Kara McGinley has over 6 years of experience writing, editing, and reporting on insurance and the insurance industry. She's been a licensed property and casualty expert in New York since 2021. Kara has been featured in several national publications, including USA TODAY, MSN, LifeHacker, Kiplinger, PropertyCasualty360, Policygenius, Rental Housing Journal, and WRAL.
Nupur Gambhir is an insurance expert and managing editor of Insure.com. She specializes in life and health insurance content, and has experience as a marketing consultant.
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MassMutual placed second in our 2025 Best Life Insurance Companies rankings and received a 4.6 star rating out of 5.0. The insurer has a strong financial rating from AM Best with an A++ (Superior) rating, reflecting its financial stability and ability to pay claims.
About 95% of surveyed customers said they would renew their policy with MassMutual, and around 91% said they’d recommend the insurer.
When customers file complaints against their insurance company with regulators, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) records them. According to the NAIC, MassMutual has the lowest number of consumer complaints out of the companies that made our best life insurance list.
Our 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, 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.
Customer satisfaction rankings tell you a lot about an insurance company and how the insurer treats its customers.
Around 76% of surveyed customers reported that they were satisfied with MassMutual. MassMutual also has an above-average score in J.D. Power’s customer satisfaction study, in third place behind Guardian and State Farm. The industry average J.D. Power score is 648 out of 1,000.
Because term life is generally the most straightforward and affordable life insurance product, we used premiums collected by CompuLife to evaluate MassMutual’s term life offerings.
MassMutual’s term life insurance rates are below the industry average of $377. Our data shows that coverage for 35-year-old non-smokers purchasing a $500,000 death benefit for a 20-year term pays an average annual premium of $350. It’s one of the cheapest offerings out of the companies we analyzed.
An insurer that rates well in the ease of service category makes life easy for its customers. Of those surveyed, 71% of respondents gave MassMutual a good grade in this area.
A wide range of policy offerings ensures policyholders find the right coverage for their needs. About 71% of the MassMutual customers we surveyed said they were satisfied with its policy offerings. AAA, Globe Life, AIG, Prudential, and more companies in our rating scored higher than MassMutual on policy offerings.
Trust is at the core of the relationship between an insurance company and its policyholders. MassMutual scored 95% on trustworthiness among surveyed customers. This puts the insurer at the top of the list of trustworthy companies in our analysis.
Happy customers tend to be loyal to their insurer. Almost all of MassMutual’s customers plan to stick with the company, with 95% of those surveyed saying they plan to renew.
However, 100% of surveyed customers of Prudential, Northwestern Mutual, Mutual of Omaha, and Lincoln National said they would renew with their companies.
Note: MassMutual is available in 50 states and Washington, D.C. The only state where it is not available is Alaska. Plans and product availability can vary by location.
MassMutual was founded in 1851. It’s a mutual company, meaning its policyholders (rather than shareholders) share in the ownership and can receive dividends. Dividends are not guaranteed, but MassMutual has been paying them to eligible policyholders yearly since 1869.
The company was the fourth largest writer of life and annuity insurance in 2022, according to the most recent data from the Insurance Information Institute. The company has more than $950 billion of life protection in force, according to its website.
MassMutual is headquartered in Springfield, Massachusetts.
J.D. Power. “Individual Life Insurance Study.” Accessed March 2025.
Insure.com in the fall of 2024 surveyed more than 1,750 insurance consumers (973 people with life insurance). The survey was conducted by online market research company Slice MR.
Respondents were asked to name their life insurer and then grade it in the following categories:
The percentage of respondents who said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their insurer is presented in the results.
We then asked respondents to provide a yes or no response to indicate their agreement with the following statements:
The percentage of respondents who said yes 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 codes of each underwriting company for each carrier and calculated a weighted average complaint index, weighted by the annual written premium. The associated NAIC complaint index score was used in the calculations.They also collected insurance rate data from Compulife.
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 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.