Prospecting Small and Midsize Employers With Public Data

Most brokers grow through referrals, and that won't change. But referrals are hard to scale, and they don't help much when you want to break into a new industry or region. Free public data can fill the gap: it tells you where the employers are, which ones already have plans, what the local individual market looks like, and what's normal for employers like them.

Here's a practical approach to prospecting with public sources.

Step 1: Pick a niche you can explain

Generalists compete on price and relationships. Specialists compete on knowledge. A niche can be an industry (restaurants, dental practices, construction, nonprofits), a workforce type (hourly, seasonal, multi-state remote), or a problem (first-time offering, unaffordable renewals, ALE compliance).

Pick one where you can say something specific in the first five minutes of a call. ICHRA, for example, tends to resonate with employers that have hourly or seasonal staff, employees across several states, or no coverage today.

Step 2: Size the market with Census data

The Census Bureau's County Business Patterns program publishes annual counts of business establishments by county, industry (NAICS code), and employment size class. You can answer questions like:

• How many restaurants in my metro area have 20 to 49 employees?
• How many construction firms in these five counties have 50 to 99 employees, right around the ALE threshold?
• Which nearby counties have the most establishments in my niche?

The data is aggregated, so it won't give you company names. What it does is tell you whether a niche is big enough to build a practice around before you invest in it.

Step 3: Find employers that already sponsor plans with Form 5500 data

Many employee benefit plans file an annual Form 5500 with the Department of Labor. Health and welfare plans with 100 or more participants generally must file, and the Department publishes the filing data. For prospecting, that means you can find:

• Employers with larger health plans in your area and industry
• Plan year dates, which tell you when renewal decisions are made
• Insurance contract details on Schedule A, including the carrier and, in many cases, commissions and fees paid to brokers

Use this information professionally. It's public for transparency purposes, and the best use is understanding the market and timing your outreach, not leading with what the incumbent earns.

Smaller insured plans with fewer than 100 participants generally don't have to file, so Form 5500 data skews toward midsize and larger employers.

Step 4: Understand the individual market where employees live

If you're going to discuss ICHRA, you need to know whether the individual market in your prospects' counties is healthy. CMS publishes Marketplace public use files with enrollment by state and county, metal level, and consumer characteristics, along with plan and rate data for HealthCare.gov states.

CMS's 2026 Open Enrollment Report adds useful context:

• 23.1 million people selected or were automatically re-enrolled in Marketplace coverage for 2026, about 1.2 million (5%) fewer than in 2025.
• The share choosing silver plans fell from 56% to 43%, with more choosing bronze and gold.
• 43% of HealthCare.gov consumers enrolled in HSA-eligible plans, after the One Big Beautiful Bill Act made all bronze and catastrophic plans HSA-eligible beginning in 2026.
• 76% of active plan selections on HealthCare.gov were assisted by an agent or broker.

That last number is worth noting: individual market enrollment is already a broker-assisted business, which matters if you plan to support ICHRA employees at enrollment.

Step 5: Bring benchmarks to the first meeting

KFF's 2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey gives you national context for conversations with small employers:

• 59% of firms with 10 to 199 workers offer health benefits, compared with 97% of larger firms.
• The average single deductible at small firms is $2,631.
• 37% of covered workers at small firms are in level-funded plans.
• Among small firms that don't offer health benefits, 2% said they were very likely and 16% somewhat likely to offer an ICHRA in the next two years.

Prospects respond better to "here's what employers your size are doing" than to a product pitch.

Step 6: Build a simple outreach plan

1. Build a target list from your niche, using Form 5500 data for larger plans and local sources (chambers of commerce, trade associations, licensing boards) for smaller employers.
2. Time outreach to the renewal cycle. Reach out four to six months before plan year dates, when employers are deciding whether to shop.
3. Lead with a useful insight, such as a short note on 2026 affordability rules or what's changed in the local individual market.
4. Offer a comparison, not a quote. Employers are more open to "let me show you three options side by side" than to "let me replace your plan."
5. Track results by niche and message, and drop what doesn't work.

Bring the analysis with you

The more specific your first meeting, the more likely you'll get a second one. If you can show a prospect what an ICHRA would cost compared with their current group plan, using their own census and local premiums, you've moved from a cold call to a consultation. Tools like Choice Arrangement Deck can help by turning a census into an affordability analysis and side-by-side proposal, but the prospecting work comes first: knowing who to call and what matters to them.

The takeaway

Public data won't replace relationships, but it makes every conversation better informed. Pick a niche, size it, find the employers, understand their local markets, and show up with benchmarks. That's a repeatable process, and it's free.