- Insurance executives take home huge salaries, bonuses and stock options
- Policyholders hit with big premium hikes, widespread non-renewals
- Insurance costs up 24% from 2021 to 2024, the study found
Being a top insurance executive is pretty sweet but for millions of policyholders, insurance is a bittersweet topic, thanks to steadily rising premiums and increasing non-renewals that leave consumers with no way to protect their precious investments, according to a study by the Consumer Federation of America (CFA).
“2024 was a bad year for policyholders, but another great year for insurance company shareholders and their CEOs,” said Michael DeLong, CFA’s Research and Advocacy Associate. “Insurance companies told regulators they had to charge consumers billions more in 2024 to stay afloat, but customers were just paying the price for insurer greed and executive excess.”
The study found that CEOs at the nation’s ten largest insurance companies received over $134 million in total compensation in 2024 and over $391 million over the past three years.
Meanwhile, from 2021 to 2024 homeowners insurance costs increased by 24% nationwide, well above the rate of inflation. And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, auto insurance costs were 7% higher in May 2025 compared to May 2024. At the same time as insurance companies have claimed no other option but to raise consumer prices, industry profits skyrocketed in 2024 to $169 billion, CFA said.
Execs earn, consumers struggle
Across the country, consumers have been struggling to keep up with the unrelenting escalation of premiums and have had difficulty finding coverage in recent years. For example:
- A New York Times analysis found that in 2023, insurance non-renewal rates rose in 46 states.
- The Wall Street Journal reported that homeowners insurance rates have increased by 30% or more since 2023 in at least nine states, including Arizona, Iowa, and Utah.
- In July 2025, State Farm hiked homeowners insurance rates by 27% in Illinois, which prompted calls for strengthening insurance regulation in the state. This month, the state sued State Farm for refusing to comply with state examination requirements that it provide data about its insurance policies in Illinois.
CFA has called on lawmakers throughout the country to adopt strong “prior approval” oversight of insurance company rates, which requires insurers to disclose and justify both their claims costs and their administrative expenses, including executive compensation, to state regulators. CFA points to the California Department of Insurance rule that limits the amount of executive compensation that can be passed on to policyholders in their insurance rates as a model that other states should adopt.
Under this California rule, the Department of Insurance has a formula to determine the “maximum permissible executive compensation” for the five highest paid executives at the insurer. Any salary in excess of that is incorporated into an “excluded expense” calculation that is used to lower the rate that an insurer is allowed to charge California customers. This exclusion, along with a similar exclusion concerning what type of corporate advertising can be passed through to policyholders, saves Californians millions of dollars per year and should be adopted across the country.
“Most Americans are required to buy insurance products, which means that lawmakers and regulators have a special obligation to make sure the premiums we are charged are reasonable. That must include protecting policyholders’ pocketbooks from these extraordinary CEO pay packages that are currently pushed onto our premiums,” said CFA's DeLong.