MassMutual comes in at No. 1 in Insure.com’s Best Life Insurance Companies rankings, receiving 4.54 out of 5 stars. Its customers rate it highly for customer satisfaction and ease of service.
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.
John is the editorial director for CarInsurance.com, Insurance.com and Insure.com. Before joining QuinStreet, John was a deputy editor at The Wall Street Journal and had been an editor and reporter at a number of other media outlets where he covered insurance, personal finance, and technology.
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MassMutual ranks first in Insure.com’s Best Life Insurance Companies rankings and received a 4.54 out of 5-star rating.
MassMutual is one of the biggest insurance providers in the U.S. The insurer did well in Insure.com’s survey of insurance consumers, receiving strong scores for customer satisfaction and ease of service, and it’s highly rated by third-party agencies. AM Best gave it an A++. Additionally, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners gave it a score of 0.11, indicating that it receives a low volume of consumer complaints.
Best whole life insurance ranking: In a separate Insure.com ranking of companies offering whole life insurance, MassMutual was ranked seventh. The company received 3.47 stars out of a possible 5 stars (which we rounded to 3.5 stars in our whole life ranking). The insurer scored well for historical performance, receiving 5 stars. It also received 4.6 stars for its account access.
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, 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.
Its customers gave it high marks in Insure.com’s survey, although Pacific Life and others had higher scores. In a separate study by J.D. Power, MassMutual received the third-highest satisfaction score of the companies we ranked. The industry average was 790.
Because term life is generally the most straightforward and affordable life insurance product, Insure.com used premiums collected by CompuLife to evaluate MassMutual’s term life offerings.
MassMutual’s term life insurance rates are below the industry average of $358. 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 $333. Of all the insurers ranked, Pacific Life and Penn Mutual charged the cheapest average premium of $280.
An insurer that rates well in the ease of service category makes life easy for its customers. Of those surveyed, 76% of respondents give it a good grade in this area, which Pacific Life led.
A wide range of policy offerings ensures policyholders find the right coverage for their needs. Some 72% of the MassMutual customers said they were satisfied with policy offerings at MassMutual. Allstate led in this category with 85% of its customers rating it strongly in this area.
Trust is at the core of the relationship between an insurance company and its policyholders. Sixty-six percent of MassMutual’s customers gave it a high mark for being trustworthy. The best company in this category was Penn Mutual – 84% of its customers said they trusted it.
Happy customers tend to be loyal to their insurer. Almost all of MassMutual’s customers plan to stick with the company.
Four companies, including State Farm, saw 100% of the respondents in our survey say they would re-up with their insurer.
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.
Sources:
MassMutual. “Insurance.” Accessed January 2024.
MassMutual. “Retirement.” Accessed January 2024.
MassMutual. “Investment.” Accessed January 2024.
MassMutual. “A legacy of mutuality.” Accessed January 2024.
MassMutual. “Financial Performance and Insurance Ratings.” Accessed January 2024.
J.D. Power. “Individual Life Insurance Study”. 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.