There are a lot of indexes published that measure trust in various industries. One that caught my attention recently is the Fairer Finance Spring 2026 Trust in Insurance Index.
Executive Summary
There's about a 50-50 chance that customers will say they trust their insurers, according to most surveys available on the subject, although a recent survey by a UK consultancy puts trust levels up a little higher—at 54%.Research also bears out the connection between seeing insurance in action—during the claims process—and the level of trust customers have in their insurers. But how much does it matter? There's no new data on that subject, but an analysis from earlier in the decade that shows a 30% boost in trust from eliminating bad claims experiences deserves some attention.
It wasn’t the companies ranked by customer trust levels that drew my interest. The customer experience consultancy and research group focuses on UK companies, and I mainly follow insurers in the U.S. Instead, the interesting bit for me included a line graph showing upward trends in the percentage of the 10,000 insurance customers who said they trust their insurers for various personal lines—54.4% in Spring 2026 vs. 43.3% in Spring 2017—and several encouraging nuggets of information about the impact of claims on trust levels.
According to survey data across four lines analyzed by Fairer Finance—car, home, pet and travel—the average claims satisfaction score reached 60.0%, which was the highest level since 2019. On top of that, “customers who have made a claim tend to trust their provider more,” the report said. For pet insurance, the average trust score for those who had a claim was 7.7 percentage points higher than those who hadn’t (61.6% vs. 53.9%), and for car insurance, the comparable gap was 5.7 points, based on averages tallied for brands that had at least 100 customers in both the claimed and not claimed groups. While the trust scores for claim and no-claim respondents were not reported for car, the average trust level for car insurers was 54.4%. For one insurer, Aviva, the trust score for customers who made a claim was nearly 67% vs. 53.6% for those who had not filed a recent claim—a gap of 13.2 points.
