New York Life is No. 5 in Insure.com’s Best Life Insurance Companies ranking, receiving 4.49 out of 5 stars. The company’s customers give it high marks for its ease of service and policy offerings.
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.
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New York Life took the No. 5 spot in Insure.com’s Best Life Insurance Companies ranking.
The company earned 4.49 out of a possible 5 stars. In Insure.com’s survey of life insurance customers, New York Life rated highly for its ease of service and policy offerings. The insurer also received excellent scores from third-party rating agencies as well. Its National Association of Insurance Commissioners score was one of the best of the insurers we ranked. NAIC rates a company by the number of customer complaints it receives. Meanwhile, AM Best gave New York Life an A++, its highest rating for financial stability
Of the customers we surveyed, 96% said they planned to renew their New York Life policy.
Best whole life insurance ranking: In a separate Insure.com ranking that looked just at companies selling whole life insurance, New York Life was ranked sixth. The insurer received 3.47 stars out of a possible 5 stars.
Below is Insure.com’s review of the company and its entire life insurance product. 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.
New York Life received a score of 76% for customer satisfaction, a score that was on the upper end compared to many of the insurers ranked. Pacific Life led this category. In a separate study by J.D. Power, its score was a tick above the 790 average.
Term life insurance is usually the most simple and affordable life insurance product. Insure.com used premiums collected by data provider CompuLife to evaluate New York Life’s term life offerings.
New York Life’s life insurance’s term life insurance rates are comparable to most other insurers evaluated in the Insure.com survey. The industry average premium is $358 for 35-year-old non-smokers purchasing $500,000 in coverage for a 20-year term. New York Life’s average annual premium is comparable to the industry average at $357. Of the companies we ranked, Pacific Life and Penn Mutual had the cheapest rates at $280.
Policyholders want an insurer that makes it easy to use a policy. New York Life received the third-best ranking in this category.
A wide range of policy offerings makes it easier for consumers to find the coverage they need.
The percentage of those satisfied with New York Life’s policy offerings is 82%. Only a few competitors scored higher. Allstate led this category.
Trust is at the heart of the relationship between an insurer and its customers. While New York Life outranked many competitors with a score of 76%, it wasn’t at the top of the list. Penn Mutual was the most trusted life insurer.
Consumers who are loyal to a company offer testimony about the insurer’s performance.
About 96% of customers plan to stick with New York Life. A very good score, but some insurers had a higher percentage of customers saying they would renew.
New York Life is one of the biggest mutual life insurance companies in the U.S. The insurer also has some of the highest financial ratings when compared to its peers.
New York Life’s history stretches back to 1841, when its predecessor – the Nautilus Insurance Company – was founded. Today, New York Life is one of the oldest and largest mutual insurance companies in the United States.
Policyholders share in the ownership and have received dividends based on the company’s investment performance every year since 1854.
New York Life. “Over 12,000 agents. One who will be there for you.” Accessed January 2024.
New York Life. “Five things to know about the founding of New York Life.” Accessed January 2024.
New York Life. “Over 175 years of helping people act on their love.” 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.