Why trust NerdWallet
250+ small-business products reviewed and rated by our team of experts.
80+ years of combined experience covering small-business and personal finance.
Objective, comprehensive small-business insurance ratings based on the financial strength, complaint records, digital features and customer service availability of insurance market leaders. Read our methodology.
NerdWallet's small-business insurance content — including our ratings, reviews and recommendations — is produced by a team of writers and editors who specialize in small-business finances. Their journalism has appeared in The Associated Press, Washington Post, MarketWatch, Nasdaq, Entrepreneur, ABC News, MSN and other national and local media outlets. Each writer and editor follows NerdWallet's strict editorial guidelines to ensure fairness and accuracy in our coverage.
Liberty Mutual is one of the largest insurance companies in the U.S. Like most industry giants, it offers virtually every business insurance policy there is, from standard general liability to highly specialized ocean marine coverage. But it suffers from poor customer service.
Liberty Mutual got more complaints than we’d expect from business owners between 2022 and 2024 given its market share. It receives consistently poor scores in customer satisfaction surveys. And online, policyholders describe unhelpful phone support and unexpected changes to their coverage.
You’ll have to work with an independent agent to get coverage from Liberty Mutual. If your agent recommends a policy from this insurer, it can be a good choice — especially if you trust your agent to help guide you through a claim and answer your policy renewal questions. But if you expect to manage claims and renewals largely on your own, I’d choose a different insurer with fewer complaints.
Save up to 30% on business insurance
NerdWallet Small Business helps you get real-time quotes from 30+ insurers, and instant access to your Certificate of Insurance (COI) through our partner, Coverdash.
Liberty Mutual business insurance: Pros and cons
Pros
Offers many types of commercial insurance, including specialized coverage like key person insurance and surety bonds.
You can generate a certificate of insurance online.
Cons
Customers filed more complaints than expected with state regulators about commercial property insurance and far more than expected about general liability insurance.
You can’t get a quote or purchase a policy online.
What Liberty Mutual does well
Lots of niche policies
It’s not surprising that a company as large as Liberty Mutual offers essentially every type of business insurance available. That ranges from standard business owner’s policies for small companies to highly specialized coverage, like professional liability insurance for digital health care providers.
You’ll usually get cheaper business insurance if you buy most if not all of it from the same company. Insurers generally prefer it too. So if you operate in a technical field with specific insurance needs and your agent recommends Liberty Mutual, it’s likely to have what you need.
Risk management tools
Liberty Mutual policyholders get access to a library of risk management resources. These include safety training webinars, audit forms you can use to evaluate your workspace and sample safety plans you can adapt to your needs.
You can also email a risk management consultant for one-on-one advice. And their industrial hygiene lab can test samples from your workplace for allergens and pollutants. (This is similar overall to an offering from Travelers, another large insurer that specializes in technical fields.)
It’s important to be fully insured, of course. But if you can avoid an incident and a claim altogether, that’s even better. Tools like these can help with that. Typically, though, these are more useful for large companies.
Where Liberty Mutual falls short
Lots of customer complaints
Liberty Mutual policyholders filed more complaints about commercial property insurance with state regulators between 2022 and 2024 than we’d expect, given the company’s market share. And they filed far more than we’d expect about general liability insurance.
This is unusual for a large insurer like Liberty Mutual. Usually, we see relatively high numbers of complaints about companies that sell insurance online.
But companies that require policyholders to work with agents tend to see fewer complaints. Travelers and Nationwide, for instance, received far fewer complaints given their market share.
Poor customer service
Liberty Mutual received the lowest customer satisfaction score out of 16 companies in the 2025 J.D. Power Small Commercial Insurance Survey. In fact, the company has been below average in four of the last five surveys.
I doubt many people love their insurance company. If you’re interacting with your insurer, you’re probably dealing with the fallout of an accident or disaster. That’s frustrating no matter what. But other insurers, like State Farm, manage to get steady above-average scores in this survey. Liberty Mutual’s consistently poor performance worries me.
