Elephant auto insurance review 2026
An eight-state insurer, sold by Admiral to a private equity firm at the end of 2025, with no AM Best rating and a below-average complaint record.
- Market share
- Outside NAIC top 25
- AM Best rating
- Not published
- Availability
- 8 states
A national average is not a quote. Compare Elephant against 50+ insurers on your own ZIP, vehicle, and record.
How Elephant 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 Elephant does well
- Better complaint band than Root, Lemonade or Clearcover
- Positioned as a budget option in the eight states it serves
Where it falls short
- Only eight states
- No AM Best rating we could verify
- Ownership changed hands at the end of 2025 — it is no longer part of Admiral Group
- More complaints than expected for its size
The full review
Elephant writes auto insurance in eight states: Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. It has generally competed as a budget option in those markets.
It is no longer an Admiral company
Elephant was for years the US arm of Admiral Group, the UK insurer. Admiral completed the sale of Elephant Insurance Company and Elephant Insurance Services to J.C. Flowers & Co., a private equity firm, on 31 December 2025. Much of what has been written about Elephant predates that change and describes it as Admiral-owned. It is not.
A UK-listed insurance group and a private equity owner are different kinds of parent, with different time horizons and different reasons to hold the asset.
We are not predicting any particular outcome. But if you are weighing a carrier that has no financial strength rating, knowing who now stands behind it is part of the picture, and the widely available answer is out of date.
Where it sits against its peers
Elephant draws more complaints than its size predicts — worse than average, but a band better than Root, Lemonade and Clearcover, all of which sit in the worst band we assign. Like them, it carries no AM Best rating we could verify, and it is absent from the rate studies that would let us publish a comparable premium.
Elephant is the least alarming of the app-first insurers in this review, which is a low bar cleared rather than a recommendation. Its complaint band is one better than its peers and it serves only eight states. The ownership change and the absence of a verifiable financial strength rating both argue for treating it as a price-comparison candidate rather than a default.
We only publish a composite score when enough of it rests on published figures — at least 70% of the scoring weight, including price. Elephant falls below that: 5 of our six categories have no published figure (price, claims satisfaction, financial strength, discounts, digital experience). Averaging whatever is left would produce a confident-looking number built mostly on the categories that need no third-party study, and a carrier scored that way can easily outrank one we actually measured. The individual categories above are real; the missing ones are simply missing.
Compare Elephant head-to-head
Every pairing gets its own side-by-side breakdown across the same six categories.
Elephant questions, answered
The things people actually ask before switching.
Elephant by state
Elephant writes in 8 states. If yours is not listed, it is not an option there at any price.
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