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

North Carolina does not offer a single Property & Casualty exam. To hold both lines of authority you sit two separate Pearson VUE exams: the Property Agent exam (code 04) and the Casualty Agent exam (code 05). There is no combined 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. 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. A separate, smaller license — the Personal Lines Agent exam (code 12, 80 scored questions) — covers a narrower set of personal coverages and is not part of the Property & Casualty license.

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 Session Law 2025-45 (House Bill 737, signed July 1, 2025) repealed that requirement by striking G.S. §58-33-30(d)(2) and (d)(3).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 — Property Agent and Casualty Agent alike.

Here is the part worth saying plainly: the official October 2025 candidate guide and most outside study guides still describe the old 20-hour requirement, and 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:

• Property Agent — 2024: 48.9% (2,153 first-time candidates); 2025: 49% (2,161 first-time candidates)
• Casualty Agent — 2024: 54.1% (2,108 first-time candidates); 2025: 53% (2,131 first-time candidates)

Two patterns are worth noticing. First, Property is the harder of the two, and the weakest line in North Carolina overall — barely half of first-time candidates pass it, versus a little over half on the casualty side. Second, both rates held roughly flat from 2024 to 2025, the year the pre-licensing course disappeared, which 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. About 4,300 candidates sit a first-time P&C exam in North Carolina each year — roughly a third of the Life & Health volume — and 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. Property Agent:

• Terms and Concepts: 7 items (about 13% of the exam)
• Personal Insurance Coverages: 25 items (about 45%)
• Commercial Insurance Coverages: 10 items (about 18%)
• North Carolina Statutes and Regulations Pertinent to Property Insurance: 13 items (about 24%)

Casualty Agent:

• Terms and Concepts: 7 items (about 13%)
• Personal Insurance Coverages: 18 items (about 33%)
• Commercial Insurance Coverages: 15 items (about 27%)
• North Carolina Statutes and Regulations Pertinent to Casualty Insurance: 15 items (about 27%)

Read both lists together and the shape of the exam becomes clear. On the Property side, Personal Insurance Coverages is the single biggest section by a wide margin — almost half of the exam on personal property coverage alone. On the Casualty side, the weight is spread more evenly across personal coverages, commercial coverages and state law. On both exams, North Carolina law is a quarter or more of the total: 13 items on Property, 15 on Casualty, covering the North Carolina Rate Bureau, fire insurance policies, the Beach Plan and the FAIR Plan on the property side, and the Motor Vehicle Reinsurance Facility, auto policy cancellation under G.S. 20-310 and the Workers' Compensation Act on the casualty side. A candidate who studies generic coverage material and skips North Carolina's own statutes is giving up a quarter or more of each exam before it starts.

This material is concrete, not abstract — you do not need a diagram to understand what a homeowners policy excludes or how a workers' compensation claim is handled, 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 — Property Agent exam (Chapters 1-3 and 7)

• Day 1: Chapter 1 — Terms and Concepts (7 items, counts toward both exams)
• Days 2-4: Chapter 2 — Personal Property Coverages (25 items, the largest single chapter in the course)
• Day 5: Chapter 3 — Commercial Property Coverages (10 items)
• Days 6-7: Chapter 7 — North Carolina Property Law (13 items): the Rate Bureau, fire insurance policies, the Beach Plan and the FAIR Plan

Those four chapters cover all 55 items on the Property exam (7+25+10+13).

Week 2 — Casualty Agent exam (Chapters 4, 5 and 8)

• Days 8-9: Chapter 4 — Personal Casualty Coverages (18 items)
• Days 10-11: Chapter 5 — Commercial Casualty Coverages (15 items)
• Days 12-13: Chapter 8 — North Carolina Casualty Law (15 items): the Motor Vehicle Reinsurance Facility, auto policy cancellation under G.S. 20-310 and the Workers' Compensation Act
• Day 14: Re-listen to Chapter 1 since its 7 items are tested again on this exam, then re-drill whatever the week's chapter quizzes flagged

Those three chapters, plus the Chapter 1 terms you already covered, account for all 55 items on the Casualty exam (7+18+15+15).

Week 3 — Common law and exam day (Chapters 6 and 9)

• Days 15-17: Chapter 6 — 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/p-and-c/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 Property candidates and a bit over half of first-time Casualty 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, Property Agent and Casualty Agent extract). Pass rates from the NAIC compiled pass-rate reports for 2024 and 2025. Read October 2026.