Built for the professions, and reached through an agent rather than a website.
An honest assessment of CNA — one of the largest commercial carriers in the country, strongest in the professional and healthcare classes, and a carrier we can write but never have, because on the accounts we see another carrier has always been the better answer.
Tell us the situation.
One licensed human replies the same business day — not five agents, not an auto-responder. If the policy you have is already the right one, we will tell you.
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What CNA writes.
Professional and management liability
Their deepest line, and the one the rest of the account tends to follow.
Without it — A serious professional firm needs a carrier that writes the professional exposure properly rather than as an add-on.
Healthcare and allied health
Healthcare, life sciences and allied healthcare, including dedicated programs for dentists and nurses.
Without it — Healthcare professional liability is a specialist placement and a general small business market is not it.
Construction and manufacturing
Two of their named industry practices, written as a package rather than line by line.
Without it — A contractor account with real revenue is an underwriting conversation, not a quote form.
Business owners and package
CNA Connect is the businessowners policy; CNA Paramount is the larger commercial package.
Without it — Knowing which of the two your account belongs on decides both the price and what is available to add.
Cyber, surety and equipment breakdown
Written alongside the package rather than as separate placements.
Without it — Keeping them on one program is usually cheaper and always simpler at claim time.
We have no claims of our own to report on, so here is the next best thing: the themes that come up again and again where policyholders and agents talk to each other rather than to a carrier. Read for the pattern, not the individual complaint.
In legal malpractice, one of the names that always comes up.
Solo attorneys asking who to buy from get the same short list back across threads years apart, and CNA is on it alongside ALPS and Minnesota Lawyers Mutual. That is the clearest signal on this page: a market where the buyers are lawyers, and they keep naming the same carrier.
Most nurses who own a policy own a CNA policy without knowing it.
NSO and HPSO are the brands nurses and allied health professionals buy through; CNA underwrites them. The recurring line in those threads is that CNA writes more nursing liability than anyone else, and it is usually offered as a reason to trust the cover rather than a complaint.
Renewal increases arrive with a clean record.
The most common grumble is a double-digit increase after a year with no claims. It is worth understanding rather than resenting: professional liability is priced on what the whole class is costing, so a clean year of your own does not hold the number down. It is a reason to shop, not a reason to distrust.
On a hard fleet they are sometimes the last market standing.
An owner of a 57-vehicle service fleet with real losses described CNA as the only carrier still quoting after another declined outright, with the premium roughly tripling over five years on the same number of vehicles. Both halves of that are true at once: staying on a losing account is a compliment, and it is priced like one.
Commercial auto appetite has tightened, and agents noticed.
Agents have flagged rating changes on commercial auto — a radius rule that pushed vehicles into a higher band — as the kind of quiet move that reprices a renewal without anything about the business changing. Ask what has moved before you assume the increase is about you.
A license bond is not a liability policy, and CNA Surety gets blamed for that.
Contractors post angrily that the bond would not pay without a court judgment first. That is how most license bonds work anywhere — the surety needs an established obligation, and then seeks the money back from the contractor. It is a real complaint about a widely misunderstood product rather than about this carrier.
The cyber insurer that got hit by ransomware.
CNA was attacked in March 2021 and Bloomberg reported a 40 million dollar ransom payment, the largest publicly known at the time. It is five years old and it is the first thing a search will surface, so it belongs here — a buyer should weigh it as history rather than as current condition.
Themes, not quotations — the comments belong to the people who wrote them, and repeating an accusation about a named insurer is not something an agency should do. Two caveats on the evidence itself: most Reddit traffic on those four letters is people asking about working at CNA rather than buying from them, and the acronym collides with certified nursing assistant, so the pool of genuine policyholder comment is thinner than the search volume suggests. Read August 2026.
What people ask us about CNA.
What is CNA known for?
The professions. Their named industry practices are construction, financial institutions, healthcare, life sciences, manufacturing, professional services, real estate and technology — and they run affinity programs for accountants, architects and engineers, dentists, lawyers and nurses, which is where an association endorsement sits behind the policy.
How much do you place with them?
Nothing, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. We can write CNA. We never have — on every account where they were an option, another carrier came back more attractive on price, on form or on both. That is a fact about the risks we happen to see rather than a verdict on the carrier, and it is why the section below reports what other people have found rather than what we have.
Is CNA a good insurance company?
For the classes they specialize in, yes — they are A-rated, they have been writing since 1897, and in legal and nursing malpractice they are one of the two or three names that come up every time practitioners ask each other who to use. Whether they are good for your account is a different question, and on ours the answer has so far been no.
Who would you send to them?
A professional firm or a healthcare practice large enough that the professional liability is the main event, particularly where a professional association endorsement is in play. A small main-street risk almost always does better somewhere else.
Can I buy CNA online?
No, and that is deliberate on their part. CNA distributes through agents, so the route in is a submission to an underwriter rather than a quote form — which is the whole reason the account gets looked at rather than rated.
Why go through a broker instead of buying direct?
Because it does not cost you anything, which is the part that surprises people. Broker compensation is built into the carrier’s rate whether you use one or not — buying direct does not remove the cost, it removes the person being paid to be on your side of it.
Commercial insurance is 96% of what we do — it is not a department here, it is the whole business. Not ready to talk? The guides answer the questions this page raises in more depth. Already insured with us and need a certificate or a policy change? Ask the service team rather than starting a quote — it is faster and it goes to the people whose job it is. We also write home and auto, which is usually cheaper alongside the business policy than apart from it.