The Fairer Finance Trust in Insurance Index - Spring 2026

How has the public' s trust in insurance providers been changing?

 At Fairer Finance, we’ve been tracking public opinion of insurance providers for over 10 years. Every six months we poll 10,000 customers through our partner Opinium, and ask them:

‘Based on everything you know about this insurer, to what extent would you agree or disagree with the following statement - “I trust (name of their insurer)”’.

We use these responses to create a trust score^[1] for each brand in every sector. These scores are used to track the public’s trust in insurers through our Trust in Insurance Index. We take away the negative responses from positive ones and double-weight the extremely positive and negative responses. This gives a single number to measure trust and puts extra weight on strong opinions.

The Autumn 2025 Index showed trust scores improving slightly in all sectors, following several waves of small declines after the Spring 2023 peak. The Spring 2026 data shows a small increase in trust in the car and travel insurance sectors, with pet and home insurance scores staying stable.

Insurance prices started to come down in 2025 after several years of sharp increases and this has continued at the start of 2026. The confused.com car price index shows that car insurance prices had fallen 9% year on year in February 2026, potentially driving the improving trust scores in that sector.

Most and least trusted brands

 In pet insurance John Lewis has seen the biggest improvement in its trust score, jumping nearly 7 percentage points to reach 65.66%. This improvement has moved them to the top of the larger pet insurers in our ratings (those with a sample size over 100 in our survey). The highest score in the sector goes to the Royal Kennel Club with a score of 65.78%. RSPCA also saw a big jump, increasing by about 5 percentage points to 64.64%. The table below shows the top 5 and bottom 5 of the larger pet insurers.

In car insurance, Zenith saw the biggest improvement, rising nearly 8p.p to reach a score of 44.46%. The highest score in car insurance belongs to BMW with 79.86%, beating out second place NFU Mutal on 78.27%. The table below shows the top 5 and bottom 5 larger car insurance providers by trust score (only those with a sample size over 100).

Amongst the major insurers (those with a sample size over 1000) the strongest car insurance performers are Saga (61.40%), AA (61.04%) and Tesco Insurance (58.88%). At the other end of this group are Hastings Direct (49.74%), Admiral (53.11%) and Churchill (54.45%). The chart below shows how the trust scores of the major car insurers have moved over the past 5 years. Saga and AA have been the top two insurers in this group every wave since Autumn 2021, while Hastings Direct have trailed well below the others in every period. AXA was the most improved of the major car insurers, increasing it’s score by 2.68 percentage points from Autumn 2025.

Trust by claim status

Within our pet insurance data 13 brands had a big enough sample that over 100 people had both made a claim with that brand and not claimed. The general trend shows that customers who have made a claim tend to trust their provider more. For these 13 brands the average trust score for those who’ve claimed was 7.7 percentage points higher than those who haven’t (61.6% vs 53.9%). This isn’t surprising as people who have claimed will have gotten use out of their insurance, unless the process was difficult you’d expect them to trust the brand more following a claim. Amongst these 13 larger brands the only exception to this trend was Direct Line. They had the highest trust score amongst those who hadn’t claimed (63.2%), but the lowest score amongst those who have claimed (56.3%). This suggests that although the Direct Line brand name carries a strong sense of trust amongst pet insurance customers, the claims process is damaging that for some of their customers. The brand with the biggest jump was LV=, their scores amongst customers who have claimed was the highest of the 13 largest brands (72.7%) and 20 percentage points above their trust score amongst those who hadn’t claimed (52.7%). The graphs below show the gaps for the 13 biggest pet insurers and trust scores for both those who have and haven’t claimed.

The trust gap in car insurance shows a similar picture. Of all the brands with at least 100 customers in both the claimed and not claimed groups (13 in total) the average gap is 5.7 percentage points, and all but one have a positive value (meaning those who have claimed are trusting their provider more). As in pet insurance LV= has a large gap (at 10.3 percentage points) but in car insurance this is behind Saga (10.7 percentage points) and Aviva who jump 13.2 percentage points from 53.6% to 66.9%. The exception in car insurance is RAC who fall 5.6 percentage points to sit on a trust score of 53.1% for those who have made a claim, ahead of only esure (48.1%) and Hastings Direct (50.7%) amongst this cohort. RAC have the third highest trust score amongst those who haven’t claimed, behind the AA and Saga. The graphs below show the gaps and trust scores amongst the different cohorts in car insurance.

