Texas Life Agent or Life & Health? Which Licence to Take (2026)

Texas issues two separate licences that both let you sell life insurance:

• Life Agent — life insurance and annuities only.
• General Lines Life, Accident & Health — life, annuities and health.

Take Life Agent if you have been recruited to sell life insurance — final expense, term, mortgage protection — and you want to be licensed as fast and cheaply as possible. It is a shorter exam and $10 less.

Take General Lines L&H if you might ever sell health, Medicare supplements, disability or group benefits — or you are not yet sure. Adding health later means sitting a whole second exam and paying a second application fee; taking it now costs 30 extra minutes and $10.

Most candidates who are not certain should take the broader licence. The extra cost is trivial next to redoing the process later.

	Life Agent	General Lines L&H
Exam code	InsTX-Life01	InsTX-LAH05
Total questions	90	145
Scored / unscored pretest	80 / 10	130 / 15
Time	120 minutes	150 minutes
Exam fee	$39	$49
Texas-specific scored questions	30	30
Covers health insurance	No	Yes
First-time takers per month	~1,679	~2,237
First-time pass rate	44%	54%

Everything else is the same: both are administered by Pearson VUE, both need the $50 TDI licence application and one-off fingerprinting of about $41, and neither requires a pre-licensing course when you apply directly for a permanent licence.

The Life Agent exam is shorter, narrower and cheaper — and harder to pass. Across May to July 2026, first-time pass rates were 44% for Life Agent against 54% for General Lines L&H, from the monthly reports the Texas Department of Insurance publishes through Pearson VUE.

Ten percentage points is a wide gap for an exam that covers less material. The likeliest explanation is not the content but who sits it: the life-only licence is the standard route for agents recruited into final-expense and mortgage-protection sales, where the pitch is often “get licensed this month”. A shorter exam invites shorter preparation.

Read it as a warning rather than a comparison. Fewer topics does not mean less studying — you still face 30 Texas statute questions, the same as on the longer exam, and they are the questions national study material covers worst.

The 80 scored questions break down like this, per the official content outline:

General knowledge — 50 scored questions

Content area	Scored questions
Types of policies (term, whole, universal, variable)	15
Policy riders, provisions, options and exclusions	15
Completing the application, underwriting, delivering the policy	12
Retirement and other insurance concepts (annuities, taxation)	8

Texas-specific — 30 scored questions

Content area	Scored questions
Statutes and rules common to life and health insurance	20
Statutes and rules pertinent to life insurance only	10

Note the weighting: the Texas section is 30 of your 80 scored questions — more than a third of your score, and a larger share than on the L&H exam, where the same 30 questions sit among 130. If you are taking the life-only route, Texas statutes matter more to you, not less.

Those statutes are agent licensing and continuing education, the Commissioner's powers, unfair trade practices, and on the life-specific side the free-look period, incontestability, replacement rules and beneficiary provisions. They are covered in detail in our Texas statutes guide.

Yes, but it is not an upgrade — it is a second licence. You would sit the full General Lines Life, Accident & Health exam (145 questions, $49) and submit another $50 application. Your fingerprints stay on file with TDI, so that part is not repeated.

In other words, going life-only first and adding health later costs roughly $99 more and a second exam day, compared with $10 more and half an hour if you take the broader exam at the outset.

That maths is why the broader licence is the default recommendation for anyone whose plans are not already fixed. The exception is genuine: if an agency has hired you to sell final expense and wants you producing this month, the shorter exam gets you there sooner, and you can revisit health when the need is real.

Here is the thing most study material will not tell you: there is almost no prep written specifically for the Texas life-only exam. The books, courses and free guides are all written for Life & Health, because that is the bigger market. So life-only candidates end up buying L&H material anyway — and that is fine, because every topic on your exam is inside it.

What matters is knowing which parts to skip. Working from an L&H course, a life-only candidate needs:

• Everything on life products — policy types, riders, provisions, options, exclusions
• Annuities and the tax treatment of life products (the “retirement and other concepts” block)
• Application, underwriting and policy delivery procedures
• All of the Texas statutes — both the common block and the life-specific one

You can skip the health-insurance material: major medical, disability income, long-term care, Medicare and Medicaid, group health and the ACA. That is roughly a third of an L&H course you do not have to study.

LanePrep's Texas Life & Health course covers the Life Agent outline in full — chapters 1 to 5 for the life, annuity and taxation material, chapters 7 and 8 for the Texas statutes. It is audio-first, so the statute material that decides a third of your score can be reviewed on a commute rather than at a desk. Chapter 1 is free, no signup, and the 25 free practice questions include the life and statute topics your exam is built on.

Exam formats and fees in this guide come from the Pearson VUE Texas candidate handbook and examination content outlines; pass rates and volumes are the average of the Texas Department of Insurance monthly reports for May, June and July 2026. All read August 2026.