Life insurance methodology

How we research life insurance

We are not an insurance agency and we do not sell insurance. We are a comparison and information site. What we can do is explain the types of life insurance, show what each carrier publishes about its own cover, and point you to the carrier's own quote route for a price that reflects your own answers.

How we research

Our research follows the same steps for every life insurance page on the site.

1. Start with the official source, not a roundup. For rules, that means the state departments of insurance and state statutes. For carrier facts, it means the carrier's own published policy information. Secondary sources (articles, roundups, aggregators) are never the source of a figure. If an official source cannot be found, the figure is not published.
2. Copy the figure exactly as the source prints it. No rounding, no estimating, no "correcting" a source's own rounding.
3. Name the statistic, the profile, the place, and the date, every time. A life insurance figure is meaningless without the age, health class, term length, cover amount, and date it describes. If any of those is missing from the source, the figure is not published.
4. Describe cover from the policy, not from a sales page. Term length, renewability, conversion options, exclusions, and waiting periods are taken from the carrier's published policy information. Where the policy wording is not public, we say the detail is available only in the policy document.
5. Have every page reviewed by an editor before publication. Our editors are Enu Zehra and Ms. Kakka. They check every figure against its named source. A page is not published until the figures check out.
6. Re-verify on a fixed schedule. Pages are reviewed at least every six months. A figure past its review date is flagged, not silently left as if it were current.

The sources we use

State departments of insurance and state statutes. These are the sources for life insurance rules on our pages: licensing, the free-look period, contestability, and grace periods. Rules differ by state, and every state-specific statement on the site carries the source and the date it was checked.

Carrier-published policy information. For each carrier shown on the site, we record what the carrier itself publishes: the types of life insurance offered (term, whole life, universal life, and their variants), term lengths, cover amounts, conversion and renewal options, and the quote route. We do not record a premium, because no carrier publishes a single premium. A premium is calculated for the individual applicant.

NAIC Complaint Index. The NAIC publishes a complaint index for insurers, based on a three-year window of confirmed complaints relative to market share. We use it as the basis for future complaint-based comparisons. We publish no complaint ranking that we have not computed from the NAIC's own published index, and we publish the method beside the ranking.

AM Best financial strength ratings. AM Best publishes financial strength ratings for insurers. Life insurance is a promise that may be kept decades from now, so financial strength matters more here than in any other line. Where we show a financial-strength figure, it is AM Best's published rating, named as such, with the date it was checked. We do not convert ratings into our own scores.

What do we not publish, and why?

There is no life insurance average on this site. That is a deliberate decision, not an omission we overlooked. A meaningful life insurance average would need a fixed profile (a stated age, health class, term length, and cover amount) published by an official source. No free official source publishes one in a usable form. The figures that circulate in roundups are usually a single carrier's quote for a single profile, or an average of quotes from a small panel of carriers, presented without the profile that would make it checkable. Publishing such a figure as "the average" would mislead more than it would inform, so we do not publish it.

The same reasoning applies to "cheapest life insurance" claims. A cheapest list is only honest if the prices were collected for the same profile, at the same time, by the same method, and the method is printed on the page. Until we have a real price-collection method with published results, there is no cheapest list on this site. Our future plan is to build a public-data ratings list from the NAIC Complaint Index and AM Best ratings, with the method printed on the page, and to collect sample rates by shopping fixed profiles on carriers' own websites. Neither exists yet, and neither will be published until it does.

What we do not do

• We do not publish life insurance premiums. Every life insurance premium on this site is Quote-only: no price figure appears on the entry at all, not even a "from" figure. The entry links to the carrier's own quote route instead.
• We do not invent ratings. No carrier rating appears without its source, scale, and date stated on the same card. No "best company" verdict is drawn from anything less than a published method.
• We do not publish savings claims. No savings figure appears unless the basis (who saved, versus what, over what period, from what data, dated) is stated beside it in the same view. If the basis cannot be stated, the figure does not appear.
• We do not give financial or medical advice. Our pages explain how life insurance works and what to compare. They do not tell you how much cover you need, which type suits you, or whether a policy is right for your health or finances. Those are questions for a licensed adviser.
• We do not take payment for placement. No carrier pays to appear, to rank higher, or to be shown first. Carrier entries are listed by the cover they offer, not by any payment.
• We do not show carrier logos, "Buy now" buttons, or lead-generation funnels. We ask for your ZIP code and basic facts only. We never ask for contact details, and nothing you enter travels to a carrier.

How often we update

Pages are reviewed at least every six months; the next review is due May 2027. Carrier facts are re-checked against the carrier's own published information at each review. When a carrier changes its cover options or a state changes a rule, the page is updated and the "Last reviewed" date changes with it. When a source publishes a correction, we correct the figure and add a correction note under our corrections policy.

Limitations: read this before you decide

• No comparison covers every insurer. Carriers that do not publish usable information, write only in a few states, or sell only through agents may not appear here at all. Check a carrier's own site for the final price and the full policy wording.
• The policy document is the contract. Our pages summarise cover; they do not replace the policy. Exclusions, waiting periods, and definitions are in the policy wording, and the wording governs.
• A life insurance decision involves your health, your family, and your finances. Nothing on this site is financial or medical advice.
• Sorting, filtering, and side-by-side comparison need JavaScript. Without JavaScript the full comparison is shown on the page, but it cannot be re-sorted, filtered, or compared side by side in the browser.

Sources

1. State departments of insurance and state statutes, as cited on each page (rules, free-look periods, contestability, grace periods).
2. Carrier-published policy information (cover types, term lengths, conversion and renewal options, quote routes).
3. National Association of Insurance Commissioners, Complaint Index (public index, three-year window). https://www.naic.org/
4. AM Best, financial strength ratings (as cited where shown). https://www.ambest.com/

Questions or corrections: hello@countrypilot.net (email only) or our corrections policy. Content reviewed by editors Enu Zehra and Ms. Kakka.

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See also: How we calculate averages · Editorial policy · Corrections policy