How to Pass the California Property & Casualty Exam on Your First Try (2026)

The California Property and Casualty examination is one combined test delivered by PSI Services. It has 150 scored 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. PSI may also add 5 to 10 unscored experimental questions, with extra time added for them; you will not be told which ones they are and they do not count toward your result. A question that feels unfamiliar may simply be a trial item — answer it and keep moving.

The passing score is 60% raw. Every listed (scored) question counts the same, so 90 correct answers out of 150 is a pass. You see pass or fail on screen as soon as you finish.

Because the exam draws on two underlying license lines — Property and Casualty — a single combined sitting covers both. You can instead take either line on its own: a Property-only exam or a Casualty-only exam, each 75 questions. The CDI exam chart rounds the time for those to 1.5 hours; the PSI Candidate Information Bulletin lists 98 minutes. Most candidates who want to write both lines take the combined 150-question exam once rather than two separate 75-question sittings, since the CDI charges one exam fee either way.

Until the end of 2025, California required applicants to finish a 20-hour pre-licensing course before they could sit the exam. AB 943 (Rodriguez, Chapter 566, Statutes of 2025, signed October 10, 2025) repealed that requirement effective January 1, 2026. The CDI Curriculum Board's own meeting minutes (February 19, 2026) spell out the scope directly: “On January 1, 2026, the 20 hours of prelicensing education will no longer be a licensing requirement for property, casualty, commercial lines, personal lines, limited lines automobile, life, and accident and health or sickness license applicants.” Property and Casualty candidates are named explicitly. 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. You can take the exam first and complete the ethics course while your Live Scan and application are processed, or do the course first — either order works.

The CDI also renamed its “Educational Objectives” to License Examination Objectives (LEOs). A Property and Casualty LEO subcommittee was still revising the objectives in early 2026, so the content weights described below are current as of this reading but worth rechecking before a future attempt if your study date is far out. If a study guide or provider still tells you that a 20-hour course is required to sit the California Property and Casualty exam, that information is no longer correct.

The CDI Curriculum Board publishes pass rates by exam and by attempt. For the English-language Property and Casualty exam in calendar year 2025:

• First-time candidates: 57% — 3,153 passed out of 5,485
• Repeat candidates: 40% — 1,502 passed out of 3,762

That is lower than California's combined Life, Accident and Health pass rate (60% first-time). Property and Casualty is the harder sitting, and the two single-line exams make that clearer still: candidates who sat the Property-only exam passed at 45% on their first try (25 of 55) — the weakest first-time pass rate the CDI publishes for any producer exam — while the Casualty-only exam ran at 64% (155 of 242).

Two things follow from those numbers. First, four in ten first-time combined candidates fail. Second, as with the other CDI exams, candidates do worse, not better, on a repeat 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. The cheapest path through this exam is to treat the first attempt as the only one — every retake costs the $55 CDI fee and the $43 PSI fee again, on top of the delay before you can be appointed and paid. The full cost breakdown shows what a retake does to the total.

The CDI publishes separate License Examination Objectives for Property and for Casualty, both effective January 1, 2026. There is no single combined P&C objectives document — the 150-question exam simply draws 75 questions from each. Unlike California's Life and Accident & Health objectives, the Property and Casualty LEOs give weights at the section level only, with no published per-topic question counts, so the percentages below are the most precise breakdown available.

Property objectives (75 questions)

• I. General Insurance — basic concepts, contract law, the California marketplace: 15%
• II. Property Insurance: 15%
• III. Personal Lines Insurance — homeowners, dwelling, flood, earthquake, the FAIR Plan: 38%
• IV. Commercial Insurance Coverages: 30%
• V. Pet Insurance: 2%

Casualty objectives (75 questions)

• I. General Insurance: 15%
• II. Casualty Insurance: 15%
• III. Personal Lines Insurance — personal auto, CAARP, umbrella: 35%
• IV. Commercial Insurance Coverages — CGL, commercial auto, workers' compensation, surplus lines: 35%

Read the two lists together and the shape of the combined exam is clear. Personal Lines is the single biggest section on both halves — 38% of Property and 35% of Casualty — and Commercial Insurance is close behind on both. Together, Personal Lines and Commercial account for roughly two-thirds of the entire 150-question exam. Pet Insurance, at 2% of the Property exam, is the smallest named section the CDI tests on either line.

