Every Texas insurance exam, ranked by pass rate

TDI publishes first-time candidates and pass rates for every insurance licensing examination it runs, in one annual report. As far as we can tell, nobody has put the rows side by side. Here they are.

Rank 1 is the hardest by outcome. The whole set totals 67,199 first-time candidates in fiscal year 2025.

The extremes are the smallest exams, and that is not a coincidence

The hardest examination in Texas insurance was sat by 105 people. The easiest was sat by 83. Both populations are small enough that a couple of dozen candidates moving either way would shift the percentage several points, so treat those two rates as indicative rather than precise.

There is a second effect underneath the first. A tiny examination is a self-selecting one. The Property and Casualty Risk Manager paper is a specialist qualification that nobody sits by accident, so its 32.4% is a hard paper meeting a prepared population and losing. The Workers Compensation Adjuster paper at 81.9% is the narrowest adjuster line there is, sat by people who already work in that corner of claims.

The four exams that actually matter

Four examinations account for all but a few thousand of the 67,199. Those are the ones where the pass rate is measuring something stable.

Three of those four sit between 57.7% and 66%, in a band about eight points wide. The odd one out is Life Agent at 46.7%, which is eleven points below this examination on a population almost as large. We have written about that gap separately in why Life Agent is harder than life and health, and the short version is that we can measure it and cannot fully explain it.

Volume does not predict difficulty

It is tempting to read the table as a difficulty ladder where the crowded examinations are the easy ones. The table does not support that. The largest examination is fifth hardest of twelve. The second largest is third hardest. The easiest is the second smallest.

What the ranking does track, loosely, is how someone arrives at the paper. Broad entry-level licenses sat by career changers land in the middle. Narrow specialist licenses sat by people already doing the work land at the top of the pass table, except where the specialism is genuinely technical, at which point they land at the bottom of it.

The 403 that explains the whole table

That single comparison does more to explain the shape of this table than any argument about how hard the questions are. Every adjuster row in the ranking is a row of volunteers, because anybody who did not fancy the examination bought the course instead. Rows 5, 6 and 8, the General Lines and Personal Lines agent papers, are rows of people who had no alternative.

So the adjuster pass rates are not comparable with the agent ones even though they sit in the same table. Ours is our own inference from joining TDI's counts to Pearson's published exemptions. The Department does not say it.

What we would rank if we could

Eventual pass rate. First-attempt figures flatter examinations where nobody comes back and punish examinations that people retake until they clear. The report gives us first-time candidates only, so the ranking above is a ranking of first attempts and nothing more. If TDI ever published the follow-through, we would expect the big agent papers to move up and would not bet money on where the specialist ones went.