Northwestern Mutual comes in fourth place in Insure.com’s Best Life Insurance Companies rankings, receiving 4.5 out of a possible 5 stars. All of the insurer’s customers surveyed plan to renew their policies.
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.
Why you can trust Insure.com
Quality Verified
Northwestern Mutual ranks fourth in Insure.com’s Best Life Insurance Companies rankings and received a 4.50 star rating out of five.
All of the Northwestern Mutual customers surveyed plan to renew their policies. Additionally, the insurer received a top score of A++ from third-party rating agency AM Best. In addition, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners has recorded a low number of complaints about the company. In fact, Northwestern Mutual, along with Pacific Life, had the best NAIC scores of the companies we ranked.
Best whole life insurance ranking: In a separate Insure.com ranking of companies offering whole life insurance, Northwestern Mutual was the top company. Northwestern Mutual received 3.95 out of a possible 5 stars (which we rounded to 4 stars in our whole life ranking). The National Association of Insurance Commissioners has recorded a low number of complaints about the company. The insurer also received the highest score of the insurers we ranked for pricing stability and a 5-star rating for financial strength.
Below is Insure.com’s review of the full company and its line of life insurance products. 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.
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.
Several competitors scored better than Northwestern Mutual for customer satisfaction – with Pacific Life leading the category. In a separate study by J.D. Power, Northwestern Mutual came in with an average satisfaction score of 790. State Farm received the highest J.D. Power score of the insurers it ranked.
Northwestern Mutual’s premiums are higher than most other insurers surveyed by Insure.com. However, two companies do have higher rates – Farmers and AAA. Northwestern’s rates for 35-year-old non-smokers purchasing $500,000 in coverage for a 20-year term are $439. Meanwhile, the industry average premium is $358.
Policyholders don’t want a hassle when dealing with their insurance company, so ease of service is key. Seven out of 10 customers give Northwestern Mutual high marks for ease of service. Pacific Life led this category.
Many policyholders expect a wide range of policy offerings from their insurance company.
The percentage of those satisfied with Northwestern Mutual’s policy offerings is 79%, which puts it in the upper half of the companies we looked at Allstate led in this category.
Trust is essential to a good relationship between an insurer and its policyholders. Northwestern Mutual earns a 71% mark for being trustworthy. That put it in the top 10 for trust, but some other insurers received higher grades in this area. Eighty-four percent of Penn Mutual’s customers rated it highly for trustworthiness – the company led the category.
Customer loyalty keeps policyholders with their insurance company. In all, 100% of customers plan to stick with Northwestern Mutual. Northwestern tied with Gerber Life, Lincoln Financial, and State Farm at the top of this category.
Ranked highly on the Fortune 500 list, Northwestern Mutual provides financial services and is a mutual company. While the company offers life insurance services, it also provides estate planning, retirement and investment products.
Northwestern Mutual has been around for more than 160 years. Today, it is headquartered in Milwaukee. The company has paid dividends every year since 1872.
The company is also known for its network of more than 6,400 financial advisors and professionals throughout the country, who help clients with insurance protection, investments, and business and estate planning.
Northwestern Mutual. “Invest in your best life.” Accessed January 2024.
Northwestern Mutual. “Protection for today, and every day after.” Accessed January 2024.
Northwestern Mutual. “When people feel good about their money, good things happen.” 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.