North American Charter Plus 10 Annuity Review (2026)

What is the North American Charter Plus 10 annuity?

Charter Plus 10 is a fixed index annuity from North American Company for Life and Health Insurance, part of Sammons Financial Group. It runs on a 10-year surrender schedule and is built for one job: growing a lump sum, not paying you an income.

The carrier stacks three things into that 10-year window. First, an upfront premium bonus that can reach 23% in most states. Second, one of the deeper index menus you will find on a bonus fixed index annuity, licensed from S&P Dow Jones, Morgan Stanley, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs and Barclays. Third, sixteen distinct crediting strategies plus a fixed account, so you are not stuck with a single formula for turning index movement into interest.

That 23% headline is really three pieces stacked together: a 10% base bonus, a discretionary 4% bonus special that North American can end at any time, and a 9% credit tied to the Enhanced Bonus Rider, an add-on that carries its own annual charge (more on that below). California buyers see a slightly smaller 22% version of the same stack.

What Charter Plus 10 deliberately does not include is a guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefit rider. There is no way to lock in a contractual paycheck on this product. If income is the priority, North American sells a separate contract built for exactly that: the Income Pay Pro 10, which pairs a similar chassis with a compounding income rider.

Inside Sammons Financial's broader lineup, Charter Plus 10 sits between the carrier's older no-bonus fixed index contracts and its income-rider family. The buyer it fits best is someone parking $75,000 to $2,000,000 for a full decade, who is comfortable trading a lifetime income guarantee for a larger day-one bonus and a wider choice of index strategies.

Index strategies and how interest gets credited

Every strategy on Charter Plus 10 works the same basic way: your principal never drops because of a bad index year, and in exchange, a cap rate or a participation rate limits how much of a good index year actually reaches your account. Some strategies reset annually, others reset every two years, and both formats appear across the seven available indices.

One-year reset strategies

Two-year reset strategies

A fixed account rounds out the sixteen options, with a guaranteed minimum rate of 0.25% written into the contract. Because current cap rates, participation rates and the fixed account's declared rate all move with the market, none of them are printed here; check the quote box on this page or our FIA crediting methods guide for how each formula works, then request current numbers before allocating.

Enhanced versus standard participation

The "Enhanced Participation" versions of the Morgan Stanley and Fidelity strategies pay a richer participation rate than their standard counterparts, but only after an added strategy fee comes out first. On the one-year reset, that fee is charged once a year. On the two-year reset, the same annual fee is charged at each anniversary within the term, so it effectively doubles before the term closes. Every other strategy on the menu, capped or uncapped, carries no strategy fee beyond the Enhanced Bonus Rider charge that applies contract-wide.

Where the proprietary indices come from

Five of the strategies run on volatility-controlled, excess-return indices: the two Barclays Transitions indices, S&P MARC 5% ER, Fidelity Multifactor Yield 5% ER, and Morgan Stanley Dynamic Global. Each is rules-based, targets a defined volatility level, and is administered by a named institutional sponsor rather than built in-house by the insurer. That structure is standard across the fixed index annuity category today, not a red flag specific to this contract. Our guide to proprietary index strategies walks through how to evaluate one on its own terms. Note that the Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley strategies both deduct a small annual amount inside the index calculation itself, a normal feature of excess-return indices that trims the raw index gain before your cap or participation rate is even applied.

Choosing among sixteen strategies

With this much choice, a few general rules of thumb help more than chasing whichever number looks biggest today. Uncapped participation strategies tend to reward a strong index year more than a capped strategy can, since a cap puts a hard ceiling on the credit no matter how far the index climbs. The strategy-fee versions only pay off if the index performs well enough to clear that extra cost; in a flat or weak year, you would have been better off in the no-fee version. And a two-year reset locks your rate in for twice as long as a one-year reset, which can work for or against you depending on how the index behaves over that stretch. Spreading a deposit across a few strategies, rather than concentrating it in one, is a common way to manage that uncertainty. A licensed strategist can walk through the current rate sheet and build an allocation around your particular goals and time horizon.

