Texas against other states, and the limits of what we can tell you

Start with the disclaimer, because it shapes everything below. This site holds the Texas content outline, the Texas candidate handbook, the Texas Insurance Code and TDI's own examination report. For any other state it holds nothing. So there is no ranking table here.

What we can do is describe the Texas exam precisely enough that you can compare it yourself against whatever your other state publishes.

What Texas looks like, in the terms other states use

Take that list to your other state's regulator page and fill in the same rows. It is a better comparison than anything we could write, because it uses their published figures instead of our guesses about them.

The one cross-state fact we do hold

As of August 2026, industry reporting put 34 of 51 jurisdictions at no mandatory pre-licensing requirement for resident producer lines, with California and Pennsylvania both dropping theirs during the year. Texas is one of the 34.

That number comes from trade reporting rather than from a regulator, and we have not checked all 51 ourselves. So it is the shape of the market, not a count to rely on. Check your own state.

Why 100 of the 130 questions travel

This is the structural point and it is the useful one. The general portion covers life policy types, riders and provisions, applications and underwriting, retirement concepts, health policy types and provisions, social insurance and field underwriting. None of that is Texas law. It is standard insurance content that every state's exam covers in some arrangement.

Which means 77% of your preparation is not state-specific, and that figure is ours, by dividing 100 by 130. If you later license in a second state, the part you have to rebuild is the smaller part. That is not the same as reciprocity, which is a licensing question rather than an exam one, and the mechanics of moving a license live in the licensing cluster.

Is the Texas exam hard, relative to others?

We cannot answer that honestly and neither can anyone else without a lot of data nobody publishes together. What we can say is that TDI publishes more than most: a first-time pass rate, a candidate count, a mean scaled score of 69.75 and a standard deviation of 14.51, for every insurance exam it administers. Very few regulators put that much on the record.

Our opinion is that this transparency, not the difficulty, is the real difference between Texas and most states. You can find out how the population actually performs before you sit. In most jurisdictions you cannot, and every claim about difficulty is somebody's impression.

The thing that would tempt us to invent numbers

A ranked table of every state's fee and pass rate would be the most linked page on this site. It would also be almost entirely fabricated, because the underlying data either is not published or sits in fifty separate documents nobody here has read. We would rather be short on this page than wrong on it.

If you find such a table elsewhere, the question to ask is where each row came from. Most of them trace back to a company's own summary of its own multi-state course catalog, which is not the same thing as a regulator's number.