Brighthouse life insurance review and ratings 2024

Brighthouse ranks among Insure.com’s Best Life Insurance Companies for 2024, receiving 3.84 out of 5 stars.

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Our take: 

Brighthouse Financial made Insure.com’s Best Life Insurance Companies list, receiving 3.84 out of 5 possible stars. 

The insurer received a strong renewal rating, with 91% of customers planning to stick with the company. It also received an AM Best score of A. 

Available in all 50 states, Brighthouse Financial has more than 2 million customers and $228 billion in assets. However, Brighthouse products can only be purchased through a financial professional, like an insurance agent, and aren’t available to purchase online.

Insure.com’s review of the entire company and its full line of life insurance products follows. This review is based on third-party metrics and our survey of insurance customers. Find the full methodology here.

Brighthouse
Brighthouse Ratings
Overall Rating: 3.8
Ease of service: 3.9
NAIC: 1.15
Customer Satisfaction: 3.8
AM Best Rating: A

Pros and Cons

Pros:
  • Most Brighthouse customers want to renew
Cons:
  • Didn’t score as well as competitors for ease of service
  • Policies can’t be bought online

How Brighthouse scores on customer satisfaction

More than half of Brighthouse’s customers gave it high marks for customer satisfaction. In a separate J.D. Power customer satisfaction ranking of life insurance companies, it scored below the industry average of 790. Pacific Life led this category.

Insurance companyPercent of customers that are satisfiedJ.D. Power overall satisfaction score (out of 1,000)
Brighthouse55%739
Northwestern Mutual71%790
Pacific Life86%799
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How Brighthouse scores on ease of service

Brighthouse ranks higher than some competitors like Guardian Life and AAA in this category, but it is 20 percentage points behind Pacific Life, which leads the pack for ease of service.

Insurance companyPercent of customers that are satisfied with ease of service
Brighthouse66%
Guardian Life60%
Pacific Life86%

How Brighthouse scores on policy offerings

Sixty-four percent of Brighthouses customers said they were satisfied with its policy offerings. Allstate led this category. 

Insurance companyPercent of customers satisfied with the company’s policy offerings
Brighthouse64%
Amica 61%
Allstate85%

How trustworthy is Brighthouse?

Brighthouse tied with MassMutual and came ahead of Guardian Life and Gerber in this group. Penn Mutual led this category. 

Insurance companyPercent of customers who find the company trustworthy
Brighthouse66%
MassMutual66%
Penn Mutual 84%

Do Brighthouse customers plan to renew? 

More than 9 in 10 Brighthouse customers plan to renew their policy. Four insurers led this category – including Northwestern Mutual – with all of their customers saying they planned to renew their policies. 

Insurance companyPercent of customers who plan to renew
Brighthouse91%
Guardian87%
Northwestern Mutual100%

Brighthouse product details

  • Permanent life insurance
  • Term life insurance
  • Hybrid indexed universal with long-term care (LTC)
  • Indexed Universal 

Other services offered

  • Annuities
  • Hybrid life insurance with long-term care policy
  • Guaranteed Distribution Rider 

States where Brighthouse offers coverage

Graph
Table
States where Brighthouse offers coverage
Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
Washington D.C.
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming
AL AK AZ AR CA CO CT DC DE FL GA HI ID IL IN IA KS KY LA ME MD MA MI MN MS MO MT NE NV NH NJ NM NY NC ND OH OK OR PA RI SC SD TN TX UT VT VA WA WV WI WY
Available
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Company background

Brighthouse

In 2005, MetLife acquired Travelers Life Insurance Company and Travelers Life & Annuity Company. Travelers Insurance Co, was founded back in 1863 and it started selling life insurance in 1923 and annuities in 1938.

In 2017, Metlife spun off a large portion of its retail business to offer a suite of products under the Brighthouse Financial name. Many of these products now offered through Brighthouse trace their origins back to options developed by Travelers Insurance in the first few decades of the 20th Century. With a headquarters in Charlotte, N.C., Brighthouse now operates as an independent company and trades on NASDAQ under BHF.

Resources & Methodology

Sources:

Brighthouse Financial. “Brighthouse Financial History.” Accessed February 2024.

Brighthouse Financial. “Financial Strength Ratings.” Accessed February 2024.

Methodology

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:

  • AM Best: 25% of total score
  • NAIC: 15% of total score
  • Survey: 60% of total score (10% customer satisfaction, 10% recommended, 10% renewal rate, 10% ease of service, 10% trustworthiness and 10% policy offerings)

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.

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Nupur Gambhir
Managing Editor

 
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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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