California law and ethics are not a separate section on either objectives document; rules such as cancellation and nonrenewal (§481.5, §§660-669.5, §670, §673, §§675-679.6), the Unfair Practices Act (§790.03), the FAIR Plan (§10090, §10091(c), §10095(i)) and CAARP are tagged throughout the Personal Lines and Commercial sections of both exams, not held back for a dedicated block.

Most of this material is conceptual: coverage forms, policy conditions, licensing rules and the differences between admitted and surplus lines markets. You do not need diagrams to understand why a FAIR Plan policy exists or what makes a cancellation improper; you need a clear explanation you can hear more than once. That is why the LanePrep California Property & Casualty course is nine audio chapters, built chapter by chapter from the CDI's Property and Casualty 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 — Property (Chapters 1–4)

• Days 1–2: Chapter 1 — General Insurance, Contracts & the California Marketplace (the General Insurance section is 15% of both the Property and the Casualty exam)
• Day 3: Chapter 2 — Property Insurance Basics (15% of the Property exam)
• Days 4–6: Chapter 3 — Personal Lines Property: homeowners, dwelling, flood, earthquake, the FAIR Plan (38% of the Property exam — the single biggest block on either half)
• Day 7: Chapter 4 — Commercial Property, Inland Marine & Pet Insurance (30% + 2% of the Property exam), then re-listen to whatever you got wrong on the quizzes

Week 2 — Casualty (Chapters 5–7)

• Day 8: Chapter 5 — Casualty Insurance Basics (15% of the Casualty exam)
• Days 9–11: Chapter 6 — Personal Lines Casualty: personal auto, CAARP, umbrella (35% of the Casualty exam)
• Days 12–14: Chapter 7 — Commercial Casualty: CGL, commercial auto, workers' compensation, surplus lines (35% of the Casualty exam)

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

• Days 15–16: Chapter 8 — California P&C Law: cancellation and nonrenewal, the Unfair Practices Act (§790.03), the FAIR Plan, CAARP, ethics
• Day 17: Chapter 9 — Exam Day, 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/p-and-c/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 before you book. If you would rather test yourself across the whole exam first, the practice exam covers every content area.

If you fail. Insurance Code §1682 allows a maximum of 10 attempts at the same exam type in any 12-month period. 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 to 60%, two focused weeks on the sections you missed is usually enough; if you were far off, go back through the plan above.

Fees. Every attempt costs the $55 CDI exam fee plus a $43 PSI convenience fee — the same fee whether you sit the combined 150-question exam or either 75-question single-line exam. Testing at the CDI's own examination site in Los Angeles removes the PSI fee entirely, bringing the cost of that attempt to $55.

Choosing combined vs. single-line. If you only need one license line, the Property-only or Casualty-only exam is half the length (75 questions, 98 minutes) for the same fee as the combined exam. Given the Property-only exam's lower first-time pass rate (45%), do not assume the shorter exam is the easier one — prepare for whichever line you sit with the same seriousness as the combined exam.

On the day. Work through the on-screen tutorial so you are comfortable with the interface before the clock starts. Every scored question counts the same toward the 60% raw pass mark, so answer every one rather than leaving any blank, and use the time you have — 195 minutes for 150 questions, or 98 minutes for 75 — to flag and return to the ones you are unsure of.

Exam format, fees and pass rates come from the California Department of Insurance exam chart, the PSI Candidate Information Bulletin and the CDI Curriculum Board meeting packet. Read October 2026.