Insurance Stocks Screener Excel: Track Life and P&C Insurers Winning From Higher Rates (July 2026)

Insurance stocks screener Excel is exactly what you need if you are trying to figure out which life, property-and-casualty (P&C), and broker names actually benefit from a Federal Reserve that refuses to cut. Heading into the second half of 2026, the macro setup for insurers is unusually clean: new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh has held the funds rate at 3.50 to 3.75 percent, the June dot plot flagged a possible hike, and markets are pricing close to zero cuts for the year. Higher-for-longer rates are a direct tailwind for the money insurers earn on their giant bond portfolios. This guide walks through how to screen the group in Excel, which metrics matter for insurers specifically, and how to model the net-investment-income effect yourself. It comes with a free, ready-to-use screener template built on live MarketXLS formulas.

This is educational analysis, not investment advice. The tickers below are used to show how the formulas and the screen work, not as recommendations to buy or sell anything.

Insurance Stocks Screener Excel: The Metrics That Actually Matter

Screening insurers is not like screening industrials or software. An insurer is essentially a leveraged bond portfolio with an underwriting business bolted on top, so the standard P/E-and-growth checklist misses the point. Here is the quick-reference table the template is built around, and why each metric earns its place.

The pairing that does most of the work is P/B versus ROE. A life insurer trading at 1.0x book while earning a 12 percent ROE is priced very differently from a broker at 8x book earning a 30 percent ROE. Neither is automatically cheap or expensive until you line up the two numbers side by side, which is exactly what the screener does.

Why Higher-for-Longer Rates Favor Insurers Right Now

The reason insurance is a timely screen in July 2026 comes down to one mechanism: net investment income (NII).

Insurers collect premiums today and pay claims later. In the meantime they invest the money, overwhelmingly in bonds. This pool of investable premium is called the float. When a bond in the portfolio matures, the proceeds get reinvested at whatever the prevailing "new-money" yield is. During the 2010s, that new-money yield was often below the portfolio's existing book yield, so every maturing bond dragged income down. Today the opposite is true. With the Warsh Fed holding at 3.50 to 3.75 percent and signaling it is in no rush to cut, new-money yields sit above the book yield most insurers are still carrying from older, lower-coupon bonds.

That gap is the tailwind. Each year, a slice of the portfolio rolls over and gets reinvested at the higher rate, lifting NII. Life insurers have the most leverage here because their portfolios are enormous relative to earnings and their liabilities are long-dated, so the reinvestment runway lasts for years. P&C insurers benefit too, and they get a second lever: in a firm pricing environment they can raise premiums, which grows the float itself.

The macro backdrop makes this concrete. The June FOMC meeting under Warsh lifted the 2026 PCE inflation projection to 3.6 percent, and nine officials penciled in at least one hike by year-end. Whether or not that hike lands, the base case is clearly "rates stay high," and that is the environment in which insurer investment income compounds.

The Approach: A Value + Quality + Income Screen

The template scores each insurer on four criteria, each worth one point:

1. Price-to-book at or below your threshold (default 2.0x). Catches the balance-sheet value.
2. ROE at or above your threshold (default 15 percent). Confirms the capital is being used well.
3. ROA at or above your threshold (default 3 percent). Confirms the whole balance sheet is productive.
4. Dividend yield at or above your threshold (default 1.5 percent). Confirms the income character.

A name scoring 3 or 4 is flagged as meeting most criteria. This is a filtering hypothesis, not a rating, and it deliberately keeps the thresholds in yellow input cells so you can tighten or loosen them. Set the P/B ceiling to 1.2x and the ROE floor to 18 percent and you get a very different, much shorter list.

One important caveat baked into the template: insurance brokers such as Marsh & McLennan, Aon, Arthur J. Gallagher, and Brown & Brown are asset-light fee businesses, not balance-sheet insurers. They structurally carry very high P/B and ROE because they hold little capital. Judge brokers against each other, not against a life insurer. The Comparison Matrix sheet groups the names into P&C, Life, and Broker for exactly this reason.

MarketXLS Implementation: Building the Screen in Excel

The whole screen is just MarketXLS functions pointed at a column of tickers. Put a ticker in column A and pull every metric across the row. Here is the core of the Main Dashboard, using Chubb as the example row:

Ticker:            CB
Price:             =QM_Last("CB")
Price-to-book:     =PriceToBook("CB")
P/E:               =PERatio("CB")
Forward P/E:       =ForwardPE("CB")
Dividend yield:    =DividendYield("CB")
ROE:               =ReturnOnEquity("CB")
ROA:               =ReturnOnAssets("CB")
Beta:              =Beta("CB")
Book value/share:  =BookValuePerShare("CB")

The composite score is a simple sum of IF tests against the yellow input cells:

=IF(PriceToBook<=MaxPB,1,0) + IF(ROE>=MinROE,1,0)
  + IF(ROA>=MinROA,1,0) + IF(DivYield>=MinYield,1,0)

Because every metric is a live formula referencing the ticker in column A, you can swap in any insurer you like and the whole row updates on recalculation. Want to add Reinsurance Group of America or Everest Group? Type the ticker and drag the formulas down. The MarketXLS add-in handles the data. You can browse the full function library on the MarketXLS functions page.

