Life & Health insurance licensing

Life and accident-and-health are two lines of authority, and states let you test for them together or separately. The combined life and health licence is the most common first licence because most agencies sell both; the life-only and accident-and-health-only exams exist for producers whose role is one line. The four pages in this family are those four exams: the combined life exam and the combined health exam as most states deliver them, and the life-only and health-only versions with California as the reference state.

The lines cover different products. Life includes term, whole and universal life, annuities and the provisions that govern them — beneficiaries, misstatement of age, settlement options. Accident and health covers major medical, disability income, long-term care and Medicare-related coverage. Variable life and variable annuities are also securities, so selling them adds a FINRA registration on top of the state licence. Insurance is state-regulated, so the licence is issued by your resident state's department, the exam is delivered by its testing contractor, and NIPR carries the application and any non-resident licences.

Pre-licensing education is set per line and per state, and the hours are per line rather than per licence, so a combined licence normally means completing both courses. California is the state that most often diverges: it revises its prelicensing rules more frequently than most and adds an ethics and Insurance Code component, and it scores its life-only and health-only exams on a different standard from the percentage most states use. The exam page for each line carries that state's own hours and passing score.