How to Pass the California Life & Health Exam on Your First Try (2026)

The California Life, Accident and Health or Sickness examination is one combined test delivered by PSI Services. It has 150 multiple-choice questions and you get 195 minutes to answer them — a little over a minute and a quarter per question. The California Department of Insurance (CDI) rounds that to three hours on its exam chart, and the 15-minute on-screen tutorial at the start is not counted against you.

The passing score is 60% raw. Every listed question is scored, so 90 correct answers out of 150 is a pass. PSI may add 5 to 10 unscored experimental questions to your exam; you get extra time for them, you will not be told which ones they are, and they do not count toward your result. The practical consequence is that a question which seems to come from nowhere may simply be a trial item. Answer it and move on.

You see pass or fail on screen as soon as you finish, and the result is also emailed to you. If you fail, the report shows how many questions you answered correctly, which is useful for deciding how much more work the next attempt needs.

Because the exam covers both the Life objectives and the Accident & Health objectives, a single pass qualifies you for both the Life-Only Agent and the Accident and Health Agent license types. You can also take either half on its own (75 questions, 105 minutes), but most candidates who want to sell both lines take the combined exam once.

Until the end of 2025, California required applicants to finish a 20-hour pre-licensing course before they could sit the exam. AB 943 (Chapter 566, Statutes of 2025, signed October 10, 2025) repealed that requirement for life and accident and health applicants effective January 1, 2026. Since that date you can schedule and take the exam without a course certificate.

One requirement survives. California still requires a 12-hour ethics and Insurance Code course, including one hour on insurance fraud, under Insurance Code §1749(a)(1). The distinction matters: the course is a condition of the license being issued, not of taking the exam. One course covers both the Life-Only and the Accident and Health license types, and the certificate is valid for three years.

In practice that gives you a choice of sequence. You can take the ethics course first and then the exam, or pass the exam first and complete the course while your Live Scan and application are processed. Either order works. What you cannot do is skip the course and expect the license to issue.

If a study guide or provider still tells you that a 20-hour course is required to sit the California exam, that information is no longer correct. The CDI notice of November 10, 2025 is the primary source.

The CDI publishes pass rates by exam and by attempt. For the English-language Life, Accident and Health exam in calendar year 2025:

• First-time candidates: 60% — 9,117 passed out of 15,300
• Repeat candidates: 43% — 2,899 passed out of 6,679

Two things follow from those numbers. First, four in ten people who walk in for the first time fail. The exam is not a formality. Second, and counter to what most people assume, candidates do worse, not better, on a second attempt. The group that comes back is mostly the group that did not prepare properly the first time, and many of them come back with the same preparation. Reading the questions once before does not turn into points.

The cheapest path through this exam is therefore to treat the first attempt as the only one. Every retake costs the $55 CDI fee and the $43 PSI fee again, plus the time it takes to get a new appointment and the weeks you are not yet licensed. The full cost breakdown shows what a retake does to the total.

The CDI publishes License Examination Objectives for each exam, effective January 1, 2026. There is one document for the Life exam and one for the Accident and Health exam, each written for a 75-question test; the combined exam covers both sets. The question counts in those documents tell you where to spend your time.

Life objectives (75 questions)

• General Insurance — basic concepts, contract law, the insurance marketplace: 22 questions
• Life Insurance — basics, types of policies, individual contract provisions, replacement and cancellation, taxation, group life, underwriting and claims: 49 questions, of which Annuities are 8
• Life Policy Riders: 4 questions

Accident & Health objectives (75 questions)

• General Insurance — basic concepts, contract law, marketplace: 18 questions
• General Concepts of Medical and Disability Insurance: 4 questions
• Medical Expense Insurance: 45 questions — individual 14, group 8, PPACA 8, Senior Health Products 15
• Disability Income: 4 questions
• Long-Term Care: 4 questions

Read the two lists together and the shape of the exam is clear. General Insurance across both halves is 40 questions, Life Insurance is 49, and Medical Expense is 45. Those three areas are 134 of the 150 questions. Disability Income, Long-Term Care, Riders and General Concepts are four questions each; they are worth learning, but they are not where a pass is decided.

Within Medical Expense, the 15 Senior Health Products questions are the single biggest block on the health side — Medicare, Medicare supplements, Medi-Cal and the California rules for selling to people aged 65 and over. Candidates who have only studied generic national material tend to be weakest here.