Modeling the Rate Tailwind: The Scenario Sheet

The most useful sheet for this particular macro moment is the Rate Scenario tab, which turns the NII story into numbers. You provide six inputs about a representative insurer:

• Invested assets (float) in billions
• Current portfolio book yield
• Share of the portfolio that turns over each year
• Baseline annual EPS
• Diluted share count
• Tax rate on investment income

The sheet then walks across five Fed paths, from two cuts to a Warsh-style 50 basis point hike, and computes the incremental after-tax NII and the resulting EPS uplift for each. The logic is transparent:

Incremental NII = InvestedAssets x Turnover% x (NewMoneyYield - BookYield) x (1 - Tax%)
EPS uplift      = Incremental NII / Diluted shares

Plug in a 100 billion dollar portfolio yielding 4.2 percent with 12 percent annual turnover, and moving the new-money yield from a rate-cut scenario up to a hike scenario shifts EPS by a meaningful amount, all from investment income alone, before any underwriting improvement. That is the quantified version of "higher-for-longer helps insurers." The numbers are illustrative and depend on duration, credit spreads, hedging, and the crediting rates life insurers pay policyholders, but the direction and the mechanism are real.

This kind of what-if analysis is where a spreadsheet beats a static stock-screener website. You control the assumptions, and you can stress-test them. If you want a deeper dive into building income models, the MarketXLS features overview shows how the live-data functions plug into custom templates.

What Is In the Template

The workbook has six sheets, and every sheet includes a "MarketXLS Functions Used" box so you know exactly which formulas power it.

• How To Use. A plain-language tutorial of each sheet and the current rate backdrop the model is built for.
• Main Dashboard. The 16-name screener plus the KIE insurance ETF benchmark, with price, P/B, P/E, forward P/E, dividend yield, ROE, ROA, beta, book value per share, and the composite score. Yellow cells set your thresholds.
• Rate Scenario. The NII-uplift model across five Fed paths described above.
• Income Strategy. An educational covered-call and dividend-income calculator for a single insurance holding, showing yield-on-cost, static return, annualized premium yield, and return-if-called.
• Allocation. A position-sizing model that splits an insurance sleeve equally across six income-oriented names and estimates blended dividend income.
• Comparison Matrix. A color-coded scorecard grouping the names into P&C, Life, and Broker with valuation, quality, and income takeaways.

The 16 insurers span the whole industry structure: P&C names like Chubb, Travelers, Progressive, Allstate, W. R. Berkley, and Arch Capital; life insurers including MetLife, Prudential, Aflac, Principal, Lincoln National, and Globe Life; and brokers Marsh & McLennan, Aon, Arthur J. Gallagher, and Brown & Brown.

Download the templates:

• - Pre-filled with an illustrative July 2026 snapshot so you can see the layout without the add-in.
• - Live-updating formulas that refresh with the MarketXLS add-in.

Reading the Groups: P&C vs Life vs Broker

Once the data is in front of you, the three groups tell different stories.

Property and casualty insurers combine underwriting profit with investment income. In a firm pricing cycle they can grow the float and earn more on it at the same time. They tend to trade at moderate premiums to book (roughly 1.7x to 2.3x for the diversified names) with mid-teens to low-twenties ROE. Progressive is the outlier, carrying a much higher P/B because of its exceptional ROE and growth, which is the P/B-versus-ROE relationship in action.

Life insurers are the purest play on the reinvestment-yield tailwind. Their portfolios are massive and long-dated, so a sustained high-rate environment compounds in their favor for years. This is also the group where you find the cheapest headline valuations, with several names trading near or below 1.0x book. The catch is that low P/B often reflects lower ROE, interest-rate-sensitive liabilities, and legacy blocks of business, so the screen deliberately checks ROE and ROA alongside the cheap P/B.

Brokers are a different animal entirely. They earn commissions and fees, hold almost no underwriting risk, and carry very little capital, which is why their P/B and ROE look astronomical next to balance-sheet insurers. They are quality-and-growth compounders with low yields, and they should be compared only to one another. The template flags this explicitly and does not color-code their P/B against the insurer scale.

