How to compare life insurers

New Zealand has a small life insurance market by international standards, and a concentrated one. Reserve Bank analysis published in 2020 found the three largest life insurers wrote about 54% of New Zealand life premiums and the top five about 72%, with penetration well below the OECD average. The shape has not changed: a modest number of licensed underwriters, and a much larger number of brands sitting in front of them.

Total in-force life premiums reached an all-time high of $3.26 billion in the quarter ending 30 September 2025, according to the Financial Services Council, while the number of covers fell slightly. More premium, fewer policies.

The four ways cover reaches you

• Adviser-distributed insurers, sold through Registered Financial Service Providers, generally with the widest range and the most detailed wordings.
• Direct insurers, which sell online or by phone with a short application and no adviser involved.
• Bank and affinity brands, putting a familiar name on a policy usually underwritten by a licensed insurer behind it.
• Health insurers that also offer life and living cover, where the attraction is holding everything in one place.

Those channels compete less on price than on how much work is done for you. Adviser commission is generally built into the premium either way, so going direct removes a person rather than a cost.

Every comparison site is under commercial pressure to produce a ranked list, and every ranked list has the same defect: it ranks a product, when the thing being sold is a contract between one insurer and one person with one medical history. Three variables decide which insurer suits you, and none of them appears in a price table.

1. 1Your health history. Reinsurers take different views of the same condition, so one insurer might accept a treated thyroid condition at standard rates, another load it and a third exclude it. There is no public map of this.
2. 2Your occupation. Occupation class drives income protection and TPD pricing and availability far more than it drives life cover. An insurer competitive for an accountant can be uncompetitive, or simply unwilling, for a scaffolder.
3. 3What you are insuring for. An insurer with an excellent income protection wording and an ordinary trauma wording is the right answer for one household and the wrong one for the next.

Compare these — the dimensions on which New Zealand wordings genuinely diverge, roughly in the order they tend to matter.

1. 1Premium structure options. Whether level is available, which expiry ages you can choose, whether part of a policy can be level and part stepped, and — most often skipped — whether a level policy ends at expiry or converts to stepped at your attained age.
2. 2The terminal illness definition. Most policies pay early on a certified life expectancy of either 12 or 24 months. The 24-month version pays earlier and is easier to meet. Ask whether it reduces the death benefit.
3. 3Trauma conditions and definitions. Condition counts are close to meaningless — insurers split and group differently. What matters is how the four conditions producing most claims are defined, plus severity partials and buy-back.
4. 4TPD: which definition, and for how long. Own-occupation is far more useful than any-occupation and is not offered to every class. Ask which classes qualify, when the definition converts, and how unpaid home duties are treated.
5. 5Income protection mechanics. Agreed value availability, waiting and benefit periods, how ACC and other income are offset, and whether a booster exists. Offsets are where these claims disappoint.
6. 6Future insurability. The right to increase cover without new medical evidence after a birth, a house purchase or a salary rise. Triggers, caps and age cut-offs all differ.
7. 7Policy wording pass-back. Some insurers apply later wording improvements to policies already in force. On a contract you may hold thirty years that is worth real money, and it is not universal.
8. 8Underwriting appetite and evidence limits. Appetite is how the insurer and its reinsurer treat your history. Evidence limits are what you can apply for before tests or financial evidence are required. Only the second is knowable in advance.
9. 9Policy fees and discounts. Whether the fee is per policy or per life, and whether multi-benefit and multi-life discounts apply, can move a family’s total cost more than the underlying rates do. Ask for the household total.
10. 10Claims philosophy and dispute scheme. Every licensed insurer must belong to a free independent scheme — IFSO, FSCL, FDRS or the Banking Ombudsman. Ask which, and what claiming looks like from the family’s side.

Published comparisons do tell you one useful thing: the spread is large and persistent. On MoneyHub’s comparison of annual premiums for $500,000 of life cover, updated 11 June 2026, the figures quoted for a 40-year-old male non-smoker ran as follows, before discounts.

Read that for the shape, not the ranking. The gap between top and bottom is roughly a third of the premium, compounding over twenty-five years. But the order reshuffles as soon as the profile changes: on the same source, a 55-year-old smoker produces a different order entirely.

Several brands you can buy cover from are distribution names; the licensed insurer carrying the risk is a different company. Southern Cross Life & Living Insurance is underwritten by Chubb Life. Bank-branded life cover is almost always underwritten by a third-party insurer. Cigna’s New Zealand life business became Chubb Life.

