Last reviewed: 15 September 2026

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What the NAIC Complaint Index actually measures

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) publishes a real, checkable complaint index for insurance companies through its Consumer Information Source (CIS). It's a genuinely useful number — but it measures something narrower than most people assume, and it doesn't say anything at all about the specific agent who sold you a policy.

How the index is calculated

The NAIC calculates each insurer's complaint index by dividing that insurer's complaint ratio — complaints received per $1 million of premium written — by the industry median complaint ratio for the same line of business and state. A score of 1.0 represents the industry median for that specific line and state. A score of 2.0 means an insurer received roughly twice as many complaints per premium dollar as the median company selling that same line of business in that same state; a score of 0.5 means about half as many. The index is normalized this way specifically so a large national insurer with more total complaints isn't automatically penalized just for having more customers.

It's a carrier-level number, not an agent-level one

This is the part almost every secondary source glosses over: the Complaint Index is calculated for the insurance company — the carrier underwriting the policy — not for the individual agent or broker who sold it to you. There is no NAIC-published equivalent index scored at the level of an individual producer. A complaint filed against "how my claim was handled" typically gets attributed to the underwriting carrier in state complaint data, even when the actual interaction a customer is unhappy about was with their agent, not the carrier's claims department directly.

That means a genuinely excellent, licensed, disciplinary-record-clean agent can sell a policy underwritten by a carrier with an elevated complaint index — and, just as easily, an agent with real problems in their own conduct can sell policies from a carrier with a spotless one. The two facts are separate, and treating one as a proxy for the other is a mistake we specifically build our own standard to avoid: we report a carrier's complaint index only as background context about the products an agent sells, and we check an agent's own conduct — license status, appointment, disciplinary history, marketing practices — as its own, separately-evidenced set of points.

Where to actually look it up

The NAIC's Consumer Information Source (available through content.naic.org) lets you search complaint data for a specific insurance company, by state and line of business, directly from the regulators' own aggregated data — this is the primary source, not a summary written by a comparison site. If you want to check whether a company's complaint pattern is elevated relative to its size before buying a policy, this is the tool to use; if you want to check the person selling it to you, see our companion guide on how to check an agent's license instead — it's a genuinely different question with a genuinely different answer.