Ethics and Insurance Code objectives are not a separate section. They are tagged inside both documents and show up throughout, so California-specific rules such as the senior free look under §10127.10, replacement under §10509 and annuity suitability under §10509.910 need to be learned alongside the general material, not left for the end.

Most of this material is conceptual. You do not need diagrams to understand how a free-look period works or what makes a replacement improper; you need a clear explanation you can hear more than once. That is why the LanePrep California course is nine audio chapters, built chapter by chapter from the CDI objectives, each with a quiz. A commute, a walk or a workout becomes study time, and a chapter you missed can be replayed at the same cost as the first listen.

Three weeks of about an hour a day is enough for most working candidates. The course allocates its chapters by exam weight, so the plan below spends the most days where the most questions are.

Week 1 — Life (Chapters 1–5)

• Days 1–3: Chapter 1 — Life Insurance Basics & Risk Concepts (general insurance, contract law, underwriting; 33 of the 150 questions map here)
• Day 4: Chapter 2 — Types of Life Insurance Policies
• Day 5: Chapter 3 — Policy Provisions, Riders & Options
• Day 6: Chapter 4 — Annuities
• Day 7: Chapter 5 — Federal Tax Considerations, then re-listen to whatever you got wrong on the quizzes

Week 2 — Health (Chapters 6–7)

• Days 8–10: Chapter 6 — Health Insurance Basics & Individual Policies (individual medical expense, disability income, long-term care; 36 questions)
• Days 11–14: Chapter 7 — Group Health, PPACA, Senior Health Products & California rules common to both lines (36 questions). Give Senior Health Products two of these days on its own.

Week 3 — California statutes and the exam itself (Chapters 8–9)

• Days 15–16: Chapter 8 — California Statutes (free look, replacement, licensing and discipline, transacting insurance)
• Day 17: Chapter 9 — Exam Strategy & Test-Day Tips, then a timed run through every chapter quiz in one sitting
• Days 18–21: Re-drill the questions you missed, re-listen to the weakest chapter, and rest the day before

Take the chapter quiz after each listen and write down the question numbers you missed. Two days later, before the next chapter, answer those again. That short loop is where most of the retention comes from; listening alone feels productive but does not test whether anything stuck.

Chapters 1 and 9 are free at /ca/l-and-h/preview — the full audio and the quiz, no signup. Chapter 9 is the one to listen to first if you have already studied elsewhere and only want to check the format and the California-specific rules before you book.

If you fail. Insurance Code §1682 allows a maximum of 10 attempts at the same exam type in any 12-month period; after a tenth failure you are barred for 12 months. There is no mandatory waiting period between attempts, so you can rebook as soon as a seat is available. Use the number-correct figure on your score report to decide how long to wait. If you were close, two focused weeks on the chapters you missed is usually enough; if you were far off, go back through the plan above.

Booking. Schedule through PSI at test-takers.psiexams.com/cadi or by phone at (833) 518-7456. The name on your booking must match your government ID exactly. Rescheduling or cancelling is free if you do it at least two business days before the appointment; a late change or a no-show forfeits the fee.

Where to test. You can test at the CDI examination site in Los Angeles, at one of about 20 PSI test centers around the state, or by remote proctoring from home. The CDI site charges no PSI convenience fee; the centers and remote testing add $43 on top of the $55 CDI exam fee. Across all CDI exams from January to September 2025, remote candidates passed at 63% and test-center candidates at 58%; both are respectable options, so pick the one where you will be least distracted.

Identification. Bring one unexpired government-issued photo ID that carries your signature. If you test remotely, note that PSI does not accept out-of-state ID cards for remote exams; candidates who recently moved to California and still hold another state's ID should test in person or use a passport.

On the day. Arrive 30 minutes early for check-in. Work through the 15-minute tutorial so the flag-and-review function is familiar before the clock starts. Answer every question — there is no penalty for a wrong answer and the pass mark is a raw percentage. Flag the ones you are unsure of and come back to them; at 195 minutes for 150 questions you have time to do that. Change an answer only when you remember a specific fact that makes the first choice wrong.

After a pass, the exam result is valid for one year under §1676(a). Complete the 12-hour ethics course, get your Live Scan fingerprints done and file the application in that window and you will not have to sit the exam again.

Exam format, fees and pass rates come from the California Department of Insurance and the PSI Candidate Information Bulletin. Read October 2026.