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 $500,000; Virginia splits accident-and-sickness coverage into four separate tiers (general, disability income, long-term care, health benefit plans) with different caps for each. Answers 'is my life insurance policy protected if the company goes under', 'how much of my annuity would I actually get back', and 'why did my neighbor in another state get a different payout' — the kind of question someone asks in the middle of an actual insurer failure, when the industry's own explainer (NOLHGA) is a member-funded index, not a citable comparison table.
The data
| State | Life insurance death benefit cap ($) | 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.
- How this is made and checkedWhat "verified against source" does and does not mean.