The Best Renters Insurance Companies
The best renter’s insurance companies offer comprehensive coverage, excellent customer service and claims processing – all at an affordable rate. Renters insurance can cover your personal belongings, additional living expenses if you’re unable to live in your rental temporarily, and it can even cover you if you are sued. Many landlords require tenants to have renters insurance, but it is a valuable protection that we would highly recommend renters have, whether or not it’s a requirement.
Choosing the right insurer to provide that protection can sometimes feel overwhelming, so we put together a list of the top renters insurance companies to help you get started in your search for the right fit for you. We looked for strong performance in the industry’s most trusted studies and rankings, with five companies standing out among the rest.
The 5 Best Renters Insurance Companies
Looking for the right insurer for you? We’re here to help. Check out our top-ranked renters insurance companies and see how they stack up when it comes to customer experience and financial stability:
Each of our categories was rated against the highest standards. We rewarded companies that have all of the rating factors we were looking for. So a lower category score doesn’t necessarily mean the company isn’t right for you, but the lower score stems from underperformance or missing results in key studies. To learn more about how we scored these categories, check out our methodology.
How To Find The Right Renters Insurance For You
1. Consider What Types of Coverage You Need
First, you’ll need to find out if you need renters insurance. If you’re renting or subleasing an apartment, the answer is likely yes, but it isn’t always the case. For children in college living in a dorm or at home, their parents’ homeowners or renters insurance will generally cover them. Next, you’ll need to decide who to include on your policy. Dependents will typically have limited coverage under your name, but if you have a roommate you will each need to be named on either individual policies or on a shared policy to be protected.
Once you know who you want covered, take into account where you live, because you may want to purchase additional coverage such as earthquake or flood insurance. Certain high-value property like jewelry or electronics might also require additional coverage beyond your standard policy. Then, you’ll want to decide whether you want to be covered for the actual cash value or replacement value of your property:
Actual cash value: This is the most common standard coverage offered and is typically your cheaper option, but that doesn’t always mean it’s your best choice. Actual cash value coverage will take the depreciation of your item into account when processing your claim, so if your TV is stolen and it’s five years old, you can expect a payout for what it would cost to buy a used, 5-year-old TV. Replacement value: We recommend finding a policy that insures your items for their replacement value because, unlike actual cash value, this coverage will calculate your payout based on how much it would cost to buy a new TV of the same size and quality as the one you had. This may cost a little more in monthly premiums, but it could make a major difference if you ever needed to use your coverage for a large loss.2. Estimate How Much of Each Coverage You Need
There are several main components to choosing the right amount of renters insurance coverage, once you’ve decided which coverages you need:
Personal belongings: Understand the amount of money you would need to replace everything you own, if necessary. It can be easy to underestimate this, so it helps to take an inventory of your possessions or use an online property calculator.Pay attention to any categories of belongings where you may have a lot of value, such as electronics, and make sure that you will have enough coverage for those when it comes time to pick your policy.
Personal liability: This coverage protects you if you are sued, so it is an important category to focus on if you have any risk factors that may make it more likely for this to happen to you. One common risk factor is owning a pet because there is a possibility that they might injure someone, even if it’s unintentional. Choosing your Deductible: Your deductible is what you will have to pay out of pocket before your insurance coverage will kick in, so make sure you choose a deductible that you will be able to afford to pay, if necessary. As you increase the deductible, you can decrease your premium, so you can balance these levels to work best for you.Remember: if you do have a roommate listed on your policy, make sure you’re considering their needs as well as yours when choosing these coverage levels.
3. Decide What Is Important to You in an Insurer
In order to narrow down your list of insurance companies to consider, take time to decide the key aspects of service you’re looking for from your insurer. Price is the driving force behind most renters insurance purchases, but we would encourage you to also look closely at the claims performance of potential insurers because if there ever comes a time when you need to use your policy, you’re going to want to be confident that your insurer will be there to help.
4. Request and Compare Quotes from Insurers
Once you know what coverage you’re looking for and which companies you’re interested in using, you can request custom quotes from each in order to find out which will offer you the best value of coverage. Most insurers today make it easy to request quotes online, with Lemonade, an insurance company, even claiming to offer a quote “in seconds,” and you can typically DIY experience or to talk to a representative over the phone. Whichever method you prefer, we recommend requesting at least three to five quotes before making your final decision and our top picks are a great place to start.
