Erie Insurance is the No. 5 home insurer in the 2023 Insure.com Best Insurance Companies survey with a 3.4 star rating out of 5. The company offers some of the lowest home insurance rates among the companies in our insurance consumer survey.
Leslie Kasperowicz is an insurance educator and content creation professional with nearly two decades of experience first directly in the insurance industry at Farmers Insurance and then as a writer, researcher, and educator for insurance shoppers writing for sites like ExpertInsuranceReviews.com and InsuranceHotline.com and managing content, now at Insurance.com.
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Erie customers rated it highly for customer satisfaction and ease of service, with 88% of customers satisfied in both categories, and rates are among the lowest of the companies surveyed. Erie also scored relatively well in other areas when customers were asked to rate it.
The company ranked in the No. 5 spot overall on the 2023 Best Home Insurance Companies list.
As a smaller company, Erie doesn’t offer home insurance in even half of the states. Despite the limited availability, Erie rates above average with J.D. Power for both overall satisfaction and claims satisfaction, has a solid A rating from AM Best and carries enough weight to land among the top picks for home insurance.
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. It’s based on third-party metrics, including two J.D. Power studies (Home Insurance Study and Property Claims Satisfaction Study) and an in-depth survey of insurance customers. Find the full methodology here, including an explanation of our survey scores.
Erie Insurance has rates well below the national average of $2,433 and it has some of the cheaper rates among the companies Insure.com surveyed.
Our survey found that 88% of Erie Insurance customers rate it highly for customer satisfaction – in line with American Family and Travelers – but better than many of its competitors. State Farm won in this category with 93%.
Erie also scored a little above average for overall satisfaction in J.D. Power’s 2022 study of customer satisfaction.
Erie scored relatively highly for ease of service, with 88% customers on the survey saying they are satisfied or highly satisfied. That’s not far behind the category winner, Travelers.
Our survey found that 83% of respondents are happy with the policy offerings from Erie Insurance. Erie’s policy offerings include standard homeowners, condo owners, renters insurance, mobile home policies, flood insurance and coverage for personal valuables. Travelers led this category.
According to our survey, 88% of respondents said they’d recommend Erie to others, but many other companies scored better in the survey. Almost all – 97% – of State Farm customers said they’d renew.
Erie scored in the lower half in this category, with 63% of its surveyed customers saying they trust the company. This was a difficult category for a lot of insurers – several companies saw their percentages in this category come in between 60% and 80% – but a handful scored higher. State Farm had the highest score at 83%.
According to our survey, 88% of Erie’s customers plan to renew their home insurance with the company. Many competitors had renewal rates in the 90s. Travelers led this category.
Erie didn’t score particularly well in our survey. J.D Power, however, gives Erie a rating of 882/1,000 for claims satisfaction, rating it near the top. Liberty Mutual led this category, but isn’t ranked.
Erie offers a 17% auto and home bundling discount, on average. Our survey found it rated right in the middle of the companies we list for combining auto and home insurance. It earned a survey score of 67%.
Erie Insurance was founded in 1925 in Erie, Pennsylvania. Within 20 years, the company had expanded into Pittsburgh and written its first comprehensive liability insurance policy. In 1995, during the company’s 70th anniversary, it was listed on the NASDAQ. Eight years after that, it was listed in the Forbes 500.
Today, Erie Insurance is still headquartered in Erie, Pennsylvania, employs 6,000 people and works with more than 13,000 independent agents.
Erie Insurance. “Homeowners insurance.” Accessed December 2022.
J.D. Power. “2022 U.S. Property Claims Satisfaction Study.” Accessed December 2022.
J.D. Power. “2022 U.S. Home Insurance Study.” Accessed December 2022.
Insure.com in the fall of 2022 surveyed more than 1,500 people with auto, home, life and health insurance (805 with home 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 home 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.
Survey score calculation. Respondents were then asked to rank their insurer’s top three attributes out of more than a dozen presented – including customer satisfaction and policy offerings. For a number one choice, five points were given; for a second choice, three points; and for a third choice, a single point. The total points for each choice – first, second and third – were then divided by the number of each company’s customers who responded to that survey question to create a percentage. Those percentages are presented in the results as scores.
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, and AM Best data, which measures financial strength.
They also collected insurance rate data from Quadrant Information Services.
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 home insurers, we used the following weights to calculate the overall score for each company:
No company in the ranking received less than 1 star in any category and 5 stars was the most any insurer could receive.