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

North Carolina does not offer a single Life & Health exam. To hold both lines of authority you sit two separate Pearson VUE exams: the Life Agent exam and the Accident and Health or Sickness Agent exam. Each has 55 scored questions, each allows up to 5 additional unscored pretest questions mixed in without being labeled, and each gives you 75 minutes. There is no way to tell a pretest question from a scored one, so the practical move is to answer everything as if it counts.

Passing is a scaled score of 70 on a 0-100 scale, not a raw percentage and not a fixed count of correct answers — Pearson VUE weights the scaled score by question difficulty, so two candidates who answer the same number of questions correctly can land on different sides of 70 depending on which questions those were. Each exam is $45 per attempt, and the content inside each sitting is general insurance knowledge and North Carolina-specific law scored together as one result — there is no separate state-law pass mark to clear.

Because the two lines are tested separately, a candidate who wants both has to pass both. There is no discount for sitting them back to back and no combined-exam shortcut the way a few other states offer. The exam is administered in English; candidates who need it can request time and a half with a letter from an instructor or sponsoring company.

Until the fall of 2025, North Carolina required anyone applying for a producer license to complete a 20-hour pre-licensing course first. Session Law 2025-45 (House Bill 737, signed July 1, 2025) repealed that requirement by striking G.S. §58-33-30(d)(2) and (d)(3). The replacement language in (d)(1) is explicit: the Commissioner "shall not require an individual who applies for an insurance producer license in this State to complete any specific amount of instruction or any specific course of instruction." The repeal took effect October 1, 2025.

The Department's Agent Services Division confirmed what that means in practice in a memo dated October 9, 2025: anyone who applies on or after October 1, 2025 "will not be required to complete pre-licensing education (PLE) prior to sitting and taking the North Carolina state exam(s)." No course, no certificate of completion, no seat-time requirement standing between you and the two exams above.

Here is the part worth saying plainly: the official October 2025 candidate guide, the Department's own PLE chart and Pearson VUE's North Carolina exam page still describe the old 20-hour requirement, and most outside study guides repeat it without a date attached. None of that is current. The primary sources are the statute itself, as amended by Session Law 2025-45, and the Agent Services memo of October 9, 2025 — both say the course is gone as of October 1, 2025. If a page you are reading does not mention that date, it was written before the repeal.

What has not changed is the exam. You still have to pass both Pearson VUE exams at a scaled score of 70. Skipping the course means you decide how to prepare, not that there is less to learn.

The NAIC compiles first-time, English-language pass rates for every state's producer exams. For North Carolina:

• Life Agent — 2024: 54.5% (7,255 first-time candidates); 2025: 51.0% (7,728 first-time candidates)
• Accident and Health or Sickness Agent — 2024: 62.6% (5,368 first-time candidates); 2025: 60.8% (5,040 first-time candidates)

Two patterns are worth noticing. First, the Life exam is the harder of the two by a wide margin — roughly half of first-time candidates pass it, versus three in five on the health side. Almost everyone who sits for an L&H license takes the Life exam; it is the one to respect most in your prep schedule. Second, both rates fell slightly from 2024 to 2025, the year the pre-licensing course disappeared. That is not proof the course mattered — the two numbers moved by only a few points — but it is a reason not to treat "no course required" as "no study required." Nothing in the data says the exam got easier.

North Carolina does not publish a separate pass rate for repeat candidates, so there is no second-attempt figure to lean on. The only number you control is the first one. Since each exam is $45 per attempt and failing either one delays the whole application, the cheapest strategy is to prepare so the first sitting of each exam is the only one. The full cost breakdown shows exactly what a retake adds to the total.

Pearson VUE's content outline #123415, effective March 2, 2026, lists exactly how the 55 scored questions on each exam are split across content sections. Life Agent:

• Types of Individual Life Insurance: 17 items (about 31% of the exam)
• Annuities: 5 items (about 9%)
• Life Insurance Policy Provisions, Options and Riders: 11 items (about 20%)
• Other Life Topics: 8 items (about 15%)
• North Carolina Statutes and Regulations Pertinent to Life: 14 items (about 25%)

Accident and Health or Sickness Agent:

• Accident and Health Insurance Policies: 22 items (about 40%) — broken down inside the outline as disability income (7), basic medical (2), major medical (6), comprehensive (1), hospital indemnity (1) and managed care (5)
• Accident and Health Insurance Policy Provisions: 11 items (about 20%)
• Other Accident and Health Topics: 8 items (about 15%)
• North Carolina Statutes and Regulations Pertinent to Accident and Health: 14 items (about 25%)

