The statistic presents the total number of life insurance companies in the United States from 1950 to 2016. In 2016, there were 797 U.S. life insurers.
U.S. life insurance companies – additional information
Life insurance refers to the contract between an insurance policy holder and an insurer who agrees to pay a designated recipient a sum of money when the insurance policy holder dies or in some circumstances, depending on the contract, if they suffer from a terminal or a critical illness.
The number of life insurance companies operating in the U.S. has been in decline since 2001. As a result, the number of people employed by life insurance companies in the U.S. has also fallen. In 1990, the industry had approximately 522.6 thousand employees on its payroll. This figure has steadily fallen every year since and reached 348.3 thousand employees in 2016. As with the number of companies and the number of employees, the number of insurance policies has also fallen year-on-year and in 2015, there were approximately 27.5 million policies purchased.
Metlife proved to be the largest life insurance company in the United States terms of assets and market capitalization.
