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IRDAI data · FY2024-25

Insurance Complaints by Insurer in India

By raw count, Star Health & Allied Insurance Co. Ltd drew the most complaints in FY2024-25, 20,527. Per 10,000 claims paid, the highest rate among the general and health insurers shown is Shriram General Insurance Co. Ltd at 197.4, and the lowest is Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Co. Ltd at 6.0.

How many grievances each insurer attracted, measured against how much business it actually settled. Ranking insurers by raw complaint count mostly ranks them by size, so the table below is ordered by complaints per 10,000 claims paid.

Written by Parul Bhargava · Founder and Principal Advisor, advising since 2004

General and health insurers, by complaint rate

Grievances reported in FY2024-25 per 10,000 claims paid in the same year. Lower is better.

Why the raw count misleads

Complaints scale with business volume. An insurer paying twelve million claims will draw more grievances than one paying two hundred thousand, however well it behaves. Ranking by the raw number therefore produces a league table of size wearing the costume of a quality measure, which is how the largest and most established insurers end up looking like the worst.

Dividing by claims paid removes most of that distortion. It is not perfect: an insurer that rejects a claim outright still generates a grievance without generating a paid claim, so a very restrictive insurer flatters itself slightly on this measure. Read it with the settlement ratio, not instead of it.

Health insurance distorts the top of the table

Health is the largest single source of insurance grievance in India. Hospital bills are itemised, exclusions bite line by line, and a partially settled claim still feels like a rejected one. A standalone health insurer has its entire book exposed to that, while a general insurer spreads the same exposure across motor, fire and marine.

That is context rather than exculpation. The rate still varies several-fold between health insurers on the same line of business, and that gap is about process and posture rather than the product.

Life insurers

Grievances reported in FY2024-25, raw counts. No rate is shown, for the reason given below.

The Handbook reports individual new policies only for LIC, the private sector as a whole and the industry total, not for each insurer, so a complaints-per-policy rate cannot be computed on the same basis as the general-insurance table. Premium would be an available substitute but a poor one: an insurer with a large book of old renewals would look better than it is, because complaints arise overwhelmingly at the point of sale.

Three different complaint numbers, all of them real

If you compare this page with others you will find figures that disagree, and usually nobody explains why. There are three separate counts in circulation. IRDAI's Bima Bharosa portal recorded 2,57,790 grievances across all segments in FY2024-25. The Council for Insurance Ombudsmen counts only what escalates to an Ombudsman, which is far smaller. The Handbook tables used here count grievances reported to each insurer.

All three are correct measurements of different things, and mixing them produces nonsense. Every figure on this page comes from the third.

Frequently asked questions

A complaint that is not resolved has somewhere to go, in order: the insurer's grievance cell, then Bima Bharosa, then the Ombudsman.

Related: claim-settlement ratios · insurer solvency ratios · incurred claim ratios · market share by insurer · Ombudsman outcomes · how we source and check figures: editorial standards.