Gerber Life life insurance review and ratings 2024

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.

Reviewed by: Nupur Gambhirquality verified
Nupur Gambhir
Nupur Gambhir

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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Our take

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.

Gerber Life
Gerber Life Ratings
Overall Rating: 4.0
Ease of service: 4.0
NAIC: 1.23
Customer Satisfaction: 4.1
AM Best Rating: A

Pros and Cons

Pros:
  • Strong customer loyalty
  • High third-party rating for financial stability
  • Customers are happy with Gerber Life’s policy offerings
Cons:
  • Scored lower than some competitors for ease of service

How Gerber Life scores on customer satisfaction

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%.

Insurance companyPercent of customers that are satisfied
Gerber Life74%
Pacific Life86%
Lincoln Financial81%
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QuickTake

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How Gerber Life scores on ease of service

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.

Insurance companyPercent of customers that are satisfied with ease of service
Gerber Life74%
Pacific Life86%
Penn Mutual84%

How Gerber Life scores on policy offerings

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%

Insurance companyPercent of customers satisfied with the company’s policy offerings
Gerber Life81%
Penn Mutual84%
Pacific Life76%

How trustworthy is Gerber Life?

More than half of Gerber Life customers find it to be trustworthy. Penn Mutual received the top score in this category.

Insurance companyPercent of customers who find the company trustworthy
Gerber Life65%
Penn Mutual84%
Lincoln Financial74%

Do Gerber Life customers plan to renew? 

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.

Insurance companyPercent of customers who plan to renew
Gerber Life100%
Prudential97%
Mutual of Omaha93%

Gerber Life product details

  • Term life insurance
  • Whole life insurance
  • Guaranteed life insurance
  • Child life insurance
  • Accident policies

Other services offered

  • College planning resources

States where Gerber Life offers coverage

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Table
States where Gerber Life 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
Not available

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. 

Company background

Gerber Life

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.

Resources & Methodology

Sources:

Gerber Life Insurance. “Meet Gerber Life Insurance Company.” Accessed January 2024.

Gerber Life Insurance. “Agency Sneak Peak.” Accessed January 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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