How we evaluated Liberty Mutual business insurance
NerdWallet’s business insurance star ratings include these factors:
- Financial strength (33%). This tells us how likely an insurance company is to be able to pay out claims if there’s a major disaster or financial crisis. Liberty Mutual’s parent company and its entities have “excellent” financial strength ratings from AM Best.
- Customer complaints (33%). The National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) collects data about how many complaints an insurer’s customers file. Between 2022 and 2024, Liberty Mutual received more complaints about commercial property insurance than we’d expect given its market share. Policyholders filed far more complaints than we’d expect about general liability insurance.
- Purchase process (17%). Liberty Mutual only sells insurance through independent agents. In general, NerdWallet recommends independent agents over captive ones, who can only sell policies from one company. Independent agents can help you get quotes from several companies and choose the best one for your business.
- Customer support (17%). Liberty Mutual falls short here. Small businesses can only file claims over the phone or via email, while larger businesses have an online portal. The company also came in dead last for customer satisfaction in J.D. Power’s 2025 Small Commercial Insurance Study. You can at least generate a certificate of insurance online, though.
I take a few additional steps when writing reviews of business insurers. These don’t currently inform our star ratings, but you’ll see details about them below:
- Aggregating customer reviews and complaints. I used an AI tool to summarize what policyholders say about Liberty Mutual on websites like Reddit, Trustpilot and the Better Business Bureau. We don’t factor this feedback into star ratings because it’s usually anonymous and we can’t verify it. Plus, it can be hard to distinguish between complaints about personal insurance policies, like home and auto, and commercial insurance. But it still offers insights into the customer experience with a company overall.
- Trying the online quote process. Liberty Mutual’s online quote process leads to a third-party agency. That doesn’t reveal much about Liberty Mutual’s policies, but it may provide insight into its priorities. After all, Liberty Mutual lets you get a quote and buy policies like auto and pet insurance online. It hasn’t invested in a similar flow for business coverage. That could reinforce that smaller businesses (i.e., those likelier to shop online) are less important to the company.
What small-business owners think about Liberty Mutual
I read through online forums like Reddit and review sites like WalletHub and Trustpilot to understand how users feel about Liberty Mutual. I then used an AI tool to help analyze overall sentiment.
Liberty Mutual also sells travel, home and auto insurance, so it’s not always easy to isolate complaints from business owners. Here are the primary themes that stood out in the complaints I found:
👍 Help getting coverage
Some policyholders who called Liberty Mutual directly to get coverage say they had good experiences. They received competitive quotes and got their questions answered. Trustpilot says these positive reviews were unprompted, which means the policyholders left them of their own accord.
👎 Poor phone support
Business owners reviewing Liberty Mutual on Trustpilot say the company’s phone support left a lot to be desired. Staffers “never return my calls,” wrote one user who was trying to get a certificate of insurance.
Yes, customer service is a common topic to complain about online. But I saw fewer complaints about phone support for Liberty Mutual competitors Travelers and Nationwide.
👎 Business reclassifications
Reviewers on Trustpilot and Reddit say that after an audit, Liberty Mutual classified their business as something different, which caused their premiums to go up. For instance, one Reddit user said Liberty Mutual reclassified him as a roofing contractor rather than a handyman after he did a small number of roof repairs.
Most insurance companies audit policyholders annually or every several years. This is to make sure you’re accurately representing what your company does and how large it is. Otherwise, your business might be riskier than it looks on paper. Roofing, to continue that example, carries far more risk than in-home handyman services.
Updated classifications can happen with any insurer. You can dispute these. But that might be harder with Liberty Mutual, given the company’s poor customer service reviews.
Save up to 30% on business insurance
NerdWallet Small Business helps you get real-time quotes from 30+ insurers, and instant access to your Certificate of Insurance (COI) through our partner, Coverdash.
