Car Insurance Rating

Everything you buy today has some sort of rating and insurance companies are not exempt from the rating system. You want to deal with a company that has the best rating but how do you know who that is.? There are several companies that specifically rate the overall performance of an insurance company through different methods.

J. D. Powers and Associates is a company that collects information from policy holders throughout the United States and gives them a rating in accordance with their performance in: price, how they handle claims, were the representatives helpful, patient and polite, and other such questions. From the answers they receive from the individual policy holders they rate the performance of the insurance company.

A couple of the other companies that rate insurance carriers are A. M. Best and Standard & Poor’s. These two companies rate the insurance carrier not on how they treat the customers but on how they handle claims. When the average insurance consumer reviews these ratings it is generally only a formality. The better known insurance carriers are safe to deal with by reputation. The ratings are a good place to start if you are looking to work with an insurance carrier that is small and not well known. Then the time you invest in researching the ratings is well spent. If you want to research a company’s rating you can do so online at the websites of A. M. Best and Standard and Poor’s.

At A. M. Best they use a letter grade rating starting at A++ which is the highest rating down to a D. If there is some question about the solvency of a company it may be assigned a rating of E. If the insurance company is in liquidation (bankruptcy or Assignment for The Benefit of Creditors, etc.) it will be rated with the letter F. If the insurance company has had its license suspended the letter rating would be an S. The safest companies for you to work with if you are looking for car insurance is a company with a B+ rating.

At Standard & Poor’s the letter ratings start at AAA which is the highest rate to a CC. Insurance companies that are under regulatory supervision will receive a rating of R and this means the company is “not rated.” Some of the letter grades may have a + (plus) or a – (minus) along with it. If you are looking at the Standard & Poor’s ratings then consider those companies that have a BBB rating, which will be your safest bet.

If you want additional information about a particular insurance carrier you can go to get additional information from your State’s Department of Insurance. There is one in every state and they each have a website. The Department of Insurance publishes what is called a “Consumer Complaint Ratio” for all of the insurance companies that do business in that state. This Ratio will let you know how many complaints your car insurance company has received against them.