Trust by vulnerability

We ask participants in our survey about several characteristics that can indicate vulnerability, for example people on low incomes, people who struggle to pay bills or have a health condition. We track the trust scores for participants who indicate they have any one of these vulnerabilities and can compare that against those participants who don’t. This enables us to calculate the gap in trust between those customers who have characteristics of vulnerability and those that don’t. In car insurance we have 15 brands who have a sample of at least 100 customers in both the vulnerable and not vulnerable cohorts. For every one of these brands the trust scores are higher amongst the not vulnerable customers. AXA has the largest gap with vulnerable customers’ trust scores nearly 9 percentage points below the score for non-vulnerable customers. While AXA come 3^rd out of 15 amongst the larger car insurers in the not vulnerable group, in the vulnerable cohort they drop to 8^th.

Ageas has the smallest difference in trust scores between vulnerable and not vulnerable customers at just 0.1 percentage point, this means they jump from 12^th amongst the not vulnerable customers to 9^th amongst those that are vulnerable. AA has the highest trust score for the vulnerable customer group, while Saga is highest for those that aren’t vulnerable. The graph below shows the trust score gap between vulnerable and not vulnerable customers across the larger car insurers.

Claims Satisfaction

Claims satisfaction scores improved across all 4 major insurance sectors in our Spring 2026 index - although they still sit some way below their 2017/18 peak. Travel insurance saw the biggest improvement jumping from an average of 53.70% in Autumn 2025 to 59.11%. Claim Satisfaction in Travel insurance has now jumped ahead of Home insurance, with Pet insurance still showing the highest levels of claim satisfaction across the insurance sectors. The average across all 4 sectors now sits at 60.03%, the highest it’s been since 2019. Claims satisfaction scores have been improving since bottoming out in Spring 2024, this was the result of a nearly 5 year trend of declining scores. The claims satisfaction scores over time can be seen in the graph below.

Amongst the larger pet insurance providers LV= had the most improved claims satisfaction score, rising from 70.6% in Spring 2025 to a score of 79.3%, the highest score in the sector. More Than also had a big increase moving from a score of 61.6% to 67.9%, placing it fourth overall in the larger pet insurers group. Pet Protect jumped by over 5 percentage points moving it from second bottom of the larger pet insurers in Autumn 2025 to 5^th place this wave. At the other end of the table Healthy Pets Insurance dropped to second last after being one of the few brands to see a decline in claims satisfaction scores, Direct Line was the only other larger brand to see a decline in claim satisfaction score. The table below shows the best and worst performing larger brands by claims satisfaction scores.  

In car insurance Saga and 1^st Central saw big improvements of over 5p.p in their claims satisfaction scores. Despite this improvement  1^st Central still sit in the bottom 5 of the larger car insurance providers, but they have moved from the bottom position they held in Autumn 2025. Saga now sits in 1st place amongst this group after improving by 7.6 percentage points to a score of 71.4%. RAC fell by 2.6 percentage points and now have the lowest claim satisfaction score amongst the larger car insurers, the only other car insurer to see a fall in claim satisfaction scores was Admiral who dropped 2.2 percentage points. The table below shows the top 5 and bottom 5 from this group.

Amongst the major car insurers, LV= and Saga have taken the top 2 spots for claims satisfaction score in almost every wave for the past 5 years with LV= at the top for 6 waves until Saga reclaimed top spot this wave. In a similar story to the trust scores, Hastings Direct has tended to fall last amongst the major insurers for claims satisfaction, this changed in the Spring 2026 wave as Hastings Direct made improvements while RAC and Admiral saw their claims satisfaction scores drop. RAC did sit third for claim satisfaction amongst the larger car insurers back in 2023 but they have been dropping almost every wave since then to now sit at the bottom of the group. Admiral’s declining score this wave means they now sit only marginally above Hastings Direct at the bottom of the group. The chart below shows the major car insurers' claims satisfaction scores over time.

^[1] The question has the following options: "strongly agree", "agree", "neither agree nor disagree", "disagree" and "strongly disagree". The trust index score is calculated using the following formula: ((% answering strongly agree x 2) + (% answering agree) + (% answering disagree x -1) + (% answering strongly disagree x -2))/ 2. We use this formula to subtract those who distrust a provider from those who trust them, to give additional weight to those answering strongly agree and strongly disagree, and to create a single score to compare sectors and track change over time.