of reasonableness at the team level rather than in policy documents. But Orr has added a second layer, making the office somewhere people actively want to be. 

“I want to make sure we create experiences in the office that make people want to come in. I call them commute-worthy experiences,” she says. 

In practice that means: 

• cultural celebrations held in-office for Lunar New Year, Matariki, and Pacifica Day, including, most recently, dining on a whole roasted pig 
  
   

• people awards tied to company values, with the overall winner earning a coffee with the CEO to share ideas on improving the business 
  
   

• recognition built into the physical rhythm of the workplace, not confined to annual events 

The most recent overall people award winner was Kayla Dalrymple, Tower’s external communications manager, who is shortly to go on parental leave, itself made possible by the top employer’s 26 weeks of fully paid parental leave entitlement. 

 

Tower’s strongest category scores from employees are in flexibility, work-life balance, and diversity and inclusion. But the benefit Orr singles out as the most meaningful, and the least visible, is income protection insurance, offered to all staff at full coverage. 

“In New Zealand, I think, certainly in larger organisations, it’s less than 10% that offer income protection insurance. It’s always one of those things that I don’t think people truly value until they absolutely need it.” 

For Orr, that benefit carries particular weight inside an insurance business. Tower’s people understand what financial risk looks like at a product level every day. Extending that protection to their own income is, she says, an expression of the same values Tower sells to customers. 

 

The initiative Tower has concentrated most energy on in the past 12 months is AI capability, approached as a people investment rather than a technology rollout. 

The program operates on two tracks: 

• a new AI contact centre platform that handles routine, repetitive tasks and frees customer-facing staff for higher-value conversations 
  
   

• 100 Copilot champions, trained specialists distributed across the business, serving as in-team resources as Microsoft Copilot rolls out to all staff 

“People have to get comfortable with it and feel confident with AI, and we take that responsibility very seriously. If we don’t upskill people and get them on board with this, then we’re probably doing them a disservice.” 

The framing matters. Tower is not presenting AI as an efficiency gain extracted from headcount. It is presenting it as a skill that belongs to the individual, one they carry with them regardless of where their career takes them next.

 

Tower’s survey scores tell a consistent story across the categories that most directly reflect daily experience: 

• work-life balance: 4.48 
  
   

• flexible work options: 4.69
  
   

• workplace culture: 4.48 
  
   

• diversity and inclusion: 4.65 
  
   

• feel valued and appreciated: 4.55 
  
   

• leadership communication: 4.50 
  
   

• inspired to meet goals: 4.65 

The pattern across those numbers is not one of exceptional performance on a single dimension. It is broad, even strong, representing a workforce that rates the fundamentals highly and does not identify a significant weak point. In a sector where the consultation gap and the flexibility shortfall are measurable across the industry, that kind of consistency is itself the story. 

Flexibility is now an expectation rather than a differentiator across the sector? How do you make sure Tower’s approach still means something to your people?

It’s a really hot topic and has been ever since COVID-19, when every organisation had to work out what it meant for people to work from home. What I find interesting is that a lot of people actually want to work from the office. It’s not just about working from home. 

Our general rule of thumb is if it works for your team and your role, then it works for us. But I also think about what we need from the office – to build the team, to build the culture, to support the business and to create the kind of environment where people do their best work together. So, the question I ask is how do we create experiences in the office that people genuinely don’t want to miss? Not because they have to be there, but because something is going on that matters to them. 

Finding the right balance between what the organisation needs and what individuals need will remain one of the industry’s key challenges. I don’t think there’s a formula. It requires ongoing conversation and a lot of trust on both sides. 

Tower has invested heavily in AI upskilling over the past 12 months. What is the philosophy behind that investment? 

We’re approaching it in two ways: the platform side, which is about making day-to-day work better for our people, and the individual capability side, which is really where my focus sits as CPO. 

We’ve just launched Copilot to all staff, and we have 100 Copilot champions across the business who’ve received specialised training and are a resource within their teams. But the thing I feel most strongly about is this: we are making sure our people are learning this skill now, whether they stay at Tower or go and work somewhere else. 

People have to get comfortable with AI and feel confident with it, and we take that responsibility very seriously. The way I see it, if we don’t upskill our people and get them on board with this, we’re probably doing them a disservice. That’s how we think about it, not as a technology project, but as something we owe our people. 

 

Arch Insurance Australia returns to IB’s Top Insurance Employers list with a result that rewards close reading. With an 84.40% overall employee satisfaction rating, Arch’s recognition is not built on one or two standout categories. It is built on an unusual pattern: the company’s highest scores are in the places most employers find hardest to crack. 

 

Healthcare benefits produced Arch’s single highest category score in the 2026 survey, at 4.833 out of five. That figure is not only Arch’s strongest result, but it is also the highest healthcare benefits score recorded by any employer in this year’s cohort. 

In the context of the broader 2026 data, where healthcare benefits rank among the weakest categories across the sector and medical coverage entered the employee benefits top 10 for the first time, Arch’s result signals a deliberate investment choice that its workforce has noticed and valued. 

The retirement plan score of 4.00 also sits well above the cohort median for that category, the area where even the sector’s best employers tend to record their most modest results. Read together, the two scores describe a company that has taken financial security benefits seriously at a time when most of its peers have not. 

