Methodology
From the fifteen companies included in the actuary's study, we chose nine for which we were able to obtain field underwriting guides. These guides are issued by the term insurance companies directly to agents, and they specify the premium classification for each underwriting factor.

We added two companies, Transamerica and GE Capital Assurance because they are listed at most Web sites. All eleven companies are included in the averages. We used eight of them in our comparison studies.