AAA ranks No. 14 in Insure.com’s Best Life Insurance Companies rankings, with the majority of its customers saying they would renew their coverage with the company.
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.
John is the editorial director for CarInsurance.com, Insurance.com and Insure.com. Before joining QuinStreet, John was a deputy editor at The Wall Street Journal and had been an editor and reporter at a number of other media outlets where he covered insurance, personal finance, and technology.
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AAA Insurance ranks among Insure.com’s Best Life Insurance Companies with a 3.87 star rating out of a possible 5 stars. In an Insure.com survey of insurance consumers, almost all of AAA’s customers – 90% – say they will renew their coverage with the insurer and 74% of its policyholders said the company is trustworthy.
AAA is owned by some of the larger groups in the AAA organization, which is best known for its emergency roadside assistance.
Below is Insure.com’s review of the company. 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.
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.
AAA customers surveyed gave the company a score of 66%. Pacific Life led this category among the companies we ranked.
Term life insurance offers coverage for 10-40 years and tends to be the cheapest type of life insurance coverage. Insure.com used premiums collected by CompuLife to evaluate AAA’s term life offerings. AAA’s average annual premium is $440.
AAA’s term life insurance rates are almost 23% higher than the industry average of $358. Of the insurers we ranked, only Farmers, at $508, cost more.
For ease of service – a metric that looks at how easy it is for customers to access services – 63% of AAA customers gave it a high mark. Pacific Life led this category.
Consumers typically want a company to offer a broad range of policies so that they can find the one that fits their needs. In the survey, 67% of AAA customers said they were satisfied with AAA’s policy offerings. Allstate came out on top in this category.
Policyholders should be able to trust their insurer — a life insurance policy protects their family’s financial health, after all. Almost three-quarters of AAA’s customers rank it high in this category. Penn Mutual is the most trusted of the surveyed companies.
Loyal customers tend to stick with their insurer year after year.
In all, 90% of AAA customers say they would renew their policy. That’s a high ranking, but it’s worth noting that many other companies scored 100% in this category.
AAA Insurance became a part of the American Automobile Association family in 1969. It offers both life insurance products and annuities and is headquartered in Livonia, Michigan.
Sources:
AAA Insurance Company. “Life is for less worrying and more living.” Accessed January 2024.
AAA Insurance Company. “Who we are.” Accessed January 2024.
J.D. Power. “Individual Life Insurance Study.” 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.