What policies does Liberty Mutual sell?
For small businesses, Liberty Mutual sells:
- Business owner’s policies.
- General liability insurance.
- Commercial property insurance.
- Workers’ comp.
- Cyber insurance.
- Commercial auto insurance.
- Umbrella insurance.
- Farm insurance.
- Inland marine insurance.
- Surety bonds.
For larger businesses, Liberty Mutual offers almost every type of business insurance. This includes specialized coverage like:
- Environmental liability insurance.
- Equipment breakdown coverage.
- Excess and surplus lines.
- Management liability insurance.
- Ocean marine coverage.
- Professional liability insurance.
How to get business insurance from Liberty Mutual
You’ll have to connect with an independent agent to buy coverage from Liberty Mutual. Its website suggests that you can get a quote online. But that actually leads to a third-party service, Tivly.
For every insurance company I cover, I use the same details to get a quote: I’m a marketing consultant operating as a sole proprietor and earning $10,000 per year in revenue. I use my address in Chicago as my business location.
Liberty Mutual started by asking about my insurance needs.
To see what would happen, I clicked “not sure.” But I noticed that you can’t select professional liability insurance. That’s coverage many consultants and freelancers need.
The website asked for my name, when I started the business and how many employees I have. It also asked for my gross sales and business address.
After that, I had to share my email and phone number. Liberty Mutual said it would in turn share that info with Tivly, an online insurance marketplace.
What’s probably happening here is Liberty Mutual selling a marketing lead — my business — to Tivly. If I buy a policy, Liberty Mutual might get a commission. I may get a quote for a Liberty Mutual insurance policy, but I’ll likely get quotes from other insurers as well.
Many insurance companies do this. It helps them make money from people who visit their website, even if they don’t actually sell insurance to those people.
But it suggests to me that Liberty Mutual doesn’t necessarily want this customer — a small home-based business with simple insurance needs. In industry lingo, Liberty Mutual doesn’t have “appetite” for this type of business.
If that describes your operations, you might have better luck with The Hartford or Hiscox. Both of those companies sell policies to very small businesses online and via agents.
Methodology
Business insurance ratings methodology
NerdWallet rewards business insurance companies for reliability and good service. We calculate star ratings based on scores in about a dozen categories. These include:
- Each company's financial strength.
- How many complaints customers made relative to its market share.
- How easy it is to get coverage.
- How accessible customer service is.
Learn more about how we rate small-business insurance companies.
Our editorial team routinely fact-checks and updates these data points. We also adjust our scoring on an ongoing basis. This helps our star ratings reflect changing industry norms. For instance, in 2026, we began evaluating how easy insurers make it to add an additional insured.
Our ratings are a guide. But insurance policy details and prices can vary widely. We encourage you to shop around and compare several insurance quotes.NerdWallet does not receive compensation for any reviews. Read our editorial guidelines.
Insurer complaints methodology
One key factor in our star ratings is how many complaints insurance companies get. Here's how we arrive at that score.
Disappointed customers can file a complaint with their state's insurance department. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) collects, analyzes and groups complaints by business line and insurance company every year. A business line is a specific type of coverage, like workers’ comp.
Then, the NAIC calculates a complaint ratio for each company. It divides the company's share of complaints by its share of total premiums for each line of business. It then adds these ratio values to their official complaint index.
- A complaint ratio of 1 means a company received about the expected number of complaints relative to its size.
- A ratio of 2 means it received twice as many complaints as expected.
- A ratio of 0 means it received half as many complaints as expected.
NerdWallet obtains the raw NAIC data every year. We aggregate results at the company level and fact-check these results. Then we calculate a three-year average of each insurer's complaint ratio and convert it to a score for our star ratings.
Business insurance star ratings consider complaints about two lines of business: commercial liability and commercial property. We analyze complaint data on commercial auto and workers' comp policies too. But we don't currently incorporate these into our ratings since they're less universal.
