Key Takeaways
- MetLife no longer sells home insurance. The entire property and casualty book, including MetLife Auto & Home, was acquired by Farmers Insurance in 2021 and policies have since been rebranded under Farmers.
- If you were a MetLife home insurance customer, your policy is now serviced by Farmers. Your coverage terms should have carried over at transition, but your renewal letters, billing, and claims contact are all Farmers now.
- Shopping for a new policy? You’re comparing Farmers against its actual competitors. Get homeowners insurance quotes from multiple carriers before defaulting to whoever MetLife sent you to.
- Farmers rates are not uniform nationally. The carrier has filed significant rate increases in multiple states since absorbing the MetLife book, so what a former MetLife customer paid in 2020 may bear little resemblance to what they’re paying in 2026.
MetLife Home Insurance No Longer Exists
If you’re searching for MetLife home insurance in 2026, the short answer is that the product doesn’t exist anymore. MetLife completed the sale of its property and casualty business, operating as MetLife Auto & Home, to Farmers Insurance Group in 2021. The transaction closed on April 1, 2021, and the policies, agents, and infrastructure that made up MetLife’s home insurance operation are now part of the Farmers family of companies.
That’s not a soft transition or a co-branding arrangement. MetLife is out of the home insurance business entirely. What you’re dealing with now, whether you’re a former customer or a new shopper, is Farmers.
This review draws on policy document analysis, state regulatory filings, and aggregated user reports from Trustpilot, Reddit, and the NAIC complaint database. No quote-flow data was generated for this article.
What the Acquisition Actually Meant for Policyholders
Farmers paid roughly $3.9 billion for the MetLife property and casualty unit, which covered auto, home, and umbrella policies. At the time of the sale, MetLife Auto & Home had approximately 2.4 million policyholders across all lines. Those customers didn’t choose Farmers. They were transferred.
The practical effect depended on where a customer was in their policy cycle when the transition happened. Policies mid-term continued under their existing terms. The Farmers branding started appearing on renewal documents, billing statements, and correspondence as each policy cycled through. By 2022, the MetLife Auto & Home name had been substantially retired from customer-facing materials, though some back-end references persisted longer.
From an underwriting standpoint, Farmers slotted the acquired book into its existing rating structure. That meant some former MetLife customers saw meaningful rate changes at first renewal under Farmers, particularly in states where Farmers had filed for higher rates independent of the acquisition. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ complaint database showed elevated complaint ratios for Farmers in the years immediately following the acquisition, a pattern that often follows large book transfers as service infrastructure strains to absorb new volume.
The Rate Picture After the Transfer
Here’s the part former MetLife customers deserve to hear plainly. Farmers has been an aggressive rate filer since 2021. According to rate filings reviewed by state insurance departments, Farmers sought double-digit percentage increases in multiple states between 2022 and 2025, including filings reviewed by the California Department of Insurance under Commissioner Ricardo Lara and the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation. In California, Farmers eventually announced in 2023 that it was pausing new homeowners policy issuance, citing reinsurance costs and wildfire exposure. Existing policyholders continued to be renewed, but the pause itself signals the carrier’s appetite for the market.
I spent nine years working with rate filings at an independent agency. When a carrier pauses new business in a state, it’s almost always because their reinsurance treaty is forcing their hand before a formal non-renewal wave starts. The public statement about “market conditions” is accurate but incomplete. Watch the renewal notices that follow.
For former MetLife customers in states like Texas, Georgia, and the Midwest, the rate environment has been less dramatic but still upward. If your Farmers renewal came in significantly higher than your last MetLife premium, that’s a combination of the Farmers rating structure and broader market hardening, not just one factor.
If You’re Still Carrying a Policy from the MetLife Era
Start with your declarations page. It should now show Farmers as the underwriting company, list your current coverage limits, and name your deductible for dwelling, other structures, and personal property separately. If anything on that page doesn’t match what you remember agreeing to, call Farmers at their published service line and ask for a written explanation of any changes.
Pay specific attention to your dwelling replacement cost limit. This is the number that matters when your house burns down, and it’s the number insurers most commonly leave stale. Inflation in construction costs ran well above general CPI between 2020 and 2025. A dwelling limit that was adequate in 2020 may be 20 to 30 percent short of actual replacement cost today, depending on your market and the type of construction. Farmers does offer an extended replacement cost endorsement that provides a buffer above the stated limit, but it’s not automatic, and it’s not unlimited. Check whether it’s on your policy.
Claims contact is Farmers directly at 1-800-435-7764. Don’t use old MetLife contact cards. Some numbers redirect; others don’t. The cleaner path is to go through Farmers’ published channels from day one of a claim, because the claims file starts there.
Who Should Be Shopping Elsewhere
If you received a Farmers renewal and it’s materially higher than last year, or if you live in a state where Farmers has been pulling back, treat that renewal as a shopping event rather than a default renewal. The best homeowners insurance options for your situation depend heavily on your state, your home’s age and construction type, and your claims history, but the comparison is worth running.
Getting homeowners insurance quotes from at least three carriers takes less than 30 minutes online and can save several hundred dollars annually. The former MetLife book skewed toward employer-sponsored and affinity group policyholders, many of whom had group discounts that may not have survived the transition to individual Farmers billing. If you’re unsure whether your former group discount is still being applied, that’s a direct question to ask your Farmers agent.
For former MetLife customers who are now in the market, the main alternatives worth comparing are USAA (if you have military eligibility), Amica, Auto-Owners, Erie, and state-specific carriers where they have strong market presence. Each of those carriers has meaningful differences in claims handling reputation, coverage breadth, and pricing, none of which are visible from a premium comparison alone.
The Broader Verdict
MetLife made a calculated exit from a business line it had decided wasn’t core. For policyholders, that decision happened to them, not with them. Farmers inherited a large, geographically diverse book of customers who didn’t necessarily choose Farmers and may not have compared alternatives since the transfer.
Farmers is a real insurer with real claims-paying capacity, a financial strength rating of A from AM Best as of 2025, and a national agent network. But the correct question for any former MetLife customer isn’t whether Farmers is “good.” The correct question is whether Farmers is the best option available to you at your current address, at your current coverage level, given what the market looks like in mid-2026. That’s a comparison, and most people haven’t made it since the transition happened three years ago.
The market has shifted enough since 2021 that the answer to that comparison may have changed even for people who checked once at renewal. Run the numbers again.