• Ask, in writing, which licensed insurer underwrites the policy you are being offered.
• Check whether that insurer appears elsewhere on your shortlist under a different name.
• Check which dispute resolution scheme the underwriter belongs to — that is the scheme you would use.
• If your brand has changed hands, your contract terms do not change with it.

New Zealand life insurers are licensed and prudentially supervised by the Reserve Bank under the Insurance (Prudential Supervision) Act 2010, which requires capital against the risks they carry and a current financial strength rating. Market conduct is regulated by the Financial Markets Authority, and the Conduct of Financial Institutions regime has been in force since 31 March 2025.

Ratings from A.M. Best, S&P Global Ratings or Fitch express an agency’s opinion of an insurer’s ability to meet its obligations, not of how generously claims are assessed. They change, which is why this page quotes none — look up the current rating on the insurer’s own site.

On disputes, the Insurance & Financial Services Ombudsman scheme received 4,293 consumer approaches in the year to 30 June 2025 and accepted 600 for investigation, with life, health and disability insurance accounting for 29% of them. Complaint counts are not a quality ranking either, but a free independent scheme is a genuine protection.

It can be done without help. It takes longer than people expect, because the useful documents are not the brochures.

1. 1Write down what you are insuring: the mortgage balance, the years until the youngest child is independent, the income the household cannot lose. Products come after that.
2. 2Download the full policy wordings rather than the summaries. The wording is the contract; a brochure binds nobody.
3. 3Compare the ten dimensions above side by side — terminal illness, the big four trauma definitions, TPD conversion age, income protection offsets, future insurability, pass-back, fees.
4. 4Get matched quotes: same sum insured, waiting period, benefit period, premium structure and indexation at every insurer. If any differ, the comparison is meaningless.
5. 5Ask how each insurer would treat your history. This is the step you cannot really complete alone, because insurers will not pre-assess informally for a member of the public.

Every New Zealand insurer writes life and living cover to its own wording, and the words are where the money is. Two policies that look identical on price can pay very differently when it matters. Closing that gap is the entire job of an adviser.

• An adviser submits applications across the panel weekly and knows which insurer is currently taking a given history on the best terms — the variable no comparison table contains.
• An adviser can pre-assess a complicated history anonymously with several insurers before any formal application exists, so a decline never lands on your record.
• An adviser can split cover across two insurers where that beats putting everything with one — life cover where it prices best, income protection where the offset clause suits your ACC position.
• Policy fees and discounts mean the cheapest per-benefit rate is often not the cheapest household total.
• At claim, an adviser assembles the evidence and argues the definition — not a job a grieving family should learn from scratch.

There are three ways to buy life cover in New Zealand, and they are not equivalent. You can buy direct from one insurer, which means you see one product range and one underwriting appetite. You can buy through your bank, which usually means a single insurer’s product sold under the bank’s brand, often with narrower definitions. Or you can go through an adviser, who quotes several insurers at once and is required to put your interests first.

The premium you pay is the same either way. Insurers build adviser commission into their pricing whether or not an adviser is involved, so going direct does not get you a discount — it just removes the person whose job is to argue your corner at application and at claim time.

• An adviser can see which insurer is currently taking your health history on standard terms, and which one will load or exclude it.
• An adviser can structure cover across two insurers if that produces a better outcome than putting everything with one.
• An adviser handles the underwriting back-and-forth, and is the person who chases the claim when a family is least able to.
• An adviser has to document why the recommendation suits you, which is a written record you can hold them to.

We are a referral service, not an insurer. We do not quote premiums and we do not sell policies. What we do is put you in front of one licensed New Zealand adviser who can compare the market properly.

1. 1

   You tell us what you are looking at

   The form takes about a minute. Nobody asks for your medical history on a web form — that conversation happens with the adviser, properly, and only once you have decided to proceed.

2. 2

   An adviser calls you

   A licensed New Zealand adviser talks through your situation: who depends on you, what you owe, what you already have in place, and what you are actually worried about.

3. 3

   They compare the market

   The adviser quotes across the major insurers, checks which of them will take your health history on the best terms, and puts the options side by side in writing.

4. 4

   You decide, in your own time

   There is no obligation and no cost to you. If the answer is that you already have enough cover, a good adviser will tell you that.