A cousin sent me a screenshot a few weeks ago — a comparison site claiming a particular insurer had a “99.7% claim settlement ratio,” bold, green, no year attached, no link to where the number came from. It’s the same reflex I hold every page on this site to: go to the primary source before you trust a rounded percentage somebody else already massaged for you. So I went and pulled it myself: the real one, from IRDAI’s own published filings, not from a listicle.
What I found is a bit more interesting, and a bit less tidy, than the single number everyone quotes. The primary data tells a different, messier story, and I’ll show you how to read it instead of just copying it.
What is a claim settlement ratio, exactly?
It’s the share of death claims an insurer paid out in a given year, and IRDAI reports it two different ways: by the number of claims settled, and separately by the rupee amount settled. Those two numbers are not always close to each other.
By count: claims paid ÷ total claims registered, as a share of policies. By amount: the rupee value of claims paid ÷ the rupee value of all claims made. A comparison site quoting one clean percentage is usually quoting the by-count number, because it’s the bigger, friendlier-looking figure. It’s also the one that tells you the least about what happens to a large claim.
What does IRDAI’s FY 2024-25 data actually show, insurer by insurer?
For individual (not group) death claims in FY 2024-25, IRDAI’s own Handbook on Indian Insurance Statistics 2024-25 (published by IRDAI in February 2026, Table 15: “Individual Death Claims of Life Insurers – Insurer-wise”) gives the following, calculated directly from the claims-paid and total-claims figures in that table:
| Insurer | Settled by count (FY 2024-25) | Settled by amount (FY 2024-25) |
|---|---|---|
| LIC | 97.59% | 96.08% |
| SBI Life | 98.34% | 95.26% |
| HDFC Life | 99.68% | 97.96% |
| ICICI Prudential | 99.31% | 98.06% |
| Axis Max Life | 99.70% | 97.39% |
| Tata AIA | 99.41% | 98.38% |
| Bajaj Allianz | 99.29% | 93.04% |
| Shriram Life | 98.31% | 81.71% |
| Industry-wide (individual) | 97.82% | 96.29% |
That last row comes from the same IRDAI table: the whole individual-life-insurance industry settled 10,11,880 of 10,34,455 individual death claims by count in FY 2024-25, worth ₹33,696.84 crore of ₹34,994.69 crore claimed by amount. I’m naming the year every time on purpose: this is FY 2024-25 data specifically, it’s recalculated every year, and an insurer’s ranking here can and does move.
Look at the gap between the two columns for Bajaj Allianz and Shriram Life. Both look close to the pack on the count column: over 98% either way. On the amount column, Bajaj Allianz drops to about 93%, and Shriram Life drops to roughly 82%. That’s not a rounding difference; it means a meaningfully larger share of the rupee value of claims against those two books went unpaid than the headline percentage would suggest, in that specific year, for that specific claims category. I’m not telling you what to conclude about either insurer from one year of data. A single year can be noisy, and this is individual death claims only, not their whole book. I am telling you that if you only ever look at the by-count number, you’d miss this entirely.
Why do claim settlement ratios differ between insurers at all?
Three mechanics drive most of the gap, and none of them are secret. They’re the standard, publicly documented reasons the industry and its regulator talk about openly.
Underwriting rigor at the proposal stage is one of them. An insurer that asks harder questions and requires more medical tests before issuing a policy tends to have fewer disputes later, because less gets left undisclosed.
Claims investigation practice matters too. Early claims, inside that three-year contestability window under Section 45 of the Insurance Act, get more scrutiny industry-wide, and how thoroughly an insurer investigates a claim that size, that early, affects both the settlement rate and how long it takes.
And then there’s distribution channel. A book sold mostly online with detailed digital underwriting behaves differently, statistically, than one sold heavily through agents who may be incentivized to get a policy issued quickly.
None of this is insider information. It’s the same explanation you’ll find in IRDAI’s own annual commentary and in general insurance-industry writing — I’m not going to tell you it comes from anywhere more special than that.
Does a high ratio guarantee your own claim gets paid?
No, and nobody can promise you that: not IRDAI’s data, not an insurer, not me. A claim settlement ratio is an aggregate statistic about everyone the insurer settled with that year. It says something about the insurer’s book as a whole; it says nothing about your specific medical history, your specific proposal form, or whether you filled it out completely and honestly. The single most common reason an individual claim gets repudiated, across the industry, is non-disclosure at the time of buying the policy: an existing health condition, a smoking habit, an income figure that doesn’t match reality. Get that right on the form and the odds genuinely are with you, whichever insurer you pick from that table above; get it wrong and no ratio will save the claim.
