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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Guardian Life is No. 9 on Insure.com’s Best Life Insurance Companies ranking for 2024 and received 4.29 out of 5 stars. Guardian’s average premiums are slightly higher than the national average of $358, but still competitive at $395 annually.
Guardian Life received a strong rating for policy renewals, with 87% of customers surveyed saying they plan to renew.
Guardian Life has a superior AM Best rating of A++, which means the company meets all its financial obligations. The insurer also received a J.D. Power score of 784 out of a possible 1,000 points for overall customer satisfaction.
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.
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.
Almost six in 10 Guardian Life customers ranked the company highly for customer satisfaction. At 86%, Pacific Life topped this category.
In a separate study by J.D. Power on customer satisfaction, the company did well. It received 784 out of 1,000 points, comparable with competitors and just below the industry average of 790.
Because term life is generally the most straightforward and affordable life insurance product, Insure.com used premiums collected by CompuLife to evaluate Guardian Life’s term life offerings.
The industry average life insurance cost is $358 per year. Guardian came in slightly higher at $395. Pacific Life and Penn Mutual had the cheapest rates among ranked companies.
Rates are based on coverage for a 35-year-old non-smoker purchasing a $500,000 death benefit for a 20-year term.
Of Guardian customers surveyed, 60% are satisfied with the ease of getting the service they need. Pacific Life topped this category at 86%.
Sixty-three percent of Guardian customers are satisfied with the company’s policy offerings. While that’s almost two-thirds of their customers, this score put it in the bottom half of ranked carriers. Allstate won this category, with 85% of customers reporting that they were satisfied with their insurer’s policy offerings.
Fifty-seven percent of Guardian customers say they trust the company. Penn Mutual and State Farm received the top two scores for trustworthiness.
Customer loyalty is a good indication that an insurance company is meeting its customers’ expectations. Guardian Life performed well here, with 87% of its customers planning to renew. Most companies performed well for renewals, with four companies receiving scores of 100%.
Guardian was formed in 1860 by civil rights attorney Hugo Wesendonck. Guardian provides a wide product line including life and health insurance solutions for individuals and businesses.
After a merger with Berkshire Life in 2001, Guardian significantly expanded its disability insurance market nationwide and celebrated its 160th anniversary in 2020.
AM Best. “Guide to Best’s Financial Strength Ratings.” Accessed January 2024.
Guardian Life. “Budget-friendly Life Insurance for Individuals, Families, and Businesses.” Accessed January 2024.
Guardian Life. “Our History.” Accessed January 2024.
Guardian Life. “Disclosures.” 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.