Farmers ranks among Insure.com’s Best Life Insurance Companies ranking, receiving 3.96 out of 5 stars. Most of Farmers’ customers plan to renew their coverage.
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.
Why you can trust Insure.com
Quality Verified
Farmers Insurance received 3.96 out of a possible 5 stars in the Insure.com Best Life Insurance Companies of 2024 ranking. One of the company’s greatest strengths is customer loyalty – 91% of its customers say they’ll renew.
AM Best gives Farmers a score of A, which indicates an excellent ability to meet their financial 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.
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.
Farmers scored well in customer satisfaction, with 71% of Farmers’ customers saying they’re satisfied. Pacific Life and Lincoln Financial led this category.
Because term life is generally the most straightforward and affordable life insurance product, Insure.com used premiums collected by CompuLife to evaluate Farmer’s term life offerings.
Farmers is more expensive than the industry average of $358, with annual average premiums of $508, and had the highest rates of the companies we ranked. Rates are based on coverage for 35-year-old non-smokers purchasing a $500,000 death benefit for a 20-year-term. Of all the insurers ranked, Pacific Life and Penn Mutual had the cheapest average premiums.
Seven in 10 Farmers’ customers gave it high marks for how easy it is to work with the company. Customers of Pacific Life rated their company the highest in this category.
A variety of policy offerings is attractive for customers shopping for life insurance. Sixty-nine percent of Farmers’ customers were satisfied with the company’s policy offerings. Allstate led this category, followed by Penn Mutual.
Sixty-nine percent of Farmers’ customers consider the company trustworthy. However, a few of Farmers’ competitors received a higher rating from their customers. Penn Mutual led this category.
Of the Farmers customers surveyed, 91% said they plan to renew. That is a strong showing. However, 100% of the customers from four insurers, including Gerber Life and Lincoln Financial, said they would renew with their current company.
Farmers Insurance was started in 1928 by John C.Tyler and Thomas E. Leavey who went from farm to farm to sell policies to farmers and ranchers to insure their vehicles. Through the Great Depression Farmers paid claims in cash, which was unique at the time. The company grew throughout the decades to become one of the nation’s largest insurers, now with more than 19 million policies.
Sources:
AM Best. “Guide to Best’s Financial Strength Ratings.” Accessed January 2024.
Farmers Insurance. “Our History: About Farmers.” 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.