The P/B-versus-ROE Line: The One Chart to Internalize

If you take one idea away from this screen, make it the relationship between price-to-book and return on equity. For a balance-sheet insurer, these two numbers are joined at the hip. An insurer that consistently earns a 20 percent ROE is creating value well above its cost of equity, and the market rightly pays up for it with a higher P/B. An insurer earning 8 percent ROE is barely covering its cost of capital, and a P/B near or below 1.0x is the market's honest verdict, not a bargain.

The practical test is to look at each name's P/B and ask whether the ROE justifies it. A rough rule of thumb some analysts use is that fair P/B is approximately ROE divided by cost of equity. If cost of equity is around 9 to 10 percent, a 20 percent ROE insurer can reasonably trade near 2x book, while a 10 percent ROE insurer should trade near 1x. When you sort the screener by P/B and put ROE right next to it, the mispriced names jump out: a high-ROE insurer at a modest P/B is more interesting than a low-ROE insurer at a rock-bottom P/B. The template puts these two columns side by side on both the Main Dashboard and the Comparison Matrix precisely so you can run this eyeball test in seconds.

Common Mistakes When Screening Insurers

A few errors show up again and again, and the template is designed to steer around them.

• Judging brokers on book value. Brokers hold minimal capital, so their P/B looks absurd next to a life insurer. Comparing the two is meaningless. Group first, then compare within the group.
• Chasing the lowest P/B. The cheapest book multiple usually belongs to the insurer with the weakest ROE or the most rate-sensitive liabilities. Cheap and good are not the same thing, which is why the screen checks profitability alongside valuation.
• Ignoring the reinvestment runway. Two insurers can both benefit from higher rates, but the one with a longer-duration portfolio and slower turnover captures the tailwind more gradually and durably. The Rate Scenario sheet lets you flex the turnover assumption to see this.
• Treating a single snapshot as the whole story. Insurance results are lumpy because of catastrophe losses, reserve adjustments, and one-off items. Screen on the live formulas so you are always looking at current data, and look at multi-year book-value-per-share growth rather than a single quarter.

Avoiding these four traps puts you ahead of most casual insurance screens, and none of it requires anything beyond the columns already in the template.

FAQ: Insurance Stocks Screener Excel

What is the best metric to screen insurance stocks? Price-to-book paired with return on equity is the standard combination for balance-sheet insurers (P&C and life). Book value approximates intrinsic value, and ROE tells you whether that book value is being compounded efficiently. A cheap P/B only matters if ROE is reasonable. For brokers, which are asset-light, fee growth and margins matter more than book value.

How do higher interest rates affect insurance stocks? Higher rates raise the yield insurers earn when they reinvest maturing bonds, lifting net investment income over time. Life insurers benefit most because their portfolios are large and long-dated. There can be short-term marks against bond holdings when rates rise, but the sustained income benefit is the dominant effect for a long-term holder. The Rate Scenario sheet in the template quantifies this.

Can I build an insurance stock screener in Excel for free? Yes. You need a column of tickers and the MarketXLS functions for price-to-book, ROE, ROA, dividend yield, and book value per share. The template in this post is free to download and already wired up with those live formulas. See MarketXLS pricing for add-in plan details.

Which insurance stocks pay the highest dividends? Among the large-cap names, life insurers such as Prudential and several P&C names tend to carry the highest yields, while brokers like Aon and Brown & Brown pay very low yields because they reinvest for growth. The screener's dividend-yield column lets you rank the group live so you are always looking at current numbers rather than a stale list.

How many insurance stocks should I hold? That is a personal decision that depends on your risk tolerance, tax situation, and overall diversification. The Allocation sheet illustrates equal-weighting an insurance sleeve across six names so you can see the mechanics, but it is an educational example, not a recommendation.

Is a low price-to-book insurance stock always a good buy? No. A sub-1.0x P/B can signal genuine value or it can reflect low ROE, interest-rate-sensitive liabilities, or troubled legacy business. That is why the screen checks profitability (ROE and ROA) and income alongside the cheap valuation rather than ranking on P/B alone.

The Bottom Line

Insurance is one of the few sectors where the current macro setup, a hawkish Warsh Fed keeping rates high with a possible hike on the table, is a direct and durable earnings tailwind rather than a headwind. The mechanism is net investment income, and it compounds quietly across the P&C and life groups as portfolios reinvest at higher new-money yields. Screening the group well means using the right metrics, price-to-book paired with ROE and ROA, and treating brokers as their own category. The free template turns all of that into a live, editable dashboard: swap in any ticker, set your own thresholds, and model the rate tailwind yourself.

Build it, break it, and make it yours. To see how MarketXLS pulls live insurance data straight into Excel, explore MarketXLS or book a demo.

Educational content only. This is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Do your own research and consult a licensed professional before investing.