Penn Mutual is the No. 5 life insurance company in the 2024 Insure.com Best Life Insurance Companies ranking. The insurer received 4.49 out of 5 stars, with customers giving it high marks for customer service.
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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Penn Mutual is No. 5 in Insure.com’s ranking of the Best Life Insurance Companies of 2024, with 4.49 out of 5 stars. Customers score the insurer highly for ease of service, policy offerings, and customer service. Penn Mutual also has competitive premiums at a lower annual rate than many of the other carriers surveyed.
AM Best gives Penn Mutual a high score of A+, showcasing the carrier’s financial stability. Of the insurers ranked, Penn Mutual also enjoys one of the lowest complaint rates with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.
Best whole life insurance ranking: In a separate Insure.com ranking that looked just at companies selling whole life insurance, Penn Mutual ranked No. 4. It received 3.60 out of a possible 5 stars. Among the whole life companies, Penn Mutual came in first for historical performance – a strong historical performance demonstrates how well your policy’s cash value can grow.
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.
Of the Penn Mutual customers surveyed, 80% are satisfied with the insurer. This was one of the highest scores, only outdone by Pacific Life and Lincoln Financial.
Competitive prices are a key factor for customers. The national annual average for life insurance premiums is $358. Penn Mutual does not disappoint. The company – along with Pacific Life – offers the lowest rate among the companies we ranked. Farmers has the highest premium.
Customers want few hassles and hurdles when dealing with their life insurance coverage. Penn Mutual came in second in this category, outranked only by Pacific Life. New York Life trailed by only two percentage points.
Customers want options when it comes to the products a carrier offers. Penn Mutual customers scored highly in this category — 84% of Penn Mutual customers are satisfied with the company’s policy offerings. Only Allstate scored better in this area, receiving an 85% score.
State Farm and John Hancock trailed slightly at 83%.
Penn Mutual scored higher than the other carriers in this category, with more than 84% of customers finding it trustworthy. Many carriers scored in the 50-70% range.
State Farm and Pacific Life were the closest in rank, with 83% and 81%, respectively.
Almost all Penn Mutual customers surveyed are loyal to the carrier and plan to renew their policy. However, other carriers received perfect scores in this category.
Penn Mutual was founded in Philadelphia in 1847. It was the seventh mutual life insurance company in the United States and the first on the East Coast to offer universal life insurance.
Sources:
Penn Mutual. “Our History.” 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.