State guaranty coverage

State annuity guaranty coverage, read from each state’s own statute

What each state’s life-and-health guaranty association actually protects for an annuity owner, and where the protection stops — every limit taken from the association’s own documents or the statute, with the access date attached.

If your insurance company fails, a state guaranty association — not the federal government — stands behind your annuity, up to a limit that state sets. Those limits are not uniform, and the summaries that flatten them into one national number are wrong often enough to matter: Pennsylvania is widely listed at $300,000 when its individual annuity limit is $250,000, and North Carolina is widely listed at $250,000 when its statute says $300,000.

Each page below reads that state’s own association documents and statute text, carries the access date inside the sentence making each claim, and states plainly where a fact could not be established rather than filling the gap with a guess.

Covering 12 of 51 US jurisdictions so far. The remaining states are not yet written, and none of the pages below speaks for them.

  • Arizona

    Arizona’s safety net is not a vault and not the treasury. It is a claim on the surviving industry’s premium base, metered at two percent per account per year — which is the honest context for every dollar limit it pays.

  • California

    California does not pay a flat $250,000. It pays the lesser of 80% of the contract’s obligations or $250,000 in present value — a haircut that changes the answer for every contract smaller than $312,500.

  • Florida

    Florida’s limit is $250,000 per owner per failed insurer for a deferred annuity, and $300,000 once income has started — and it is not FDIC, not per contract, and not triggered by a downgrade.

  • Georgia

    The same insurer failure pays out differently on a $100,000, a $250,000 and a $400,000 contract — and differently again depending on the year of the failure and whether income has started.

  • Illinois

    A liquidation dated 1991 is still on Illinois’s active-protection list in 2026, and a live rehabilitation is one stage short of the trigger. The record is a better guide to insurer failure than any hypothetical.

  • Michigan

    Six checks on Michigan’s guaranty coverage, each naming the document it runs against — and a seventh that returns an anomaly: Michigan’s guaranty act contains no advertising ban at all.

  • New Jersey

    For the same $400,000 obligation, New Jersey’s deferred limit protects up to $250,000, while the $500,000 payout-status ceiling can encompass the full $400,000.

  • New York

    New York protects $500,000 per life where most of the country protects $250,000 — through a statutory corporation of its own rather than the usual association. The higher ceiling changes claim arithmetic; it does nothing about the wait.

  • North Carolina

    The widely copied summaries put North Carolina $50,000 too low. Correcting the number without reading subsection (d)(6) puts it too high — $300,000 is the whole roof, shared with any life policy at the same carrier.

  • Ohio

    Ohio’s protection is real, and it arrives at a fixed point in a legal sequence. Most of what worries annuity owners — frozen withdrawals, suspended payments — happens before that point.

  • Pennsylvania

    Pennsylvania’s individual annuity limit is $250,000 in present value. The $300,000 you will find quoted elsewhere is a different number — the combined aggregate cap — or a pre-2020 summary the association still hosts.

  • Texas

    The Texas guaranty association covers up to $250,000 in the present value of annuity benefits per contract owner, per insolvent insurer. Everything else about the protection is a boundary — when it starts, what it measures, and what it leaves out.