Gerber Life ranked at No. 11 in Insure.com’s 2024 Best Life Insurance Companies ranking with 4.01 out of 5 stars. All of the Gerber Life customers surveyed say they’ll 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.
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Gerber Life is No. 11 in Insure.com’s Best Life Insurance Companies ranking for 2024, with 4.01 out of 5 stars. The insurer received a strong rating for customer loyalty, with 100% of customers saying they plan to renew their coverage. Gerber also scored high for policy offerings.
Gerber Life has an AM Best score of A, indicating financial stability. It’s a well-known company, particularly known for its Gerber Grow-Up Plan, aimed at parents.
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.
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.
With 74% of Gerber Life customers saying they’re satisfied with the insurer, the company landed in the middle for this category. Pacific Life topped the category with a score of 86%.
Most Gerber Life customers are satisfied with the company’s ease of service. This category rates how easy it is to make changes to your policy, access documents and get help on the website or via customer service. Gerber Life’s score was about average for this category, which was led by Pacific Life.
Gerber Life customers are happy with its policy offerings, with 81% of customers saying they’re satisfied in this area. It was only outranked by a few other carriers when it comes to policy offerings, with Allstate topping the category at 85%
More than half of Gerber Life customers find it to be trustworthy. Penn Mutual received the top score in this category.
All of the Gerber Life customers surveyed are loyal to the insurer and plan to renew their policies. Three of the other insurers ranked also earned 100% in this category.
Note: Gerber products are available in every state, with the exceptions of Guaranteed Life, which is not available in Montana, and a Simplified Senior Life Disability Waiver of Premium (DWP) Rider is not available in California.
Gerber Life has been around since 1967 and is geared toward young families on a budget. It specializes in life insurance products for adults and children and college planning tools. Unlike some of the other insurance carriers, it doesn’t offer auto and home insurance and focuses primarily on life insurance as its specialty.
It is owned by Western & Southern Financial Group, with $63 billion in active policies.
Sources:
Gerber Life Insurance. “Meet Gerber Life Insurance Company.” Accessed January 2024.
Gerber Life Insurance. “Agency Sneak Peak.” 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.