John Hancock is No. 7 in Insure.com’s 2024 Best Life Insurance Companies ranking, receiving 4.37 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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John Hancock is No. 7 in the 2024 Insure.com Best Insurance Companies ranking for life insurance, receiving 4.37 stars out of 5.
The insurer performed particularly well for policy offerings and customer renewal while also having a low National Association of Insurance Commissioners complaint ratio of 0.31. It also received an AM Best score of A+, which measures the insurer’s ability to pay out claims and meet its financial obligations.
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.
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.
While 72% of John Hancock customers say they’re satisfied with the insurer, some carriers scored better. Pacific Life led the pack in this category.
Cost is an important factor for customers. An unaffordable policy becomes difficult to maintain.
John Hancock’s average annual premium is $415 for a $500,000 20-year term life policy based on a 35-year-old non-smoker at a preferred health rating. This is almost 16% higher than the industry average of $358. Pacific Life had the lowest premiums of the ranked insurers while Farmers had the highest rate.
Customers need to easily access their policy documents and get service when it’s needed.
With 76% of customers saying they’re satisfied with the ease of service at John Hancock, the insurer ranked in the upper-middle portion of the ranking. Pacific Life and Penn Mutual received the highest scores in this category, with Pacific Life in the top spot.
John Hancock performed very well in this category, with 83% of customers saying they were satisfied with policy offerings. Only two other carriers scored better, with Allstate coming out on top.
When asked if they trust John Hancock, 76% of customers said they found the insurer trustworthy, a score in the upper half of the rankings. Penn Mutual had the highest score at 84%.
Satisfied customers keep their policies, and 97% of John Hancock’s customers plan to do so. Most of the carriers ranked performed well in this category, with a few scoring 100%.
John Hancock was founded in 1862, named after the founding father and patriot. The company, based in Boston, Massachusetts, has served customers nationwide for 160 years. In 2004, John Hancock merged with ManuLife, creating North America’s second-largest life insurance company at the time.
Sources:
ManuLife Financial. “News release.” 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.