Erie Insurance is the No. 1 home insurer in the 2024 Insure.com Best Insurance Companies ranking with a 4.6-star rating out of 5. The company’s customers give it high marks for customer service and it 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 took the No. 1 spot for home insurance in our 2024 Best home Insurance Companies ranking. The company received 4.6 (actually 4.63) out of 5 stars and topped most of the individual categories we used to select the top insurers.
A consumer survey conducted by Insure.com found that 97% of Erie customers plan to renew, and 95% would recommend the company for home insurance. Erie also had the top score for claims, with 92% of customers satisfied with how their claim was handled.
As a smaller company, Erie doesn’t offer home insurance in even half of the states. Despite the limited availability, Erie ranked at No. 1 with J.D. Power for both overall satisfaction and claims satisfaction; has a solid A rating from AM Best, which measures financial strength; and is well regarded for the breadth of its policy offerings.
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.
Erie Insurance has rates well below the national average of $2,604 and some of the cheaper rates among the companies Insure.com surveyed, although not the cheapest.
Our survey found that 89% of Erie Insurance customers rate it highly for customer satisfaction, receiving the highest score of any company in the survey. State Farm was second at 85%.
Erie also had the top score for overall satisfaction in J.D. Power’s 2023 study of customer satisfaction.
Erie scored relatively highly for ease of service, with 84% of customers on the survey saying they are satisfied or highly satisfied. That puts Erie in third place, behind American Family and State Farm.
Our survey found that 86% of respondents are happy with the policy offerings from Erie Insurance, the best score in this category. Erie’s policy offerings include standard homeowners, condo owners, renters insurance, mobile home policies, flood insurance and coverage for personal valuables. American Family was second here at 84%
According to our survey, 95% of respondents said they’d recommend Erie to others, making it the most recommended company in the survey. Progressive was second at 93%.
Erie scored a little lower on trust in the survey, with 78% of customers saying they trust the company. This was a difficult category for a lot of insurers – only two companies scored above 80%; American Family had the top score at 89%.
According to our survey, 97% of Erie’s customers plan to renew their home insurance with the company. That was the top score for renewals, although several other companies had scores in the 90s here.
Erie had the top score in our survey, with 92% of customers saying they were satisfied with the claims process. J.D Power’s survey agrees, giving Erie a rating of 912/1,000 for claims satisfaction, rating it No. 1 as well.
When we asked customers to rank the top three things their insurance company does best, only 24% chose digital experience for Erie, which is low, but similar to several other companies. Allstate, Progressive and Travelers tied for the top score here at 44%.
The Erie app has 2.8 stars in the Apple App Store and 3.1 stars in the Google Play store.
Erie’s score for discounts was 43%, marking the percentage of customers who ranked discounts as one of the company’s three best points. Only one company, American Family, broke 50% here.
Erie offers a 17% auto and home bundling discount, on average. When we asked customers to rate the top three things for which their insurance company is best, 73% of Erie customers chose bundling as one of the three. No other company came close to that score.
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.
Sources:
Erie Insurance. “Homeowners insurance.” Accessed January 2024.
J.D. Power. “2023 U.S. Property Claims Satisfaction Study.” Accessed January 2024.
J.D. Power. “2023 U.S. Home Insurance Study.” Accessed January 2024.
Insure.com in the fall of 2023 surveyed more than 1,750 insurance consumers (1,151 people with home insurance). The survey was conducted by online market research company Slice MR.
Respondents were asked to name their home insurer and then grade it in the following categories: customer satisfaction, ease of service, 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.
Respondents were then asked to pick their insurer’s top three attributes out of more than a dozen presented – including digital experience, discounts best for auto/home bundling and best for discounts. The number of responses for each attribute were totaled before dividing by the number of each company’s customers who responded to that survey question to create a percentage.
Respondents were then asked if they would recommend their home insurer to someone else and if they planned to renew their policies. The percentage who said yes is presented in the results.
Finally, respondents 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 selected – based on the number of survey responses – the top companies for further evaluation.
They then collected AM Best data, which measure financial strength, and National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ complaint data, which ranks a company by the number of customer complaints it receives. The Insure.com team 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 the calculations. If more than one underwriting company was identified for a line, the editors used a weighted average of the NAIC complaint index scores.
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 took the following and gave each a weight.
Each insurer was awarded between half a star and 5 stars. No company in the ranking received less than half a star in any category, and 5 stars was the most any insurer could receive.