Pacific Life ranks second in Insure.com’s Best Life Insurance Companies ranking, scoring highest for customer satisfaction and ease of service. It received 4.52 out of a possible 5 stars.
Nupur Gambhir is a content editor and licensed life, health, and disability insurance expert. She has extensive experience bringing brands to life and has built award-nominated campaigns for travel and tech. Her insurance expertise has been featured in Bloomberg News, Forbes Advisor, CNET, Fortune, Slate, Real Simple, Lifehacker, The Financial Gym, and the end-of-life planning service.
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Pacific Life is No. 2 in Insure.com’s Best Life Insurance Companies of 2024, with 4.52 out of 5 possible stars. It received high scores in all major categories — customers report being happy with the insurer’s ease of service and consider it trustworthy. Pacific Life also has below-average premiums, with customers paying almost 22% less than the industry average.
The company also rates highly with third-party agencies. Pacific Life has a JD Power customer satisfaction score of 799 out of 1,000 and an AM Best rating of A+, which is considered a superior score for financial stability. The company had the best National Association of Insurance Commissioners rating of the insurers we ranked. NAIC rates a company by the number of customer complaints it receives.
AM Best's Financial Strength Rating is an independent opinion of an insurer's financial strength and ability to meet its ongoing insurance policy and contract obligations.
Below is Insure.com’s review of the company and its full line of life insurance products. It’s based on third-party metrics and an in-depth survey of insurance customers. Find the full methodology here, including an explanation of our survey scores.
Pacific Life outperformed every other insurer in this category, with 86% of customers saying they were satisfied with the insurer’s service. In a separate study by J.D. Power, it scored above the industry average of 790.
Because term life is generally the most straightforward and affordable life insurance product, Insure.com used premiums collected by CompuLife to evaluate Pacific Life’s term life offerings.
Of the companies we ranked, Pacific Life has the cheapest premiums for 35-year-old non-smokers purchasing $500,000 in coverage for a 20-year term. It and Penn Mutual offer an annual rate of $280.
Ease of service is an important feature for customers. It means there are few roadblocks and hurdles when owning a policy with an insurer. Pacific Life received the highest score in this category. Penn Mutual and New York Life followed close behind.
A wide array of policy offerings is an attractive feature for customers when they shop for life insurance. Pacific Life was in the middle of the pack in this area – 76% of its customers say they’re satisfied with the insurer’s policy offerings. Allstate led this category.
Pacific Life ranked high for trustworthiness, coming in third, with 81% of Pacific Life customers saying they find the insurer trustworthy. Only State Farm and Penn Mutual received higher scores.
Customers who are happy with their carrier will likely renew their policy. Most of Pacific Life’s customers — 90% — plan to renew. Many of the carriers surveyed did well in this category, with customers of four, including State Farm and Lincoln Financial, all saying they would stick with the company
Pacific Life was formed in 1868 in Sacramento, California. It offers a wide range of life insurance, annuities, mutual funds, and workplace benefits. Forbes Magazine named it one of America’s Best Mid-Sized Employers of 2023.
Sources:
AM Best. “Guide to Best’s Financial Strength Ratings.” Accessed January 2024.
J.D. Power. “About Us.” Accessed January 2024.
Pacific Life. “Pacific Life Named by Forbes as One of America’s 2023 Best Midsized Employers.” Accessed January 2024.
Pacific Life. “It’s what happens the day after you buy life insurance that matters.” Accessed January 2024.
Insure.com in the fall of 2023 surveyed more than 1,750 people with auto, home, life and health insurance (1003 with life insurance). The survey was conducted by online market research company Slice MR. Respondents were asked to name their insurer and the editors then selected – based on the number of responses – the top companies for this year’s Best Life Insurance Companies ranking. Insure.com needed 20 or more of a company’s customers to respond to the survey for that insurer to be included in the ranking, although in some categories the editors did consider companies with 18 or 19 responses.
Respondents were first asked to grade their insurer in the following categories – customer satisfaction, claims satisfaction and policy offerings. The percentage of respondents who said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their insurer is presented in the results.
In addition, the editors also created star rankings for each company. Respondents were asked to pick their insurer’s top three attributes out of the more than the dozen presented – again including categories such as customer satisfaction and policy offerings. The number of responses for each of those attributes was totaled and then divided by the number of each company’s customers who responded to that survey question to create the star ranking.
Respondents were then asked if they would recommend their insurer to someone else. The percentage who said yes is presented in the results.
They also were given the statement “I trust my insurance company” and asked if they strongly agreed, agreed, disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement. The percentage of those who said they agreed or strongly agreed is presented in the results.
The editors compiled the survey results and then collected National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ complaint data, which ranks a company by the number of customer complaints it receives. The editors identified the NAIC company code or codes that were the primary underwriting companies for each carrier and line of business using total annual premiums. The associated NAIC complaint index score was used in our calculations. If more than one underwriting company was identified for a line, we used a weighted average of the NAIC complaint index scores.
The team also gathered AM Best data, which measures financial strength.
They also collected insurance rate data from Quadrant Information Services (for auto and home insurance), Compulife (for life insurance) and the public health marketplace (for health insurance).
With the help of Prof. David Marlett, Ph.D., managing director of the Brantley Risk and Insurance Center at Appalachian State University, the editors created a rating system to determine which insurance companies were best in each sector. For life insurers, we used the following weights to calculate the overall score for each company:
To find the industry average annual premium, insure.com weighed the rates from 9 companies: AAA, Farmers, Guardian Life, John Hancock, Lincoln Financial, MassMutual, New York Life, Northwestern Mutual and Transamerica. Rates are based on premiums for 35-year-old males and females who are non-smokers and in good health. Rates are for a 20-year-term policy that provides $500,000 in coverage.
No insurer in our ranking received less than half a star and the highest possible ranking is 5 stars.
On company review pages, the editors compared the profiled insurers in various categories against the leaders in that category or against other top insurers that match up well against the profiled company in terms of size and/or coverage area.