How to read a Charter Plus 10 illustration

Any formal illustration you receive for this contract will project an accumulation value years into the future using one specific hypothetical path for the indexes involved. Often that path is simply the actual index returns from the last decade, run once and then repeated on a loop for the remaining years of the projection. That is one legitimate way to build a projection, but it is still only one scenario among many. A projection built on the last ten years of a strong bull market will look very different from one built on a decade that included a prolonged downturn, and neither guarantees anything about the years actually ahead of you.

What is guaranteed, regardless of how the indexes perform, is the Enhanced Bonus Rider charge. That 0.95% comes out of the accumulation value every year for the full 10-year surrender period, so any illustration you review should show it being deducted the entire time, not just in a few sample years.

A useful exercise before you commit is to compare Charter Plus 10's illustrated accumulation value at year 10 against a simpler guaranteed alternative, such as laddering a series of multi-year guaranteed annuities over the same decade. Our fixed annuity calculator and MYGA calculator can each model a guaranteed-rate path side by side with whatever numbers a Charter Plus 10 illustration hands you, using today's actual rates rather than a projection. In a strong market decade, an indexed strategy can meaningfully outpace a locked-rate ladder. In a weak or flat one, the ladder often wins, since it does not carry a 0.95% annual charge or depend on index performance at all. Framed honestly, Charter Plus 10 competes with fixed-income alternatives like MYGAs and CDs, not with owning the stock market outright; a fixed index annuity trades away most of a bull market's upside in exchange for never losing principal in a downturn.

Income options without an income rider

Because Charter Plus 10 has no guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefit rider built in or available as an add-on, there are only two ways to turn this contract into income. You can annuitize the accumulation value, which North American allows for life income after the first year or for a fixed period of payments after year five, under its current administrative practice. Or you can take systematic withdrawals, drawing on the same 10% free withdrawal allowance available to any owner of the contract.

Neither route offers the kind of guaranteed, contractually locked-in payout percentage that a dedicated income rider provides. If a set lifetime income figure matters more to you than maximizing the accumulation value, North American's Income Pay Pro 10 or a competing income-rider fixed index annuity from another top-rated carrier will serve you better than Charter Plus 10 ever will.

Surrender schedule, bonus recapture and liquidity

Charter Plus 10 actually carries three different surrender schedules depending on where you live. Most states use the harsher version: 10%, 10%, 9%, 9%, 8%, 8%, 7%, 6%, 4% and 2% across the ten years. Twenty states get a materially softer version, among them Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Washington: 9%, 8.5%, 7.5%, 6.5%, 5.5%, 4.5%, 3.5%, 3%, 2% and 1%. California gets the gentlest schedule of all, starting at 8% and tapering to 0.44% by year 10.

The bigger liquidity story, though, is bonus recapture, not the surrender charge itself. Cash out early and North American claws back part of the bonus on top of any surrender charge. In the most-states version, recapture starts at 100% in year 1, meaning a full surrender that first year forfeits the entire bonus, then steps down by 10 percentage points a year. In the 20 state-variation states, recapture starts lower, at 90%, and steps down as 90%, 85%, 80%, 70%, 60%, 50%, 40%, 30%, 20% and 10%.

To put a number on it: surrender a $100,000 state-variation contract in year 5, and you would face roughly 60% recapture of the 23% bonus, about $13,800, plus a 5.5% surrender charge, roughly $5,500 assuming the accumulation value is still near your original premium, plus a possible market value adjustment on top of both. Hold to year 11 or beyond and none of that applies; the bonus and any growth on it are yours free and clear.

