I'm an actuary and data scientist at a major life insurance company. It depends a lot on the product and business line. For employer-sponsored coverage, zipco

I'm an actuary and data scientist at a major life insurance company. It depends a lot on the product and business line. For employer-sponsored coverage, zipcode, age, sex, industry, salary, and collar (white/blue) are the major underwriting factors that determine what your employer pays in premium. For individual life products (term, whole life, etc), it's much less about gaining an advantage from an underwriting perspective. A lot of it is marketing, product design, and investment strategies. State farm's products are pretty expensive compared to the rest of the industry, but their "one-stop-shop" approach and bundling discounts have given them a pretty good marketing niche. Other carriers have their own niches, e.g. using tax-havens to reduce capital requirements. Some invested in very long duration bonds at the right time, and are reaping the benefit of higher yields (on reserves aka float) compared to their peers. And if the article is still down, the answer to the question of how life insurance companies make money is underwriting profits (charging more than they pay out in claims) and investing in high-quality fixed income investments. Sometimes less scrupulous companies (often owned by private equity firms) create tax arbitrages via offshore havens and tax loopholes.