What the Texas life and health insurance exam actually is

The Texas Department of Insurance issues the license. Pearson VUE runs the test under contract. Those are two different organizations doing two different jobs, and almost every confusing thing about this examination comes from not knowing which one you are dealing with.

The exam in one table

That is the whole shape of it. What follows is the part that decides how you should prepare.

It is two exams wearing one coat

The 130 scored questions split into a 100-question general portion on insurance principles and a 30-question portion on Texas statute and rules. The content outline publishes them separately, as nine general sections and four Texas ones. You sit them together and you get one result.

There is no separate pass for the Texas half. You cannot clear the general portion, fail the state portion and be told to come back for the state portion only. It is one score, and the 100/30 split is the fact that should shape your study time more than any other.

Our opinion, stated plainly: candidates over-prepare Texas statute because it feels like the local, unfamiliar, examinable-sounding part. It is 30 questions. The general portion is 100, and it is where a marginal candidate is actually losing the paper.

Who has to sit it

Anyone who wants to solicit or negotiate life, accident, health or HMO coverage in Texas under a General Lines agent license. That is the standard route into the job, and 26,427 first-time candidates took it in fiscal year 2025.

The single exemption is the Chartered Life Underwriter designation, which is eight college-level courses. If you already hold it you do not need this exam. If you do not hold it, earning it to avoid a USD 49 test would be one of the worst trades available to you.

Texas does not require a course first

This is the correction worth reading twice, because most of the pages ranking above this one are selling something. TDI's own licensing page lists three steps: take the examination, get fingerprinted, apply. A pre-licensing course is not one of them.

You may still want a course. Plenty of people learn better with structure, and a carrier recruiting you will often pay for one, which changes the arithmetic completely. Wanting one and being required to have one are different things, and only the second would be a legal requirement.

What a pass is worth, and for how long

A pass is not a license. It is the qualifying step for one, and the application has to be filed within a year of passing or you sit the exam again. Fingerprints and a USD 50 application fee come after.

We do not print a fingerprinting fee because we have not verified one. It is a real cost and you should expect it; we would rather leave a gap than fill it with a number nobody checked.

How hard it is, honestly

57.7 percent of first-time candidates passed in fiscal year 2025. Those are people, not sittings, which matters: a pass rate counted per attempt would flatter the exam by counting the same determined candidate twice. Roughly four in ten walk out having failed.

It is not a conceptually difficult paper. It is a volume-of-detail paper, full of near-synonym pairs that only separate if you learned them precisely. Waiver of premium and payor benefit. Noncancelable and guaranteed renewable. Own occupation and any occupation. Nothing there is hard to understand and all of it is easy to confuse under a clock.

The pass mark, and why nobody can tell you one

TDI sets the passing score and Pearson reports it as a scaled score. No percentage is published. The confident "70%" you have seen quoted on a dozen prep sites is not TDI's number, and why Texas publishes no percentage pass mark works through what is actually published instead.

The concession we owe you here: nobody at this site has sat this examination. What we have is the Insurance Code, the content outline, the candidate handbook and TDI's own FY2025 report, and where a figure is ours rather than the Department's we say so on the page it appears on.