As an online insurance marketplace, policycentral helps customers all over the country find the right homeowners insurance policy for their needs — without bias or favor toward any one company.
To that end, it was important to us that our home insurance reviews methodology reflected our customer-first mission, while also leveraging our vast library of resources, unique data points, and expert insights from our very own licensed agents.
After hours of research, data gathering, and fact-checking from our home insurance experts and operations specialists, we structured our methodology around four main factors with their own individual ratings: price, customer experience, coverage options, and financial strength. From there, we combined the category ratings to get the company’s overall policycentral rating.
Here are the four categories we used to calculate our overall policycentral ratings for home insurance reviews.
Price rating
Our price rating combines two cost-related metrics with different weights: the company’s average annual home insurance rate in 2022, and the total number of discounts it offers.
This category accounts for 35% of the company’s overall rating. If we don’t have cost data for the company, then we only factor the number of available discounts into its price rating.
Average annual premium (90%): We calculated each company’s average annual premium for a 40-year-old female homeowner with no claim history, good credit, a $1,000 deductible, and the following coverage limits: dwelling ($300,000), other structures ($30,000), personal property ($150,000), loss of use ($60,000), liability ($300,000), and medical ($1,000).
Discounts (10%): Number of discounts offered by each company.
Customer experience rating
Our customer experience rating combines company scores from three J.D. Power surveys and the National Association of Insurance Commissioner’s (NAIC) National Complaint Index Report.
This category accounts for 20% of the company’s overall rating. If a company wasn’t included in J.D. Power’s studies, then we left it blank and it wasn’t factored into the overall customer experience rating.
J.D. Power customer satisfaction score (40%): Rates companies based on customer interaction, policy offerings, price, billing process and policy information, and claims.
J.D Power claims satisfaction score (25%): Rates companies based on claim settlement, claim servicing, final notice of loss, estimation process, and repair process.
J.D. Power digital experience score (10%): Rates companies based on desktop and mobile web experience by looking at the following factors: ease of navigation, speed, visual appeal, information, and content.
NAIC Customer Complaint Index (25%): Scores whether or not the company receives more or less complaints than the average company.
Coverage options rating
Our coverage options rating is based on both the number and quality of additional coverage and policy options offered by the company. This category accounted for 20% of the company’s overall rating, and awards points for each of the following coverages or services if they were detailed on the company’s website.
1 point
Flood insurance
Earthquake insurance
Windstorm insurance
Identity theft
Scheduled personal property
Water backup
Replacement cost for personal property
Equipment breakdown
Service line
Home business
Sinkhole
Ordinance or law
Bundle with auto coverage
Friendly toward dog owners
More than $1 million in liability coverage
Umbrella insurance
Wildfire mitigation services
Other risk mitigation services
Covers homes over 100 years old
Inflation guard
Other coverage not listed (1 point for each)
2 points
Extended replacement cost dwelling coverage
3 points
Guaranteed replacement cost dwelling coverage
Financial strength rating
Our financial strength rating combines average scores from the major credit-rating agencies: AM Best, S&P Global Ratings, and Moody’s Investor Services. These ratings provide an important barometer for whether a company has the financial stability to pay out claims in the event of an economic downturn or major natural disaster.
This category accounts for 25% of the company’s overall rating. If it hasn’t been rated by one or more of the Big Three credit-rating agencies, then it isn’t factored into its overall financial strength rating.
AM Best rating (70%): We scored each company based on their rating with AM Best — the insurance industry’s leading credit rating agency.
S&P rating (15%): The S&P rates insurance companies’ long-term ability to pay out claims.
Moody’s rating (15%): Moody’s rates insurance companies’ ability to repay short and long-term debts.
Overall policycentral rating
Once we researched and collected the requisite information for each category, we converted the raw data for each category to a standardized z-score between -3 and 3. A z-score is a calculation of how much higher or lower the company’s rating or value for a given category compares to the overall average.
For example, a company’s price rating is largely based on how its average annual premiums compare to the overall average of the 50 other companies we’re reviewing. This not only adds an important layer of objectivity to our ratings, but it also incorporates the comparison-based ethos at the core of Policygenius.
After converting the raw data to the same standardized scale, we combined the scores according to their individual rating category. We then took the weighted average of the scores to get the company’s category rating — converted to a 1 to 5 scale.
Finally, we calculated the weighted average of the category ratings to get each company’s overall policycentral rating, rounded to the nearest tenth of a decimal.
