Is the Alabama Life & Health Exam Hard? Pass Rates and Difficulty (2026)

The Alabama Life & Health exam is a long, broad exam rather than a tricky one. The combined exam has 150 multiple-choice questions, gives you 180 minutes, and you need 105 correct, which is 70%. Nothing in it is exotic. The difficulty comes from volume: you have to hold a full body of life insurance knowledge and a full body of health insurance knowledge in your head at once, plus a short Alabama law section, and keep your focus for up to three hours.

Whether it is hard for you depends mostly on how you prepare. Since January 1, 2024 Alabama no longer requires a pre-licensing course, so nobody is forced to sit through classroom hours before the exam. That makes the exam easier to reach, and it also means the preparation is entirely your own responsibility.

We cannot give you an honest Alabama pass rate, because Alabama does not publish a usable one. Here is what we checked.

• The National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) compiles first-time pass rates from the states. In its 2025 compile, Alabama reported no data at all. Every Alabama cell is marked as no data.
• In the 2024 compile, Alabama's block contains two different sets of Life and Health figures that do not agree with each other and cannot both describe the same first-time candidates. We could not establish which set is authoritative, so we do not quote either one.
• The Alabama Department of Insurance and the University of Alabama testing program do not post a pass rate on the pages we reviewed.

If you see a specific Alabama pass percentage on another site, ask where it comes from. We would rather tell you the number is not available than give you one that sounds precise and is not.

Four things drive the difficulty, and all of them are visible in the official format.

Length. The combined exam has 150 questions in 180 minutes. That is a little over a minute per question, but the real challenge is staying sharp for the last 40 questions, not the first 40.

Breadth. The content outline has four parts. General insurance principles, contracts and underwriting account for 30 questions. Life insurance is 55. Health insurance is 45. Alabama insurance law is 20. A weak area in any one of the big three can cost you a dozen marks.

A flat passing line. The passing score is a raw count, 105 correct out of 150. There is no scaled score to soften a bad section, so a poor Health block has to be paid for with a strong Life block.

The Alabama law section. Twenty questions is the smallest part, but it is the part that national study text covers least. It includes continuing education rules, license maintenance, unfair trade practices, life and annuity replacement, and the Alabama Life and Disability Insurance Guaranty Association. These are marks you can only collect by studying Alabama material.

Because Alabama publishes no pass data, we cannot tell you which group of candidates fails most often, and we will not guess. What we can describe are the habits that make an exam like this go badly, because they show up in every licensing exam.

• Reading the book once and testing never. Recognising a term on a page is not the same as picking it out of four close answers.
• Studying only the section you like. Many candidates favour life insurance and skim health, or the reverse, and the flat 70% line punishes that.
• Skipping the state law section. It is the smallest block, so it gets the least time, and it is the block where general knowledge helps least.
• Fatigue and pacing. Rushing the end of a three-hour exam turns known answers into careless ones.

If you take the exam and miss, the retake rules matter. The first failure carries no waiting period, but later failures do, and they are covered in our guide to Alabama retake rules.

Aim to be able to pass the weakest of the four parts, not just the strongest. A practical approach:

1. Learn the outline first. Know the four parts and their question counts so you can divide your time in proportion. Our guide to the exam format lists them.
2. Listen, then drill. Audio is good for building understanding on a commute. Practice questions are what show you whether the understanding holds up against four plausible options.
3. Review every wrong answer. The explanation matters more than the score. A missed question tells you which rule you have not yet absorbed.
4. Do not leave Alabama law to the last night. It is 20 questions of the 150, and it rewards a few focused sessions.
5. Practise at full length. Before exam day, sit through a long run of questions so that 180 minutes does not feel new.

You can start with the free Alabama Life & Health course preview and the free practice questions. For a plan, see how to pass on the first try.