Regional manager Dominic Brannigan, based in Sydney, attributes Arch’s benefit profile to a direct line between what employees say and what the company does. “What we hear directly shapes how we work, whether that means evolving our benefits, expanding our learning and development offering, or investing in the wellbeing initiatives our people tell us matter most.” 

 

Arch’s approach to employee listening runs through two parallel channels. The first is structural. Managers are actively encouraged to hold one-on-one conversations throughout the year rather than relying on periodic reviews. The second is peer-driven. A reward platform gives employees an ongoing mechanism to recognise each other’s contributions outside the formal management hierarchy. 

The combination matters because it addresses the central weakness the 2026 data identifies across the sector, which is that employee consultation is increasingly episodic. In 2026, 46.10% of insurance employees at top employers said they had not been asked about their benefits or conditions in the preceding 12 months. Arch’s model is designed specifically to close that gap, embedding the conversation into the everyday rhythm of the business rather than reserving it for scheduled review points.

 

Arch’s flexible work options score of 4.23 sits modestly relative to some of this year’s highest performers, but the framing Brannigan places around it is significant. The company operates a hybrid model but explicitly rejects a policy-compliance approach to how it functions in practice. 

“We treat flexibility as a conversation, not a checkbox, recognising that no two employees have the same needs and that meaningful flexibility requires a genuine willingness to listen and adapt.” 

That framing aligns directly with what the 2026 data surfaces as the central employee demand. Not more hybrid arrangements but real agency within them. Arch’s work-life balance score of 4.37 and its safe work environment score of 4.51 suggest employees experience the flexibility philosophy in practice, not just in policy language. 

 

The investment Brannigan identifies as most meaningful in the past 12 months is a sustained commitment to employee wellbeing, notable both for how it is structured and for its scope. Arch gives employees the freedom to invest in their health in ways that suit their individual circumstances and extends that support to employees’ immediate families. 

“Our most meaningful investment has been in building a culture where people feel genuinely supported and recognised, not just at key moments in the calendar, but consistently throughout the year,” Brannigan says. “The difference is visible in the engagement, loyalty, and sense of community that defines our team today.” 

The health and wellness programs score of 4.31 reflects that investment, as does the family-friendly benefits score of 4.17. Both sit above the cohort median for those categories. 

 

Arch’s scores tell a story of broad, considered investment rather than peaks in the obvious places: 

 

• healthcare benefits: 4.83 
  
   

• safe work environment: 4.51 
  
   

• retirement plan: 4.00 
  
   

• health and wellness programs: 4.31 
  
   

• work-life balance: 4.37 
  
   

• diversity and inclusion: 4.33 
  
   

• feel valued and appreciated: 4.28 
  
   

• professional development: 4.03 
  
   

• inspired to meet goals: 4.24 
  
   

The standout pattern is financial security. Healthcare benefits and retirement plan are the two categories where the sector most consistently underperforms, and they are precisely where Arch records its strongest results. For a repeat winner on this list, that consistency across the hardest categories is the clearest indicator of where the company has chosen to place its investment and what its people have chosen to recognise in return.

The employers recognised in this report were voted onto this list by their own people. That is the standard, and it is a meaningful one. An employee satisfaction threshold of 75% or higher, applied anonymously across 21 categories, is not a participation award. It is a workforce verdict. 

What makes the 2026 data genuinely compelling is not what it confirms about these employers. It is what it reveals about the conditions even the best are struggling to get right. Nearly half of employees at these leading companies were not consulted on their benefits or working conditions in the past year. More than a third would move for better working options, the highest proportion in three years.  

The arrangement employees want most, the ability to decide for themselves how and where they work, is the one most dramatically under-supplied. If this is what the best looks like, the industry as a whole has a significant reckoning ahead. 

The root cause is not indifference. It is infrequency. 

The flexibility gap, the switching intent rebound, and the under-delivery of autonomous working arrangements do not persist because these employers do not care about their people.  

The consultation data makes the actual explanation visible. In 2026, 46.10% of employees at the sector’s top employers were not asked about their preferences in the preceding 12 months, a three-year high, rising consistently, at precisely the moment switching intent moved in the opposite direction. 

Employers cannot close gaps they have not measured. For many, the gaps persist because the conversation is happening once a year at best, and in some cases not at all. Employee listening treated as an annual event is not employee listening. It is an annual survey. 

The employers who will retain their standing in 2027 are those who act on four specific signals that the data has surfaced. Hybrid is infrastructure, not flexibility, and the workforce has made that distinction clearly, and the employers who respond by expanding genuine autonomy over working arrangements will directly address the greatest single unmet demand in the dataset. 

Medical coverage is no longer a secondary benefit in this sector. Its debut in the top 10 is a credibility signal as much as a retention one, and insurers who lead on it are uniquely positioned to align what they offer internally with what they sell externally. 

Corporate wellness has recorded the strongest sustained growth of any benefit across three consecutive years, and the employers who invested early are already seeing that validated in their scores. And consultation must become continuous, not a periodic exercise triggered by a difficult exit interview or a dip in engagement scores, but an ongoing operational practice embedded at manager level. 

The real story of the 2026 Top Insurance Employers report is not that the best are good enough. The data their own employees have produced this year is both a recognition and a roadmap. The employers who treat it as both are the ones most likely to be standing here again in 2027. For a broader view of the professionals shaping the ANZ insurance industry this year, see the Insurance Business Hot List 2026 and the Elite Women 2026 reports.