Two features soften that picture considerably. The bonus is paid in full at death, with zero recapture, which makes Charter Plus 10 a reasonable option for a buyer whose main goal is leaving more behind for heirs. And the nursing home waiver releases up to 100% of the accumulation value after year 1, with no surrender charge, no bonus recapture and no market value adjustment, though it is not available in Massachusetts.

A few more liquidity details worth knowing: free withdrawals equal to 10% of the accumulation value can be taken every year starting in year 2. Because that 10% is measured against the full accumulation value, bonus included, the actual dollar amount you can pull rises as the contract credits more interest over time. Required minimum distributions above that 10% free amount are treated as penalty-free under North American's current administrative practice. And the guaranteed minimum cash surrender value floor sits at 87.5% of premium, growing at a guaranteed 2.4% a year. On a $100,000 contract, that is an $87,500 floor that keeps compounding even in the worst-case scenario of zero index credits and full rider charges the entire term, a genuine contractual backstop rather than a marketing promise.

The premium bonus: what it actually costs

A 23% bonus on $100,000 of high-band premium means $23,000 lands in your accumulation value the day the contract is issued, before a single dollar of index interest has been credited. That money is immediately part of the death benefit with no recapture, and it starts earning interest in whatever strategies you choose right alongside your original premium.

It is not free, though. The 9-percentage-point Enhanced Bonus Rider portion of the bonus comes with a 0.95% annual charge on the accumulation value for the full 10-year surrender period. On a $100,000 contract, that works out to roughly $9,500 over ten years if the value never grows past your original premium, and somewhat more than that if it does, since the charge is a percentage of a rising balance rather than a flat fee. Bonus contracts across the fixed index annuity category also typically price other terms, such as caps and participation rates, a bit less generously than a comparable no-bonus contract from the same carrier; that trade-off is the real cost of the bonus, more than the rider fee alone.

The math works out best for a buyer who holds the full 10 years and lets both the bonus and the credited interest compound undisturbed. It works out worst for someone who might need to exit in years 3 through 7, when bonus recapture and the surrender charge overlap most painfully. And remember that 4-percentage-point piece of the current bonus is a pricing special North American can end whenever it chooses, so do not assume today's 23% headline will still be on the table when you are actually ready to sign.

Who the Charter Plus 10 fits

Picture someone roughly 55 to 70 years old sitting on somewhere between $75,000 and $2,000,000, none of it needed for at least a full decade. That is the buyer Charter Plus 10 is built around: comfortable trading a guaranteed income figure for principal protection, index participation, and a sizable day-one bonus aimed at accumulation and legacy goals. It is a particularly good fit for someone living in one of the 20 state-variation states, or in California, since the softer surrender and recapture schedules there lower the cost of an unplanned early exit.

It is a poor fit for anyone who needs a contractually guaranteed lifetime paycheck, since there is simply no income rider to provide one. It is also weaker for anyone who might need more cash than the annual 10% allowance covers somewhere between years 2 and 8, since that is exactly when bonus recapture stings the most, and for anyone below the $75,000 high-band threshold, since the low band trades away much of what makes this contract appealing in the first place.

How Charter Plus 10 compares

Among 10-year bonus fixed index annuities from top-rated carriers, Charter Plus 10's closest competition includes Athene Agility 10, Allianz 222, and EquiTrust's MarketPower Bonus Index. Each carrier bundles a different mix of bonus size, surrender length, index selection and rider availability, so the right pick depends on which of those trade-offs matters most to you. Charter Plus 10's advantage tends to be the sheer depth of its index lineup and its state-variation surrender relief; its main limitation next to income-focused competitors is the complete absence of a lifetime withdrawal rider.

If a guaranteed paycheck is actually the goal, skip the accumulation category entirely and compare Charter Plus 10's sibling, Income Pay Pro 10, against other income-rider fixed index annuities instead. Tax Free Wealth Plan is a licensed independent insurance agency, appointed with 25 companies, and we can price Charter Plus 10 next to other top-rated carriers so you see the actual trade-offs before you commit to a 10-year contract.