NAC BenefitSolutions 10 Review (2026)

What is the NAC BenefitSolutions 10?

North American Company for Life and Health Insurance built the NAC BenefitSolutions 10 as a fixed index annuity, and the carrier itself carries an A+ rating and more than a century of history writing annuities as part of Sammons Financial Group. Unlike a plain accumulation contract, this one is built around a guaranteed income rider from the start, and it leads with a 20% bonus applied to the number that sets your future income.

What makes the income math here different from many competitors is how the rider grows once the bonus is applied. Rather than crediting a flat percentage every year no matter what happens in the market, the rider mirrors 100% of the actual index credits your contract earns and adds them straight to your income number, on top of a floor North American guarantees regardless of performance. That combination, a real bonus plus a real floor plus upside tied to actual index results, is the core pitch of this contract, and it is worth understanding in full before you compare it against anything else on your short list.

The 20% benefit base bonus is not a premium bonus

Agents tend to lead with the 20% number, and it is a real feature, but it does not work the way a cash bonus on your contract value would. The bonus only touches the Benefit Base, the figure North American uses to calculate your guaranteed income. Your actual contract value, the money you would receive if you surrendered the policy, is not affected by it at all.

Put a $100,000 deposit into this contract and your contract value opens at exactly $100,000. Your Benefit Base, meanwhile, opens at $120,000, which is 120% of what you put in. That extra $20,000 exists only inside the income calculation. It raises the income you can lock in for life, but it disappears if you surrender the contract early, because a surrender pays out the contract value, not the Benefit Base. The bonus is real money in the sense that it permanently raises your guaranteed paycheck, but it only pays off through that paycheck.

The benefit base floor: your guaranteed income foundation

The feature that separates this contract from a typical income rider is a three-step Benefit Base Floor, a contractually guaranteed minimum the Benefit Base cannot fall below no matter what the market does, as long as you have not taken any withdrawals.

Any withdrawal, including a required minimum distribution, reduces the Benefit Base proportionally, so the floor above assumes you leave the contract untouched until you start income.

Because the rider also credits 100% of any index gain straight into the Benefit Base, a run of strong index years can push your actual base above these floor numbers well before the scheduled step-ups arrive. In a flat or negative stretch for the indexes, though, the floor is what protects your future income, and it needs no market cooperation at all to reach $150,000 by year 6 and $180,000 by year 11 on a $100,000 deposit.

Guaranteed income by start year, on the floor alone

Because the step-up floor is a contract guarantee, we can show exactly what it buys in income terms without touching a single index assumption. Here is the guaranteed lifetime income a 60-year-old male could lock in on a $100,000, non-qualified deposit, using only the Benefit Base Floor and North American's stated payout factors by age, assuming a single-life payout with no prior withdrawals:

A joint-life election would lower every number in this table. Payout factors and the assumptions behind them are fixed at issue and are illustrated here only as an example; ask your strategist to confirm the current factors for your age and state before you rely on any figure.

Notice what the step-ups do to the math. Waiting one extra year, from age 64 to age 65, moves the payout from $7,728 to $10,245 a year, a jump of more than $2,500 that comes entirely from the Benefit Base stepping up to $150,000, not from any index performance. The same thing happens again between age 69 and age 70, where the jump to a $180,000 floor adds roughly $2,800 a year. If your income date can flex by even a year around one of these anniversaries, it is worth checking which side of the step-up you land on before you sign.

Nursing home doubler and death benefit options

Two built-in features extend what this contract does beyond the income table above.

The nursing home doubler kicks in if the covered person spends 90 consecutive days in a nursing home and is still there when an annual payment is due. Once that happens, North American doubles the lifetime payment for as long as the qualifying stay continues, provided the contract's accumulation value is still above zero. The benefit is not available until the second contract anniversary, so it will not help someone who needs care in year one.

At death, beneficiaries get a choice between two payout structures. The straightforward option is a lump sum equal to the accumulation value, or the original premium if no withdrawals were taken and the accumulation value has fallen below it. The second option, available in most states after the first contract year, lets beneficiaries take the full Benefit Base instead, paid out over five equal annual installments. Because the Benefit Base is usually larger than the accumulation value, especially once a step-up has occurred, this second option is often the better deal for heirs, as long as they are comfortable receiving the money over five years rather than all at once.

Surrender schedule and free withdrawals

This is the area where the NAC BenefitSolutions 10 asks the most of a buyer. The surrender charge holds at its maximum for two full years before it starts declining:

An early exit in either of the first two years costs 10% of the amount withdrawn beyond the free allowance, on top of any market value adjustment. California and a handful of other states use their own version of this schedule, so confirm your state's numbers with your strategist.

