The six principles behind everything we publish
Reader first, always. If it does not make life easier for the person reading it, we do not publish it. We write for you, not for insurers, brokers or search engines.
Independence is non-negotiable. What we publish is never for sale. No insurer can pay to appear in our content, influence a rating or soften a review.
Show your working. Methodologies published in full, sources linked, writers named, and every page written and reviewed by qualified specialists.
Plain English, properly researched. Written for a non-specialist, and cited to the documents behind every claim.
Improve continuously. Guides are reviewed and updated regularly throughout the year, and every page shows its latest review date.
Respect the people, criticise the product. We are robust about products that fall short, never personal, and we credit strengths even in products that rate poorly overall.
These are the same six principles set out on our About us page. We expect to be held to them.
Our independence is never for sale
myTribe is a journalistic organisation, not a sales team. In practice, that means:
- No insurer or other company can pay to appear in our articles, guides, ratings or reviews.
- There is no sponsored content, no display advertising and no paid placement anywhere on the site.
- Rated insurers receive their ratings badges and marketing collateral free of charge. There are no licence fees, and whether an insurer uses its badge has no bearing on its score, this year or next.
- We sell no awards tickets and no sponsorships, and we take no fees of any kind from the insurers we rate.
- Our broker partners have no say in what we publish or how providers rank, and they do not see content before it goes live.
Because every rating is scored against a published methodology, anyone can check how a provider arrived at its score. And plenty of what we publish can never earn us anything: our policy document analysis, our private treatment and dental cost research, and our guides for people who cannot buy insurance at all. It gets the same care as everything else.
How we make money
myTribe is free to read and free to use. If you request comparison quotes, we introduce you to a vetted, FCA-authorised broker, who may pay us a commission for the introduction, or one if you go on to buy a policy, never both. It never changes the price you pay, and if you research here and buy elsewhere, we earn nothing. The full explanation is on our About us page.
Who writes and reviews our content
Every page on myTribe names its author and shows when it was last reviewed. Content is written and reviewed by qualified specialists.
has written about UK private medical insurance for over a decade.
More about Chris
brings more than 25 years in personal finance journalism, including two decades as Editor of Investment Life & Pensions Moneyfacts and, most recently, Managing Editor at NerdWallet UK.
More about RichardThey are supported by a wider team of researchers, writers and fact checkers, and the team maintains continuing professional development with the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII). You can read every team biography in full.
Nobody outside the editorial team, not broker partners, not insurers, not anyone, can change what we publish. We do not accept guest posts or externally written content.
How we research, write and check every page
Research from primary sources. We work from insurers' own policy documents and literature, regulator data, claims statistics and our own pricing datasets: 38,682 individual UK health insurance prices taken from 1,104 source quote documents since 2021, alongside more than 5,700 life insurance prices. Around 100 of the official insurer policy documents behind our analysis are published in our public document library, so you can read the source alongside what we say about it.
Written by a specialist. A named writer with relevant expertise drafts every page in plain English, for a non-specialist reader.
Reviewed before publication. A qualified specialist reviews every page before it goes live, checking accuracy, balance and completeness. That includes being clear about who a product does not suit, not only who it does.
Fact-checked and cited. Claims are checked against the source documents behind them, and we link those sources so you can check our working. We name our sources; if we ever cannot, we explain why.
Reviewed and updated regularly. Pages are re-reviewed throughout the year, and every page displays its latest review date.
Our ratings and research
myTribe runs three annual star-ratings programmes, produced entirely in-house, and publishes each methodology in full:
- PMI ratings methodology: 10 providers scored against a weighted system covering six categories, 20+ measures and 63 sub-measures, with over 100 policy documents analysed.
- Life insurance ratings methodology: 30 providers, more than 1,200 individual data points.
- Income protection ratings methodology: 17 providers, 700+ benefits, features and options, producing over 800 data points.
Most UK insurance ratings and industry awards are funded by the insurers they rate, through badge licences, sponsorships or awards tickets. That creates a commercial incentive to award high marks widely. myTribe takes no fees from the insurers we rate, so our five-star rating is deliberately hard to earn. In 2026, only three of the ten PMI providers we rated achieved it, and only five of the 30 life insurance providers we reviewed.
Keeping content up to date
Insurance products, prices and rules change constantly. Every guide shows the date it was last reviewed, our team re-reviews content on a rolling cycle throughout the year, and our ratings are refreshed annually. From time to time there may be a short delay between a change in the market and an update to a page. If you spot something out of date, we want to know.
How we use AI
Everything we publish is written by people, not AI. We do not use generative AI to write our guides, reviews or ratings, and a named, qualified human is accountable for every page.
We do use it in one limited way. Once a specialist has written a passage, we sometimes ask an AI tool to suggest how the wording could be clearer, in the same way you might ask a colleague to look over a paragraph. The judgement, the research and the final words are ours.
We do want AI assistants to represent us accurately when you ask them about insurance, which is why we publish a dedicated, structured reference for them: Info for AI.
Conflicts of interest, gifts and hospitality
Our team does not accept gifts, hospitality or payments from the insurers and brokers we write about. Where a potential conflict of interest exists, for example a team member's previous employment at a provider we rate, it is declared internally and that person steps back from the relevant judgement.
Accountability
Overall responsibility for what we publish sits with Chris Steele, Founder, and Richard Eagling, Senior Editor. myTribe Insurance Experts is a trading name of Mytribe Health Limited, and the whole business, publishing and comparison service alike, is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority under reference 1008629. Our content informs and educates; it is not personal financial advice. If you think we have fallen short of the standards on this page, our complaints procedure explains how to raise it.
Questions about anything here? Email contact@mytribeinsurance.co.uk. Journalists can reach us at press@mytribeinsurance.co.uk.