Reviews.com Renters Insurance Top Picks
USAA – Best for Military Members and Veterans
Reviews.com Score: 4.8/5
While USAA is only available to current and former military members and their families, if you do qualify for coverage, we would highly recommend that you request a quote. It offers the most comprehensive standard coverage out of our top picks, including flood and earthquake coverage and outperforms in every category we judged. With both an excellent customer experience score as well as some of the highest financial strength ratings, it has proven itself as an insurer you can rely on for both service and stability.
State Farm – Best for Coverage Options
Reviews.com Score: 3.8/5
State Farm is another insurer that impressed us overall with high J.D. Power rankings and strong financial strength. It earned a 5/5 overall in the 2019 J.D. Power Renters Insurance Study, but received just a 2/5 for its claims satisfaction. Although this doesn’t mean you will run into this issue, claims are one of the most important measures of an insurer so it is worth keeping in mind. State Farm does offer the most additional coverage options of our top picks, which may make it an attractive insurer if you’re looking for a more customized policy.
American Family Insurance – Best Value
Reviews.com Score: 3.6/5
American Family stood out to us for its range of both coverage options and discounts. Individual quotes will vary, of course, but it could offer great value if you’re looking to customize your policy and qualify for multiple discounts. For renters with a pet, pet insurance is even available as a unique add-on. American Family shined in its overall customer satisfaction earning the top spot on J.D. Power’s 2019 Renters Insurance Study, but it middled-out on another J.D. Power Study that measures property claims satisfaction.
Allstate – Best for Bundling
Reviews.com Score: 3.3/5
Allstate did not stand out in either customer experience or financial strength, but it did have solid, middle-of-the-road performance. We chose Allstate as our top pick for bundling because Allstate’s car insurance also has solid, reliable rankings, and keeping both policies with the same company can help you save money and simplify your life. Allstate also offers the option to bundle your renters policy with an umbrella liability policy, which is an add-on that can provide even more protection in case your liability ever exceeds your other applicable coverages.
Lemonade – Best DIY Digital Experience
Reviews.com Score: N/A
Lemonade insurance is a relatively new company, so it hasn’t yet been rated by many of the industry-leading agencies, which means we weren’t able to get enough information to give it a Reviews.com score. It is, however, a rapidly growing insurer that has attracted lots of consumer interest, with internet search traffic that rivals the largest insurers, and performed well on the measures we could check. Lemonade stood out to us as a tech-savvy option with a user-friendly quote tool and extensive online resources written in plain English. It also has a complaint ratio that is lower than expected in the market, even considering its size, but it does offer more simplified coverage that caters toward a younger crowd.Reviews.com Renters Insurance Methodology
We’re here to help you find the insurer that’s right for you, so we focused on the companies you (and lots of others) wanted to learn more about. We found out which renters insurance companies people are most interested in by gathering a list of the companies that had the highest online search volume, then put them to the test:
- We collected data about these top companies on two key measures: customer experience and financial strength.
- Customer experience: We looked for strong performance on key industry indicators such as J.D. Power’s Renters Insurance Study and data from the NAIC on customer complaints.
- Financial strength: We rewarded insurers that received top ratings from three large rating agencies: AM Best, S&P, and Moody’s, so companies that had fewer rankings had lower scores. Keep in mind, even if an insurer you are interested in does not have all of these ratings to boost their financial strength score, it doesn’t mean that they are an unreliable company. Insurance companies are regulated by state governments that advocate for insurers’ stability to help keep consumers safe.
- We converted that data into a standardized 5-point scale so we could compare each data point equally.
- We averaged those scores to get an overall score for each category.
- We weighted each category, giving a higher value to customer service than financial strength because while stability is important, large and well-established insurers are well regulated to keep the consumer safe. The measure that is more likely to help you decide whether an insurer is the right fit is its record of keeping other customers happy.
- We used these weights to arrive at our overall Reviews.com Score and to rank our top renters insurance companies of 2020.
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