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

The California Life, Accident & Health exam is moderately hard, and harder than either single-line exam on its own. In 2025, 60% of first-time candidates passed the combined exam (9,117 of 15,300). On a retake, only 43% passed (2,899 of 6,679). About four in ten first-timers fail.

The state does publish these numbers. They come from the California Department of Insurance (CDI) Curriculum Board meeting packet of February 19, 2026, and cover January to December 2025 for the English-language exam.

The exam is not hard because any single idea is difficult. It is hard because it is long, broad, and because the California-specific rules are tested inside the general questions rather than in a section of their own. Structured study beats skimming.

Three exams are offered, and the gap between them tells you something:

Exam (English, 2025)	First-time pass rate	Repeat pass rate
Life, Accident and Health (combined)	60% (9,117 of 15,300)	43% (2,899 of 6,679)
Life only	63% (10,075 of 15,974)	43%
Accident and Health only	76% (2,565 of 3,374)	53%

The combined exam has the lowest first-time rate of the three. That is what you would expect from an exam that asks you to hold two bodies of knowledge at once. Across all CDI producer exams in January to September 2025, the first-time pass rate was also 60%.

Notice the repeat column. Candidates who already failed once pass far less often than first-timers. The numbers do not prove why, but they do show that going back in with the same approach is a poor bet.

1. Length. The combined exam has 150 questions in 195 minutes, which is about 78 seconds a question. That is comfortable for a fast reader and tight for someone who rereads every option. Between 5 and 10 unscored experimental questions may be added, with extra time, and you cannot tell which ones they are.

2. Breadth. One sitting covers the Life objectives and the Accident and Health objectives. The published objectives for the health side put the most weight on medical expense coverage, including 15 questions on senior health products alone on the A&H-only exam. The life side puts the most weight on policy types, the individual contract and annuities. You cannot coast on one half.

3. The law is woven in. The California Insurance Code and ethics objectives are not a separate section. They are tagged inside both sets of objectives, so a question about replacement, free look, twisting, fiduciary duty or continuing education can turn up next to a question about policy types. Candidates who skip the Code because there is no obvious chapter for it lose marks they never see coming.

The state publishes who passes, not why people fail, so what follows is drawn from how the exam is built rather than from a survey.

The most common pattern is lopsided preparation: strong on life products and weak on Medicare, group coverage and disability, or the reverse. The second is reading instead of testing: recognising a term on the page is not the same as picking the right option when three answers sound plausible. The third is rebooking too fast. California sets no mandatory waiting period between attempts, so a candidate can book again straight away, and the 43% repeat pass rate suggests that many who do so have not changed what they study.

Very close pairs are the usual trap: revocable and irrevocable beneficiaries, a MEC and a non-MEC policy, guaranteed renewable and noncancelable, own-occupation and any-occupation. Each pair is easy once you have drilled it and expensive when you have not.

The passing score is 60% on a raw basis, not a scaled score. On a 150-question exam that means 90 correct answers. You can be wrong on four questions in ten and still pass.

You also do not need a pre-licensing course to sit for it. Since January 1, 2026, the 20-hour course is no longer required, and the 12-hour ethics course is needed before the license is issued, not before the exam (see whether you need a pre-licensing course). And if you fail, you may retake with no waiting period, up to 10 attempts of the same exam type in 12 months (see the retake rules).

Work to the weights. Start with the biggest blocks on the objectives: on the life side, policy types, the individual contract and annuities; on the health side, individual and group medical expense, PPACA and senior health products. Then give the California rules their own passes, because they are the points other materials treat lightly.

Study in short, repeated sessions rather than one long one. Listen to a chapter on the commute, then answer questions on it the same day. The free topic sets, such as annuities and California statutes, are built for exactly that, and the full list is on the practice question hub.

When a practice question goes wrong, work out which of the two reasons it was: you did not know the idea, or you knew it and misread the stem. They need different fixes. For the timeline, see how to pass on the first try, and for what the day itself looks like, exam day at PSI.

Ready to start? Try the free first chapter.