Annuity company ratings: financial strength, explained.

Why does an annuity company's financial strength matter?

When you buy an annuity, you are trading money today for a promise that may need to hold up for thirty years or more. There is no vault with your name on it. The promise is a claim on the insurer's general account, which means claims-paying ability, the company's capacity to pay every contract it has issued, on time, in full, for decades, is the thing you are actually buying.

Bank deposits get FDIC insurance. Annuities do not. If a bank fails, a federal agency steps in up to the insured limits. If an insurer fails, the process runs through state regulators instead: the state takes the company into receivership, and in most past failures another insurer has taken over the contracts. State guaranty associations provide a limited backstop with caps that vary by state, and insurers are legally barred from using that backstop as a selling point. Treat it the way regulators intend: a last resort, not a substitute for picking a strong company in the first place.

That is why financial strength deserves as much attention as the product brochure. A generous-looking contract from a shaky company is not generous. The good news is that judging strength does not require an accounting degree. Three public tools do most of the work: agency ratings, the COMDEX summary score, and the NAIC complaint index. The rest of this page walks through each one, then puts about twenty major annuity companies side by side so you can see how the pieces read in practice. If you are still learning how the products themselves work, start with what is an annuity and types of annuities.

Any annuity guarantee is backed by the claims-paying ability of the issuing insurer; it is not FDIC-insured or bank-guaranteed.

How do you read AM Best, S&P, and COMDEX?

AM Best is the oldest of the rating agencies, founded in 1899, and the only major one that focuses exclusively on insurance. Its financial strength scale runs from A++ at the top down to D. The letters come in labeled pairs: A++ and A+ are Superior, A and A- are Excellent, and B++ and B+ are Good. Everything B+ and above sits in what AM Best calls its secure range; B and below is classified as vulnerable. Because AM Best rates nearly every insurer that matters, its rating is usually the first one to check.

S&P Global Ratings uses the scale most people know from bonds: AAA at the top, then AA, A, BBB, and on down, each notch modified with a plus or minus. For insurer financial strength, AAA means extremely strong, AA very strong, A strong, and BBB good. Moody's and Fitch run similar scales. The agencies do not always agree with each other, and a one-notch difference between two strong companies rarely means much. What deserves attention is the neighborhood a company lives in and the direction it is moving, which is why each rating also carries an outlook of stable, positive, or negative.

COMDEX answers a practical problem: four agencies, four different alphabets. It converts every rating a company holds into a percentile and averages them into a single score from 1 to 100. A COMDEX of 95 means the company's ratings stand higher than about 95 percent of rated insurers. Two cautions. It is published by third-party data services, not by a rating agency, so it is a summary tool rather than an official opinion. And it only exists for companies rated by at least two agencies, so a missing COMDEX does not automatically mean a weak company.

One habit keeps all three tools honest: check the date. Ratings carry effective dates and get upgraded and downgraded as companies change hands, merge, and shift their investments. A rating printed in a brochure may already be stale by the time you read it.

What is the NAIC complaint index?

Ratings measure whether a company can pay. The complaint index hints at how it behaves along the way. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the body of all fifty state insurance regulators, collects the complaints consumers file with state insurance departments and publishes a complaint index for each company through its Consumer Information Source at naic.org.

The math is simple. The index compares a company's share of complaints to its share of business. A score of 1.00 means the company drew exactly the complaints you would expect for its size. A 0.50 means half as many as expected. A 2.00 means twice as many. Because the tool is run by regulators and covers closed complaints rather than online reviews, it is one of the cleaner behavior signals available to the public.

Three tips for using it well. Look at the index for the specific line of business, since a company's annuity operation can behave differently from its auto or health business. Look at more than one year, because a single bad year can reflect one product hiccup rather than a pattern. And read small companies gently, since a handful of complaints can swing a small insurer's index dramatically.

How do about twenty major annuity companies compare on financial strength?

The table below puts the tools to work. It lists, in alphabetical order, about twenty of the companies retirees most often meet when shopping for fixed, fixed-indexed, and income annuities, with each company's AM Best and S&P ratings, its COMDEX score, the annuity families it offers, its founding year, and one honest line about what it is known for. There are no rates here, no rankings, and no picks. The point is to show you how the strength picture reads so you can verify it yourself.

Listed alphabetically. This table is educational information only. It is not a ranking, and it is not a recommendation of any company or product. Annuity Explained does not sell insurance and receives nothing from any company listed here.

Ratings shown are as of July 2026 and simplified to the two most commonly quoted agencies plus COMDEX. Ratings change; verify the current rating before relying on it. AM Best ratings are the independent opinion of AM Best and are reproduced here with attribution; for the latest Best's Credit Rating, access www.ambest.com. S&P insurer financial strength ratings are the independent opinion of S&P Global Ratings, reproduced here with attribution; verify the current rating at spglobal.com/ratings. COMDEX values are composite percentile scores published by third-party data services and are approximate. "Not rated" means the company does not currently engage that agency, which is not by itself a negative signal.

"Annuity families" reflects the fixed, fixed-indexed, and income annuity lines this site covers. Many of these companies also issue products outside that scope, including variable annuities, which are securities and are not covered here. All annuity guarantees, from every company on this list, are backed by the claims-paying ability of the issuing insurer and are not FDIC-insured or bank-guaranteed.

How do you check an annuity company yourself?

Fifteen minutes of homework covers the essentials, and every source below is public. Do this before any contract is signed, no matter who proposed it.

1. Look up the AM Best rating at ambest.com. Search the insurer by its exact legal name, since large groups issue through several companies. Note the rating, the outlook, and the effective date. The rating that matters is the one on the specific company issuing your contract.
2. Check a second agency. S&P, Moody's, and Fitch publish insurer financial strength ratings, and most insurers list all of their current ratings with dates on the financial strength page of their own website. Two agencies telling the same story is worth more than one.
3. Pull the complaint record at the NAIC's Consumer Information Source. At naic.org, search the company and read its complaint index for the annuity line across the last three years. A pattern above 1.00 deserves questions.
4. Verify the license with your state's department of insurance. Every state lets you confirm an insurer is authorized to do business where you live, and many, such as the Texas Department of Insurance, publish their own complaint data too. An unlicensed company is a full stop.
5. Ask for it in writing. Any licensed professional proposing a specific annuity should hand you the issuing insurer's current ratings, with agency names and dates, without being nudged. Hesitation on that request tells you something useful.

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