Free withdrawals are also more restrictive than on many competing contracts. In year 2 you can take out 5% of the accumulation value with no charge. From year 3 on, that allowance rises to 10%, but only if you did not take a withdrawal the year before. Take even a small amount in year 2, and your year 3 allowance drops back to 5%. One thing that does not count against this limit: the 1.20% rider charge, which North American deducts automatically from the accumulation value on each contract anniversary regardless of what else you withdraw.

Index options: the Barclays Transitions indexes

Where some income riders credit off familiar benchmarks like the S&P 500, the NAC BenefitSolutions 10 runs entirely on Barclays Transitions indexes, two proprietary Barclays benchmarks offered in four crediting variants: a 1-year and a 2-year point-to-point version of each. The "12 VC" version targets a higher volatility level and the "6 VC" version targets a lower one; both blend equities, bonds and cash using a Barclays-built model rather than tracking a single, well-known market gauge.

Both underlying indexes launched on the same date, March 31, 2023. Because caps, spreads and participation rates on these strategies reset regularly and change by state and deposit size, we do not print current numbers here. Ask your strategist for the crediting terms available today, or check current fixed index annuity crediting methods to understand how participation rates, caps and spreads interact before you compare quotes.

Historical performance and why we do not print the backtested numbers

Every sales illustration for this contract includes tables showing how each Barclays Transitions strategy would have performed across different historical stretches, often labeled as a best period, a worst period and a most recent period. Those tables can look convincing, and the guaranteed income table earlier in this review does not depend on any of them. But before you let a historical chart influence your decision, it is worth understanding exactly what kind of history it is showing you, which is the subject of the next section.

The indexes are only two years old

Here is the detail that deserves the most scrutiny in this entire review. Both Barclays Transitions indexes went live on March 31, 2023. As of this writing, that means roughly two years of real, live trading data exists for either strategy. Every year shown in an illustration before 2023 is a backtest: Barclays used its own model to calculate what the index would have produced had it existed at the time, using historical market data fed through the current formula.

Backtesting is common across the annuity industry, and it is not inherently dishonest, but it comes with real limitations worth naming plainly. A backtest is built and tuned after the fact, so there is no way to know whether the model would have been designed the same way without the benefit of hindsight. Backtests also tend to understate real-world drag from trading costs and index rebalancing, since those frictions are harder to model accurately after the fact than to observe as they happen.

The live results since March 2023 are the real test of this concern, and they have run cooler than the backtested history suggests investors should expect. The 2-year crediting strategies have not produced a positive credit in any completed period since launch, and the 1-year strategies posted a solid opening year before flattening out considerably in the periods since. None of that makes the guaranteed income numbers in this review any less real, they do not depend on the indexes at all, but it is a strong argument for treating any illustrated accumulation number, or any promise about how much extra income the indexed rollup might add, as a guess rather than a plan.

Who is the NAC BenefitSolutions 10 best for?

This contract makes the most sense if you are buying primarily for guaranteed income and can commit to the full surrender period. More specifically, it fits well if you:

• Want the guaranteed income floor and the step-ups at years 5 and 10 more than you want index-driven growth
• Plan to hold through the 10-year surrender period and start income at year 6 or later, once the $150,000 floor applies on a $100,000 deposit
• See real value in the nursing home doubler as a hedge against a future care need
• Like the idea of beneficiaries being able to choose the larger Benefit Base over five payments instead of a smaller lump sum
• Are deploying roughly $100,000 to $250,000 and want a guaranteed income figure in the five-figure range starting somewhere around age 65 to 70

Be more cautious if you are buying mainly for accumulation, since the backtested index charts are not a reliable guide to what the contract will actually credit going forward. The same caution applies if you need a full 10% free withdrawal starting on day one, since year 2 here caps out at 5%, or if you live in Oregon, New York, Guam, Puerto Rico or the U.S. Virgin Islands, where this contract is not sold. Anyone who expects to need their principal back inside the first two years should also look elsewhere, since the 10% surrender charge in years 1 and 2 is among the steepest charged on any comparable product.

Other income annuities to consider

If the NAC BenefitSolutions 10 is on your list, these are worth pricing alongside it:

• American Equity IncomeShield 10: a similar 10-year income FIA built around a simple interest rollup with a longer-tenured crediting index
• North American Company for Life and Health Insurance: the full carrier profile, ownership and ratings history behind this contract
• Sammons Financial Group: the parent company backing North American's guarantees