Read both lists together and the shape of the exam becomes clear. On the Life side, Types of Individual Life Insurance is the single biggest section by a wide margin — almost a third of the exam on policy types alone. On the health side, Accident and Health Insurance Policies plays the same role, and disability income is the largest piece inside it. On both exams, North Carolina law is not an afterthought: it is a flat 14 items, a quarter of each exam, on top of the state-specific material that is already woven into the policy-provisions and other-topics sections. A candidate who studies generic national material and skips the North Carolina statutes — G.S. Chapter 58 licensing and unfair trade practices, the Insurance Information and Privacy Protection Act, replacement under 11 NCAC 12 .0612, the Guaranty Association — is giving up a quarter of each exam before it starts.

This material is conceptual, not visual — you do not need a diagram to understand how a reduced paid-up option works or what makes a replacement improper, you need a clear explanation you can hear more than once. That is why the LanePrep North Carolina course is nine audio chapters built directly from the #123415 outlines above, each with its own quiz, organized so the chapters for each exam line up with that exam's item counts.

Week 1 — Life Agent exam (Chapters 1-3 and 8)

• Days 1-2: Chapter 1 — Types of Individual Life (17 items)
• Day 3: Chapter 2 — Annuities and Other Life Topics (Annuities 5 + Other Life Topics 8 = 13 items)
• Days 4-5: Chapter 3 — Life Policy Provisions (11 items)
• Days 6-7: Chapter 8 — North Carolina Life Rules (14 items), then re-listen to whatever the chapter quizzes flagged

Those four chapters cover all 55 items on the Life exam (17+5+11+8+14).

Week 2 — Accident and Health exam (Chapters 4-6)

• Days 8-10: Chapter 4 — A&H Policies (22 items, the largest single chapter)
• Days 11-12: Chapter 5 — A&H Provisions (11 items)
• Days 13-14: Chapter 6 — Other A&H Topics and NC A&H Rules (8 + 14 = 22 items)

Those three chapters cover all 55 items on the health exam (22+11+22).

Week 3 — Common law and exam day (Chapters 7 and 9)

• Days 15-17: Chapter 7 — North Carolina Insurance Law Common to Both Exams (licensing under G.S. Chapter 58 Art. 33, the Commissioner's powers, unfair trade practices, the privacy act)
• Day 18: Chapter 9 — Exam Day, then a timed run through every chapter quiz in one sitting
• Days 19-21: Re-drill whatever you missed, re-listen to the weakest chapter, rest the day before

Take the chapter quiz after each listen and write down which questions you missed. Two days later, before starting the next chapter, answer those same questions again. That short loop is where the retention comes from — listening alone feels productive but does not tell you what actually stuck. When all nine chapters are done, a separate timed practice exam for each line tells you whether you are really at a scaled 70 or only strong in the chapters you enjoyed.

Chapters 1 and 9 are free at /nc/l-and-h/preview — full audio and quiz, no signup. Chapter 9 is the one to start with if you already studied elsewhere and just want to check the format and the North Carolina-specific rules before you book either exam.

If you fail either exam, the wait before you can retest is 24 hours — short, but not zero, so plan the retake day rather than assuming you can walk back in the same afternoon. The $45 fee is charged again for every attempt, on every exam, with no reduced retake price. Fail both exams once each and you have spent $90 without yet holding a license; fail one of them twice and you are already past what the other exam cost you the first time.

Because each exam is scored as one sitting — general insurance knowledge and North Carolina law together, no separate pass mark for the state portion — there is no way to "bank" a passing state-law score while you work on the general material, or vice versa. A fail on either exam means the whole 55-item sitting is retaken, pretest questions included.

The practical upshot is the same one the pass-rate numbers already point to: with roughly half of first-time Life candidates and three in five first-time A&H candidates passing, a retake is a live possibility, not an edge case, and it is cheapest to prevent rather than pay for. The cost guide works through exactly what one retake adds to the full license budget.

Exam structure and fees from the NCDOI/Pearson VUE candidate guide #123400 (October 2025 edition). Question counts and content weighting from Pearson VUE content outline #123415 (effective March 2, 2026). Pass rates from the NAIC compiled pass-rate reports for 2024 and 2025. Read October 2026.