State life and health insurance guaranty association benefit limits — how much is protected if your insurer fails
Every US state runs a life/health insurance guaranty association — a state-chartered backstop, funded by assessments on other insurers, that pays policyholders (up to a cap) if their life, annuity, disability, long-term-care or health insurer becomes insolvent. FDIC/SIPC-style protection, but almost nobody outside the insurance industry knows it exists or what it actually covers, because unlike bank deposit insurance there is no single federal number — each state sets its own dollar caps by statute, and the caps genuinely differ: California caps life death benefit at $300,000 and lumps all health benefits into one $200,000, CPI-adjusted figure; Florida caps life at just $100,000 (cash value only) but health benefit plans at $500,000; Virginia, Illinois and Ohio each split accident-and-sickness coverage into four separate tiers (general, disability income, long-term care, health benefit plans) with different caps for each — and even those three, which look identical at a glance, differ: Virginia caps total benefits per life at $350,000 where Illinois and Ohio cap them at $300,000, and Ohio has no per-owner cap on multiple policies at all. California additionally pays no more than 80 percent of what the failed insurer owed, a haircut none of the others impose. Answers 'is my life insurance policy protected if the company goes under', 'how much of my annuity would I actually get back', and 'why did my neighbor in another state get a different payout' — the kind of question someone asks in the middle of an actual insurer failure, when the industry's own explainer (NOLHGA) is a member-funded index, not a citable comparison table.
The data
| State | Life insurance death benefit cap ($) | Life insurance cash value cap ($) | Annuity present value cap ($) | Health insurance benefit cap ($) | Aggregate cap per life ($) | Per-owner cap across multiple policies ($) | Additional percentage limit | Statute section | Disability income / long-term care benefit cap ($) | Other accident & sickness cover cap ($) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| California | $300,000 | $100,000 | $250,000 | $200,000 | $300,000 | $5,000,000 | Eighty percent of the contractual obligations | 1067.02 | ||
| Florida | $300,000 | $100,000 | $250,000 | $500,000 | 631.717 | $300,000 | ||||
| Illinois | $300,000 | $100,000 | $250,000 | $500,000 | $300,000 | $5,000,000 | 531.03 | $300,000 | $100,000 | |
| Ohio | Three hundred thousand dollars | one hundred thousand dollars | Two hundred fifty thousand dollars | Five hundred thousand dollars | three hundred thousand dollars | 3956.04 | Three hundred thousand dollars | One hundred thousand dollars | ||
| Virginia | $300,000 | $100,000 | $250,000 | $500,000 | $350,000 | $5 million | 38.2-1700 | $300,000 | $100,000 |
Where this came from
Every record above links the page it was taken from and quotes the sentence that states it. These are the 5 sources this dataset was assembled from.
- leginfo.legislature.ca.govhttps://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.xhtml?lawCode=INS&division=1.&title=&part=2.&chapter=1.&article=14.7
- leg.state.fl.ushttp://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&URL=0600-0699/0631/Sections/0631.717.html
- ilga.govhttps://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/fulltext.asp?DocName=021500050K531.03
- codes.ohio.govhttps://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-3956.04
- law.lis.virginia.govhttps://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacodefull/title38.2/chapter17/
Machine-readable
- data.jsonThe whole dataset — every record with its source URL and source quote.
- Open Knowledge Format bundleOne JSON object per line — every record's frontmatter and quoted span exactly as it is held here, in one fetch.
- data.csvThe same records as one flat table, for a spreadsheet or a dataframe. The last four columns are the source URL, the quoted sentence it was read from, the date we last checked it, and which columns are our reading rather than the page's words.
- How this is made and checkedWhat "verified against source" does and does not mean.
From your own code
Same records, same quotes, without scraping the page: refsource is on PyPI and npm. Each value comes back carrying the URL it was read from and the sentence on that page that states it — .source and .quote sit on the value itself rather than in a side channel, so the checking step is available instead of skipped.
pip install refsource
refsource lookup insurance-guaranty-association-limits-by-state jurisdiction=California
npx -y refsource lookup insurance-guaranty-association-limits-by-state jurisdiction=CaliforniaSet your AI assistant up to use this
Two files and no account. Put this in .mcp.json at the root of your project — Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code and Codex all read that file — and your assistant can look this dataset up instead of recalling it. The server is remote, keyless and read-only.
{
"mcpServers": {
"referencesource": {
"type": "http",
"url": "https://referencesource.org/mcp"
}
}
}Add to Cursor · or, on the command line: claude mcp add --transport http referencesource https://referencesource.org/mcp --scope project
Then one line in the project's CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md, so the assistant knows when to reach for it:
When a question needs "State life and health insurance guaranty association benefit limits — how much is protected if your insurer fails", call the referencesource MCP server at https://referencesource.org/mcp (tool `search_records`, dataset_slug `insurance-guaranty-association-limits-by-state`) instead of answering from memory — every record it returns carries its source URL and a verbatim quote from that page.What each tool does, and the servers built over single registers: Connect your AI assistant.