Kemper auto insurance review 2026
A specialist in non-standard auto for drivers other insurers decline. Judge it against that market, not against State Farm.
- Market share
- 0.8% of U.S. auto
- AM Best rating
- A-
- Availability
- 38 states, specialising in non-standard auto
A national average is not a quote. Compare Kemper against 50+ insurers on your own ZIP, vehicle, and record.
How Kemper 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 Kemper does well
- Writes drivers that standard carriers decline — DUIs, lapses, poor credit, suspended licences
- 38-state footprint, wide for a specialist
- Kemper Co-Pilot offers a 10% signup discount, unusual in the non-standard market
- AM Best A- (Excellent), with a publicly traded parent
Where it falls short
- Far more complaints than expected for its size
- Exited the preferred market entirely in 2023 — this is no longer a general-market insurer
- App ratings are poor, and the current listing is too new to judge fairly
- Non-renewed roughly 67,900 California auto and home policies during its restructuring
The full review
Kemper is the seventeenth-largest private passenger auto insurer in the country on 2024 premiums, with 0.83% of the market. That figure understates how different it is from the other carriers at that scale, because in August 2023 Kemper exited the preferred home and auto business entirely — roughly $500 million of written premium across eight underwriting companies — and now concentrates on non-standard and specialty auto.
Why the price comparison is misleading
Our benchmark profile is a 35-year-old with a clean record and good credit, and Kemper quotes that driver $2,422 a year — slightly above the national average. But that driver is not Kemper's customer. Kemper writes people with at-fault accidents, violations, DUIs, coverage lapses, suspended licences and poor credit, and for those drivers the relevant comparison is not Geico's $2,023. It is whether anyone will write them at all.
Kemper draws far more complaints than its size predicts. That is a real number and we are not going to explain it away.
It is also true that non-standard carriers systematically run high on this measure — the book is drawn from drivers in difficult circumstances, claims are more frequent, and disputes follow. Both things can be true, and a prospective customer should know both.
The 2023 restructuring
The exit from preferred lines was not a trim. Kemper non-renewed existing preferred policies, including roughly 67,900 personal auto and homeowners policies in California. If you were a Kemper customer before 2023 and had a clean record, the company you were with no longer sells the product you had.
Who it suits
Kemper suits a driver who has been declined or priced out elsewhere and needs coverage from a financially sound carrier — AM Best rates it A- (Excellent), which is better than several specialists in this market. It does not suit anyone the standard market will accept, and we would rather say that plainly than let a price comparison imply otherwise.
Kemper is the right answer to a specific question: what do you do when the standard market will not take you? For that driver it is a real, financially sound option with a wider footprint than most specialists. For everyone else it is the wrong comparison — if State Farm or Geico will quote you, they will almost certainly quote you better.
Compare Kemper head-to-head
Every pairing gets its own side-by-side breakdown across the same six categories.
Kemper questions, answered
The things people actually ask before switching.
Where Kemper sits in the market
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.
Kemper by state
Kemper writes in 38 states. If yours is not listed, it is not an option there at any price.
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