Best Long-Term Care Insuranceof 2026

A traditional standalone policy is pure long-term care insurance with no cash value or death benefit — if you never need care, you get nothing back. A hybrid policy combines life insurance (or an annuity) with an LTC rider, so your heirs receive a death benefit if you never use the LTC portion. Hybrid policies generally cost more upfront but guarantee some kind of payout either way, which is a major reason they’ve become the dominant new-sales category.

MetLife, Prudential, Transamerica, and MassMutual have all exited new standalone LTC sales over the past 15 years, and John Hancock stopped accepting new standalone applications in December 2016. Most cited the same root cause: insurers in the 1990s and 2000s badly underpriced how long policyholders would live, how often they’d let policies lapse, and what interest rates would do — forcing years of steep rate increases on existing policyholders and making the standalone business unprofitable to keep writing. Genworth, the industry’s largest legacy writer, has restructured its new-business efforts under a separate subsidiary, CareScout Insurance Co., rather than continuing to write new policies under the Genworth name directly.

It functions as long-term care coverage in that it can pay for qualifying care costs, but it’s structured as a life insurance policy (or annuity) with an LTC acceleration rider, not a dedicated LTC insurance contract. That distinction matters for tax treatment, underwriting, and what happens to the policy if you never need care — read the specific rider terms rather than assuming it works identically to a standalone LTC policy.

WA Cares Fund is the nation’s first public long-term care insurance program, funded by a mandatory payroll tax on Washington workers since July 2023, with benefits (up to an inflation-adjusted $36,500) becoming available starting July 2026. Washington workers who held qualifying private LTC coverage by a past deadline could exempt themselves from the payroll tax — if you live or work in Washington, check your specific exemption status before assuming you do or don’t need private coverage.

Insurers that wrote LTC policies in the 1990s and 2000s underestimated how long people would keep their policies, how much care would actually cost, and what interest rates would do to their reserves. As those assumptions proved wrong, insurers sought and received regulatory approval for large cumulative rate increases — sometimes 50-100% or more — on existing blocks of business. At least one major legacy carrier is currently facing active class-action litigation over how those increases were applied to policyholders.

Short-term care insurance covers a shorter benefit period (up to about a year) and often skips the medical exam required for traditional LTC underwriting, making it an option for older or less-healthy buyers who can’t qualify for a full LTC policy. It’s a genuinely thin market with only a couple of dedicated national providers, and it’s best understood as a fallback option for people who can’t get traditional coverage, not a full substitute for it.

NME evaluates long-term care insurance providers using our own five-criterion framework: whether the company is confirmed actively selling new policies today (not just historically), product structure (standalone vs. hybrid vs. rider), distribution channel and who can actually buy the product, disclosed rate-increase or litigation history, and use-case fit for situations like couples coverage or family-caregiver payment. We do not accept payment from providers to be featured, and none of the companies on this page currently have a confirmed, integrated affiliate relationship with NME.