The Hartford is ranked highly in the 2023 Insure.com Best Insurance Companies survey for auto insurance, with customers saying they’re happy with the company’s discounts.
Laura Longero is an insurance expert and executive editor of CarInsurance.com. With 15 years of experience simplifying complex financial topics, Laura provides clear, expert-backed guidance to help drivers make smart, confident decisions. Before joining CarInsurance.com, she was an award-winning editor for the USA Today Network.
The Hartford did well in Insure.com’s 2023 Best Insurance Companies survey, getting very high marks from customers for its discounts.
However, in terms of survey responses, the company did not get enough to warrant ranking on our best auto insurers’ list in 2023, 2024 or 2025.
While it wasn’t included in the overall company ranking, the editors felt The Hartford was a notable auto insurer worth reviewing.
Below is Insure.com’s review of the company. 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.
The Hartford has high auto insurance rates compared to other companies in our survey with a national average cost of $1,362 annually or $195 a month.
Almost 75% of The Hartford’s customers said they were satisfied or highly satisfied with the company overall. However, this put the company in the bottom half of the survey results. Erie and Travelers topped this category.
Another metric to consider: J.D. Power doesn’t do national ratings for overall auto insurance satisfaction instead ranking by region. To get a broader picture of how The Hartford rated in that survey, we averaged the regional scores. The Hartford scored 837/1,000, better than many competitors. The average score is 834.
Of the customers surveyed, 84% said they were satisfied or highly satisfied with how easy it is to get the service they need from the company. The highest scores in this category went to USAA and Liberty Mutual – 92% of those companies’ customers give it top scores. But The Hartford did better than other companies.
When it comes to policy offerings, The Hartford scored in the bottom half of our survey, with 74% of customers saying they were satisfied.
Of the customers surveyed, 89% would recommend The Hartford to others. Most companies’ results in this category were in the 80th and 90th percentile.
In all, 79% of customers say they trust the company. That was somewhere in the middle of our survey results, with few companies scoring especially high in this category. State Farm had the best score.
Almost 90% of customers plan to renew with The Hartford. All – 100% – of USAA and Erie customers plan to renew with their insurer.
For discounts, The Hartford’s customers rated it extremely high. In fact, if the company were ranking the final results, it would have scored the highest of any auto insurer in this category.
The Hartford is one of America’s oldest continuously operated insurance companies, having been founded in 1810. Still headquartered in Hartford, Connecticut, The Hartford is a Fortune 500 company with nearly 20,000 employees.
The company sells multiple times of insurance and operates in every state and the District of Columbia. The Hartford has been the home and auto insurance writer for AARP for a quarter century.
J.D. Power. “Insurers Struggle to Manage Expectations in Auto Claims Process as Repair Times Increase, J.D. Power Finds.” Accessed December 2022.
J.D. Power. “Usage-Based Auto Insurance Takes Center Stage as Satisfaction Flatlines, J.D. Power Finds.” Accessed December 2022.
The Hartford. “Vehicle insurance.” Accessed December 2022.
The Hartford. “AARP auto insurance.” Accessed December 2022.
The Hartford. “Discounts on car insurance.” Accessed December 2022.
Insure.com in the fall of 2022 surveyed more than 1,500 people with auto, home, life and health insurance (1,080 people with auto 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 Auto 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.
Survey score calculation: Respondents were then asked to rank their insurer’s top three attributes out of more than a dozen presented – including customer satisfaction and policy offerings. For a number one choice, five points were given; for a second choice, three points; and for a third choice, a single point. The total points for each choice – first, second and third – were then divided by the number of each company’s customers who responded to that survey question to create a percentage. Those percentages are presented in the results as scores.
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, and A.M. 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 auto and home insurers, we used the following weights to calculate the overall score for each company: