American Family auto insurance review 2026
A Midwestern insurer with a solid complaint record and two telematics programs — held back by an above-average price and a badly rated Android app.
- Market share
- 1.7% of U.S. auto
- AM Best rating
- A
- Availability
- 19 states, mostly the Midwest and West
A national average is not a quote. Compare American Family against 50+ insurers on your own ZIP, vehicle, and record.
How American Family scores
Each category is scored against a published figure, then weighted into the overall score. Where a figure is not published, we say so rather than estimate one.
Sources: average premiums from NerdWallet's August 2026 rate analysis (Quadrant Information Services), for a 35-year-old driver with a clean record and good credit in a 2023 Toyota Camry LE at 12,000 miles a year, 100/300/50 limits with $1,000 deductibles — national average $2,356. Claims satisfaction from the J.D. Power 2025 U.S. Auto Claims Satisfaction Study (segment average 700). Complaint record from NerdWallet's analysis of NAIC complaint data, 2022–2024. Financial strength from AM Best. Discounts and app data from each carrier's published pages and the Apple App Store / Google Play, retrieved August 2026. Updated August 2026.
Strengths and trade-offs
What American Family does well
- Fewer complaints than its size predicts
- Fourteen published discounts, including generational and young-volunteer discounts nobody else offers
- Two telematics options — DriveMyWay for behavior (10–35%) and MilesMyWay for low mileage (up to 25%)
- Steer Into Savings and Early Bird discounts reward shopping ahead of renewal
Where it falls short
- 18% above the national average on our benchmark profile
- Google Play rating of 3.0 — one of the two worst in this review
- Available in only 19 states, mostly the Midwest and West
- Claims satisfaction is barely above the segment average
The full review
American Family writes in 19 states, concentrated in the Midwest and West, and holds 1.72% of the national private passenger auto market on 2024 premiums. It sells through agents and has built its discount structure around long-term customer relationships more explicitly than most competitors.
What it costs
$2,785 a year for full coverage on our benchmark profile, 18% above the $2,356 national average. Minimum coverage averages $862. Neither figure is competitive against Geico, Travelers or Erie, and American Family's case depends on the discount stack closing the gap rather than on the base rate.
The discounts are the interesting part
Fourteen published discounts, several of which exist nowhere else in this review. There is a generational discount recognizing a parent's tenure with the company, a young-volunteer discount, an Early Bird discount for quoting before your current policy expires, and Steer Into Savings. Alongside them sit the usual multi-product, multi-vehicle, good-driving, accident-free and violation-free credits.
Two telematics programs
DriveMyWay scores driving behavior and publishes savings of 10–35%; MilesMyWay prices by mileage and publishes up to 25%. Worth noting for anyone comparing against older reviews: American Family's current pages list these two programs, not KnowYourDrive, the name still widely cited elsewhere. We could not confirm whether KnowYourDrive is retired, renamed, or still running for legacy policies.
4.72 on the App Store against 3.0 on Google Play. That is one of the widest platform gaps in this review and one of the two lowest Android scores.
If you are an Android user and expect to manage your policy through an app, this is worth weighing seriously rather than treating as a footnote.
How claims go
702 out of 1,000 in the J.D. Power 2025 study — two points above the segment average, which is to say average. The better signal is the complaint record: American Family draws fewer complaints than its size predicts, and that is the measure where it clearly outperforms.
American Family's complaint record is genuinely good and its discount list is more creative than most — the generational discount for children of long-tenured customers is a real differentiator. But at 18% above the national average with an average claims score and a 3.0 Android app, it needs the bundle and the telematics discount to make sense. Quote it, but quote it against Nationwide and Auto-Owners.
Compare American Family head-to-head
Every pairing gets its own side-by-side breakdown across the same six categories.
American Family questions, answered
The things people actually ask before switching.
Where American Family sits in the market
No published rate data, so no honest position on the horizontal axis: Liberty Mutual, NJM, Clearcover, Elephant, Lemonade, Root, Texas Farm Bureau. Below the J.D. Power study’s size threshold, so no position on the vertical axis: Kemper, Shelter, Chubb, COUNTRY Financial, MAPFRE, Plymouth Rock, The Hanover. That study samples only the largest insurers, so these carriers will not appear in a future wave either. Premiums from NerdWallet’s August 2026 analysis; claims scores from the J.D. Power 2025 U.S. Auto Claims Satisfaction Study. USAA is scored but not ranked in that study because it serves the military community only.
Not plotted, because no public rate data exists for them: Liberty Mutual, NJM, Clearcover, Elephant, Lemonade, Root, Texas Farm Bureau. Complaint bands from NerdWallet’s analysis of NAIC complaint data, 2022–2024 (2021–2023 for Liberty Mutual and Mercury). We show the band rather than a numeric complaint index on purpose — the per-carrier indexes published by different compilers contradict each other badly enough to be unusable, because the index is reported per underwriting subsidiary and most sources do not say which one they used.
American Family by state
American Family writes in 19 states. If yours is not listed, it is not an option there at any price.
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