United States
Hong KongWhat a 57.7% pass rate means for you
It means 15,257 of 26,427 first-time candidates passed in FY2025. It does not mean you have a 57.7% chance. The rate describes a population with no entry requirement, where an appointment costs $49 and nothing at all forces a candidate to prepare before booking one.
A pass rate is a fact about a group. It becomes a forecast about you only if you are an average member of that group, and the whole question is whether you are.
- First-time candidates, FY2025
- 26,427
- Passed
- 15,257
- Pass rate
- 57.7%
- Entry requirement
- None
- Exam fee
- USD 49
- Mean scaled score
- 69.75
Who is inside the 26,427
Everyone. That is the unusual thing about this number and it is what makes it hard to read.
Most licensing examinations filter their candidates before the door. A course must be completed, hours must be logged, a degree must be held, a sponsor must sign. Texas requires none of that for a General Lines life, accident and health agent license. TDI lists three steps and none of them is preparation. So the 26,427 includes people who studied for two months, people who studied for two evenings, and people who booked a $49 appointment to see what it was like.
Compare it with the Property and Casualty Risk Manager examination, which passed 32.4% of 105 candidates. That is a much lower rate on a population of specialists who almost certainly prepared. The lower number is measuring a harder paper. This one is measuring an open door.
The standard deviation is the tell
TDI publishes a standard deviation of 14.51 alongside the mean of 69.75. That is a wide spread, and a wide spread means candidates differ a lot from each other rather than clustering around a common level.
Our reading is that the population is not one group with a bit of variation, it is at least two groups: people who prepared and people who did not. If that is right, the 57.7% is an average of two very different rates and describes almost nobody exactly. We label that as our inference. The report gives two moments of a distribution, not the distribution, so we cannot demonstrate it.
What the number should and should not change
| Question | Does 57.7% answer it? |
|---|---|
| Is this examination worth taking seriously? | Yes. Four in ten first-time candidates walk out without a license |
| Will I personally pass? | No. It is a population rate, not a prediction |
| Is the paper hard? | No. Nothing in the rate separates paper difficulty from candidate preparation |
| Do I need a course? | No. Texas requires none, and the report has no breakdown by preparation |
| Should I book before I am ready? | No, and this is the one decision the number should actually change |
The retake gap nobody publishes
57.7% is a first-attempt figure. It is not the share of people who eventually get licensed, and the difference between the two is everybody who came back.
A retake is a fresh registration at $49 and the candidate handbook sets no waiting period for this license, so coming back is easy and cheap. The eventual rate is certainly higher than 57.7%. We cannot tell you by how much, because TDI's report follows examinations rather than people over time. If you have just failed, that gap is the most important unpublished number on this site.
How to think about it before you book
- Treat 57.7% as a floor for the unprepared, not a ceiling for you. It is what happens across a population where preparation is optional
- Replace it with your own number. Two timed papers on different forms give you a rate that is actually about you, and our readiness target of 78% is deliberately set above where the evidence puts the cut
- Ignore any vendor pass rate you are shown. There is no published baseline to compare it against, because the TDI report contains no breakdown by preparation method. That applies to ours as much as to anyone's
The opinion, plainly: 57.7% is the most useful number about this examination and it is also the most misread. It is not a difficulty score. It is a measure of how many people Texas lets walk up to a paper they have not prepared for, which is a policy fact dressed as a statistic.
And the concession. We sell a course, so we have an obvious interest in you concluding that preparation is what separates the two halves of that rate. We cannot prove it from the report, we would say it anyway, and you should weigh it accordingly.
Common questions
Is a 57.7% pass rate bad?
It is middling among Texas insurance examinations, which run from 32.4% to 81.9%. What makes it hard to read is that no pre-licensing course is required here, so the population sitting the paper includes candidates who did no preparation at all.
Does the pass rate mean I have a 57.7% chance of passing?
No. It is the share of a mixed population of 26,427 first-time candidates who passed, not a probability attached to any individual. Your own timed practice scores on full papers are a far better forecast than a population rate.
How many people passed the Texas life and health exam?
15,257 of 26,427 first-time candidates in fiscal year 2025, according to TDI's report to the Governor. That counts first attempts only, so the number of people who eventually got licensed that year is higher by an amount the report does not state.
Is the eventual pass rate higher than 57.7%?
Almost certainly, because a retake is a fresh $49 registration with no waiting period set in the candidate handbook for this license. TDI's report tracks first-time candidates rather than following people through retakes, so the size of the gap is unpublished.
Do prep course pass rates mean anything?
Not much, and that includes ours. TDI publishes no breakdown of pass rates by preparation method, so there is no baseline to compare a vendor claim against and no way to tell whether its students differed from the general population before they enrolled.