How we rank annuities

Rates, terms, riders, surrender schedules and state availability come from Annuity Rate Watch, which aggregates carriers' filed rate sheets. We refresh it every night. Six things ARW does not carry — the minimum guaranteed surrender value, death benefit details, required-minimum-distribution treatment, annuitization options, waiver riders, and free-withdrawal narrative — come from the carrier's own brochure, and are shown with the date we extracted them.

Where the two sources disagree about a contract term, the brochure wins: it is the filed document. Where neither source carries a fact, the page omits it. We do not fill gaps with estimates.

Every night, for each published product, we compute a percentile against every comparable contract in the rate feed — not just the ones we happen to publish a page for. The peer group is the product's class and its surrender-length band (3–5, 6–7, 8–10, or 11+ years). Percentile is the share of peers the product beats, with ties split evenly. We display it as a quartile rather than a raw percentile because quartiles do not flap from one night's repricing to the next.

The metric depends on the product class. Fixed-rate contracts (MYGAs) are ranked on guaranteed yield to surrender — never on a headline first-year rate, because a first-year interest bonus can make a mediocre contract look like the best on the market. Fixed-indexed contracts are ranked on comparable annual S&P 500 caps, with volatility-controlled, fee-bearing, spread-based and sub-100% participation strategies excluded, because those are not like-for-like with a plain annual cap. Income products are ranked on guaranteed income per $100,000 of premium.

Where a contract quotes different rates at different premium levels, standing is computed on the best band it offers. The page always shows every band, so you can see which rate applies to the money you actually have.

If a product has fewer than 8 comparable contracts to be measured against, the page shows its rates and terms and says nothing about where it stands. A quartile drawn from a handful of contracts is noise, and dressing it up as a ranking would be worse than staying quiet. The same applies to any product with no current quote in the data: facts, no claim.

Standing is also not a recommendation. It says how a contract's numbers compare with its peers today — nothing about whether an annuity suits you, and nothing about what the carrier will pay at renewal. Separately, we only recommend products from carriers rated B++ or better by A.M. Best. Products below that floor still get an honest page; they do not appear in our recommendations.

Fixed-rate band approximation. The peer universe for a fixed-rate contract is banded on the guarantee term of each rate in the feed, while an individual product page is placed in a band by its surrender period. On most contracts these are the same number. Where they differ — a five-year rate guarantee sitting inside a ten-year surrender schedule, for example — the product is compared against contracts whose guarantee runs as long as its surrender charge does. We do not adjust for that, and we say so on the page rather than quietly correcting the number.

Income standing is computed per age cell. Income quotes vary by issue age and by how long payments are deferred, and carriers file different issue-age windows, so there is no single population to rank the whole income market against. Each product is scored at its quoted age nearest 62 with the deferral nearest five years, against the other products quoted at that same age and deferral — typically ten to seventeen contracts. That is why an income standing names no surrender band: the comparison is an age cell, not a band.

Published income pages skew low against the quoted market. The highest-paying income contracts are concentrated in carriers whose brochures we do not hold, so they sit in the peer denominator without having a page of their own. The result is that our published income pages cluster below the middle of the market they are measured against. That is expected rather than a defect — the same effect is visible on our rates page.

Product pages are composed at render time. The facts come from the data described above; the explanatory prose comes from a fixed library of reviewed passages, each of which renders only when the facts it describes are actually present. A passage that would state something we do not know does not run. Any per-product observation that falls outside the library — a contract with an unusual clock, an allowance narrower than the category norm — is written once as a short callout and shown as such.

Because pages are composed rather than hand-written, a rate change reaches every page that quotes it the night it happens. Nothing on a product page is a number somebody typed and forgot.

Nothing on this site is a recommendation to buy a specific contract, and nothing here is legal, tax or investment advice. Annuities are issued by insurance companies and are not guaranteed by any bank or the FDIC. Rates are snapshots as of their stated dates and change without notice. See our legal & disclosures page for licensing and relationship disclosures.