Lincoln Financial is the No. 8 company in Insure.com’s Best Life Insurance Companies of 2024, receiving 4.3 out of 5 stars.
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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Lincoln Financial offers an array of life insurance policies, including no-medical-exam life insurance.
The insurer scored well in Insure.com’s Best Life Insurance Companies survey across many categories, including customer satisfaction, policy offerings and customer loyalty. Additionally, all of the Lincoln Financial customers surveyed said they plan to renew their life insurance policy.
Lincoln Financial, No. 8 on Insure.com’s Best Life Insurance Companies list, also received solid scores from third-party rating agencies. It received 788 out of 1,000 possible points for overall customer satisfaction from J.D. Power and an AM Best rating of A, demonstrating its ability to pay out claims and meet its financial obligations. Lincoln Financial also has a low complaint ratio with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.
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.
Lincoln Financial customers rated it highly for customer satisfaction, ranking it second at 81%. The only carrier that scored higher was Pacific Life.
Price is an important factor to consider when choosing a carrier. If premiums are too high, then coverage becomes unaffordable.
Lincoln Financial’s average premium of $297 was below the industry average of $358 for a $500,000 20-year term life policy based on a 35-year-old nonsmoker with a preferred health rating. That makes Lincoln Financial the fifth cheapest company in our ranking.
Customers want a life insurance policy that is easy to manage. Lincoln Financial scored highly in this category, with 81% of customers saying they are satisfied with the ease of getting service for a fourth-place ranking. Pacific Life topped this category.
Lincoln Financial came in eleventh place in this category, with 74% of customers reporting that they are satisfied with the insurer’s policy offerings. Allstate led the pack for policy offerings.
Life insurance provides for family members after a loved one’s death, and policyholders want to trust their insurer. Seventy-four percent of Lincoln Financial’s customers report that they trust the company. Penn Mutual led this category.
Lincoln Financial customers are loyal to the insurer, with 100% of those surveyed saying they plan to renew their coverage. This indicates that customers are overall happy with the company’s performance.
Lincoln Financial, also known as Lincoln National Life Insurance Co., has been in business since 1905. It’s headquartered in Radnor, Pennsylvania and has grown throughout the decades to serve over 16 million customers. Newsweek named Lincoln Financial one of America’s Most Responsible Companies of 2024.
Sources:
AM Best. “Guide to Best’s Financial Strength Ratings.” Accessed January 2024.
Lincoln Financial. “Do more with life insurance.” Accessed January 2024.
Lincoln Financial. “Who we are.” 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.