Farmers auto insurance review 2026
A large national agent-based insurer with an average claims record — and the highest average premium in this entire review.
- Market share
- 3.8% of U.S. auto
- AM Best rating
- A
- Availability
- 40 states, through agents — the Farmers brand left Florida in 2023 and does not write in Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont or West Virginia
A national average is not a quote. Compare Farmers against 50+ insurers on your own ZIP, vehicle, and record.
How Farmers 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 Farmers does well
- Best-rated mobile app in this review on both platforms — 4.84 iOS and 4.7 Android
- Large agent network across the 40 states it writes in
- Complaint record close to what its size predicts
- Broad specialty and non-standard coverage options through the agent channel
Where it falls short
- The most expensive carrier in this review — 72% above the national average
- Claims satisfaction is ten points below the segment average
- Minimum coverage averages $1,266 a year, also the highest here
- Writes in only 40 states — the Farmers brand exited Florida in 2023
- Farmers blocks automated access to its own discount pages, so its published lineup could not be verified directly
The full review
Farmers is the sixth-largest private passenger auto insurer in the U.S., writing 3.76% of the market on 2024 premiums through an agent network. It has a long history in specialty and non-standard auto, which is part of why its average premium looks the way it does.
Where you can actually buy it
Farmers writes in 40 states — the smallest footprint of any carrier here that markets itself nationally. The notable absence is Florida, which the Farmers brand exited in 2023, dropping roughly 100,000 policies. One nuance worth keeping straight: Farmers' sister brands, including Bristol West and Foremost, do still write in Florida. So "Farmers the group" and "Farmers-branded auto insurance" are different answers to the same question, and a Florida driver told they have Farmers coverage most likely has one of the sister brands.
The price
$4,048 a year for full coverage on our benchmark profile. The national average is $2,356. That is 72% above average, the highest figure in this review, and roughly $2,000 a year more than Geico for the same 35-year-old with a clean record. Minimum coverage averages $1,266, also the highest here.
Some of this is mix rather than pricing: a book weighted toward non-standard risks pulls averages upward, and a driver with a clean record may be quoted far below the average. But our benchmark profile is a clean-record driver with good credit, which is precisely the case where a carrier should be competitive — and Farmers is not.
How claims go
690 out of 1,000 in the J.D. Power 2025 study, ten points below the segment average, ahead of only Progressive among the carriers in this review. Its complaint record is close to what its size predicts, which is the more neutral of the two figures.
Farmers blocks automated access to its own discount pages — every attempt returned a site-wide 'page currently unavailable' interstitial rather than content.
That means we could not confirm its discount list, its telematics program name, or any of the savings percentages that circulate in search results. We have deliberately not published figures we could not read on the carrier's own page. A human on a normal connection should capture this.
The app is genuinely excellent
4.84 on the App Store and 4.7 on Google Play — the best pairing of any carrier in this review, and the only one above 4.7 on both platforms. The rating base is smaller than Geico's or State Farm's, but the consistency across platforms is real and worth crediting.
Who it suits
Farmers makes sense when an agent has quoted you a specific number that works, or when your situation is unusual enough that a specialty carrier is the right answer. It does not make sense as a default. The one thing every driver considering Farmers should do is quote at least two other carriers alongside it.
Farmers is the hardest carrier in this review to recommend on the published data. At $4,048 a year it costs twice what Geico does for a claims score seven points lower, and its app — genuinely the best-rated here — does not begin to bridge that. If a Farmers agent has quoted you competitively for a specific situation, take that seriously; the national average says most drivers will do better elsewhere.
Compare Farmers head-to-head
Every pairing gets its own side-by-side breakdown across the same six categories.
Farmers questions, answered
The things people actually ask before switching.
Where Farmers 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.
Farmers by state
Farmers writes in 40 states. If yours is not listed, it is not an option there at any price.
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