One thing worth actually knowing here: under Section 45 of the Insurance Act, 1938, as amended by the Insurance Laws (Amendment) Act, 2015, an insurer can contest a policy within three years of when it started (or was last revived), on grounds of non-disclosure or fraud. After three years, the amended law’s own text bars questioning the policy “on any ground whatsoever” — a stricter bar than the pre-2015 version, which let a fraud claim survive past the three-year mark. That three-year window is exactly why the early years of a policy carry more scrutiny than later ones, and it’s also why filling the proposal form accurately at the start matters more than anything you do after.
What does a real term insurance premium actually look like?
I’d rather show you one fully-specified, insurer-published number than hand you a table of prices with the conditions stripped out, because a premium without its conditions isn’t really a number — it’s a guess dressed up as one.
The exact example, from HDFC Life’s own published brochure for Click 2 Protect Super: a 35-year-old man buying the Life Option (Option A), a level (non-reducing) sum assured of ₹1 crore, for a 40-year policy term (cover to age 75), paying regular annual premiums, pays ₹20,033 a year, excluding taxes. That’s every condition the insurer’s own document states, stated plainly: age 35, ₹1 crore cover, 40-year term, regular pay, the base “Life Option” without return-of-premium or income riders attached.
Two conditions the brochure’s illustration does not state: tobacco use and city. The same document separately notes, elsewhere in its terms, that “an underwriting extra premium may be charged in case of sub-standard lives and smokers,” which tells you the ₹20,033 figure is the base, standard rate, and a tobacco user would be quoted more than this, not the same. City isn’t mentioned at all in the illustration, and term insurance in India generally isn’t priced by city the way, say, motor insurance is. But I’d rather flag that as unconfirmed for this specific product than assert it confidently either way.
That’s the whole point of insisting on a worked example instead of a comparison table: age, sum assured, term, smoking status and city all move the number, and a premium quoted without all five isn’t wrong exactly; it’s just incomplete enough to be misleading. Change any one of those five for yourself and you’ll get a different quote than ₹20,033, possibly a very different one. The brochure’s own illustration shows that if this policyholder died in the 7th policy year, having paid ₹1,40,231 in total premiums across those seven years, the nominee would receive the full ₹1 crore. That’s the brochure’s stated mechanism of term insurance, not a promise about any particular claim: a small, known annual cost against a large, fixed payout, for as long as you keep paying.
So how should you actually use claim settlement ratio when comparing plans?
Check both numbers, not just the friendlier one. Pull the by-count and by-amount figures for the insurers you’re actually considering, for the most recent year IRDAI has published, and notice if they’re close together or far apart: a big gap between them (like Shriram Life’s or Bajaj Allianz’s in FY 2024-25) is worth understanding before you decide it doesn’t matter to you. Check the year every time; IRDAI republishes this annually, and a number from two years ago is a number about a different book of business. And treat the ratio as one input, not the only one: it tells you almost nothing about your own premium, your own underwriting, or your own specific claim. That part is between you, the proposal form you fill out honestly, and the insurer you eventually choose. I’m not going to tell you which one that should be; that’s a decision only you have the full picture for.
A quick note on housekeeping: this article carries no affiliate links: there’s no term-insurance partner in our program yet, so nothing here is trying to route you anywhere. It also isn’t personalised financial advice; it’s general information built from IRDAI’s own published data and one insurer’s own published brochure, and your own decision should account for your specific health, income and dependents, which I have no way of knowing. Every claim-settlement figure above is IRDAI’s FY 2024-25 individual-death-claims data from the Handbook on Indian Insurance Statistics 2024-25 (published February 2026), checked against that source on September 20, 2026. IRDAI updates this annually — next year’s numbers will be different numbers, not this year’s with a new label on them.
Term insurance and investing are two different jobs, and the classic mistake is letting one bundled product try to do both — an endowment or ULIP premium that’s meant to cover protection and investing at once usually does neither well. The cleaner split is to buy pure term for the protection, at whatever sum assured and premium you’ve worked out is right for you, and invest the difference separately. How SIPs compare to a lump sum covers that investing side in more depth. There’s no calculator on this site built specifically for term insurance yet, but “buy term, invest the difference” is fundamentally a SIP decision, so KnowWiser’s SIP calculator is the honest next stop: put in what you’d be setting aside monthly instead of paying for a costlier insurance-cum-investment plan, and see what that actually grows into over 10 or 20 years.