California Life Insurance Exam 2026

What the California Life License Covers

A California Life license — CDI's forms also call it Life-Only Agent — authorizes you to transact life insurance and annuity contracts anywhere in the state. It is issued by the California Department of Insurance, whose Commissioner is, unusually, elected statewide rather than appointed.

Two boundaries matter before you commit to this line. First, fixed and indexed annuities sit inside the Life line — no separate license — but California will not let you solicit one until you have completed its 8-hour annuity training, so the license alone is not a licence to sell. Second, variable life and variable annuities are outside it: those require a California Variable Contracts license layered on top of Life authority, plus your FINRA registrations.

Life does not include accident and health. If there is any realistic chance you will quote disability, Medicare supplement, or group health, compare this exam against the combined 150-question sitting in the next section before you book anything.

For the 12-hour Code & Ethics course California still requires before your license is issued, TESTivity recommends Achievable. The Achievable insurance courses were built by the same subject-matter expert behind TESTivity, so the two are designed to work together.

One important distinction: TESTivity is not an approved pre-licensing provider in California and does not issue certificates of completion. The TESTivity learning tools and study packages will absolutely help you pass the exam — but treat them as a supplement to your Achievable course, not a substitute for it.

Disclosure: TESTivity has a partnership with Achievable and may earn a commission if you enroll through links on this page.

Exam Options & Format

The California Life examination is 75 questions with a 105-minute limit, administered by PSI Services under CDI's own content objectives (Ins. Code §1677). California does not use the national series-code model — there is no "Series 13-31" equivalent here, just CDI's published objectives.

The bulletin notes that one to ten unscored experimental items — roughly 10% — may be added to any exam, and warns that they do count against your time. CDI does not say whether the published 75 includes them, so budget your pace against 75 questions in 105 minutes and treat any extras as a bonus you have already paid for in minutes.

The alternative is the combined Life, Accident and Health or Sickness exam: 150 questions in 195 minutes, one sitting, and under Ins. Code §1676(b) it satisfies the examination requirement for both lines. Better still, applying for Life-Only and Accident & Health at the same time is one $188 filing fee, not two — the combined route is meaningfully cheaper than adding health later.

Everything passes at 60%. You may test at any of PSI's twenty California sites, at CDI's Los Angeles examination site, or by remote proctor; format is chosen at registration.

Most Tested Topics on the California Life Exam

California's life questions cluster around the handful of policy provisions where the Insurance Code departs from the NAIC baseline that national prep material teaches. Each of these is verified against the California Insurance Code:

The 60-day grace period is the single most-missed California life fact. Candidates who studied a national outline arrive with "30 days" burned in and never reconsider it; California doubled the window because its lapse-notice regime assumes the insured gets a real chance to cure. If a question gives you a California policy and a lapse date, count sixty.

The second trap is the life settlement rescission window, because it is written as a whichever-comes-first pair rather than a single number. Thirty days from signing, fifteen days from the money — and the exam will happily give you a fact pattern where the proceeds arrived on day five, which makes the answer day twenty, not day thirty.

Applying for Your California License — Every Step

Passing does not make you a producer; the application does. California's sequence has one ordering rule that trips up nearly everyone, so read step 3 and step 4 together before you start.

Step 1 — Pass the Life examination. Your result appears on screen at the end of the session and a score report is emailed to you. The pass is good for 12 months — but read the deadline carefully: Ins. Code §1676(a) says the Commissioner may not issue a permanent license unless the applicant passed the qualifying exam within the 12 months preceding the date of issue. The clock runs to issuance, not to your filing date, so treat month nine as your real deadline.

Step 2 — Complete the 12-hour Ethics and California Insurance Code course. It must be finished before CDI can issue the license. CDI's prelicensing FAQ states plainly that it is not a prerequisite to scheduling or sitting the exam — though some of CDI's individual qualification pages still read the other way, so if a provider tells you otherwise, the FAQ is the page to cite. The certificate is valid three years from the completion date, whether or not a license issues, and one 12-hour course covers every producer line you apply for at once (§1749(f)).

Step 3 — File the application at Sircon for California. CDI routes applicants to sircon.com/california; NIPR is also accepted. Select California, individual resident, and the Life line of authority. The filing fee is $188 for the two-year term. Under §1751.5 that fee is non-refundable whether or not the application is acted upon — so get the answers right the first time.

Step 4 — Only now, submit your fingerprints. This is California's counterintuitive step. CDI's own instruction form (LIC 442-39A) states that license applicants are not to submit fingerprint impressions until after their applications are submitted. Register and pay at Capital Live Scan, then book the capture. (Nonresident applicants do the reverse — prints first, application second. The Casualty guide walks both paths screen by screen.)

Step 5 — Answer the background questions honestly. Any "yes" needs supporting documents — court records, a letter of explanation — uploaded through the portal's attachments warehouse. An undisclosed matter that surfaces in the FBI response is treated far more harshly than a disclosed one, because misrepresentation on the application is itself an independent ground for denial.

Step 6 — Track it in CLASS and confirm issuance. CDI's Check License Application Status Service shows where your file sits. Allow at least two weeks for fingerprint results alone. When the license issues, note the date: your two-year term runs from it, and every additional license you add later will expire alongside this one.

Step 7 — Get appointed. A license is authority to transact, not a book of business. A carrier must file an appointment for you; California's appointment filing fee is $32.

What It Costs

Three fixed costs and one variable one. The exam runs $55 to CDI plus PSI's $43 convenience fee — about $98 per attempt at a PSI site or by remote proctor, and $55 flat if you test at CDI's Los Angeles site, where the convenience fee is waived. The license filing is $188 for the two-year term. Fingerprints are $74 all in. That is roughly $360 on a first-time pass.

The variable cost is the 12-hour Ethics and California Insurance Code course, which is priced by the provider rather than the state. CDI does not publish a dollar amount for the rescheduling/retake fee — it says only that one will be charged — so budget a full exam fee for any second attempt.

Eligibility Requirements

You must be at least 18. California residency is not required to hold a California license — plenty of resident-state producers in neighbouring states hold California authority — but you may designate only one state as your resident state (§1638), and that choice determines which fingerprint path and which CE rules apply to you.

A criminal record is not an automatic bar, but fingerprints go to both the California DOJ and the FBI, and matters involving fraud, dishonesty, or breach of trust weigh heavily. Disclose everything the application asks about.

Keeping Your License Active

California licenses run a two-year term measured from the issue date — it expires on the last day of that same calendar month two years later. This is worth internalising because it is not how most states work: California is not a birthday-renewal state, and if you add an Accident & Health license eighteen months from now, it will expire alongside this one rather than starting its own clock.

Each term takes 24 hours of CE including 3 hours of ethics, and one of those ethics hours must cover insurance fraud. Holding several producer licenses does not multiply the requirement — one 24-hour block covers them all.

For a Life producer the requirement that actually bites is the annuity training. California wants 8 hours of California-specific annuity training before you solicit a single annuity sale, then 4 hours each renewal thereafter, on the Best Interest curriculum SB 263 introduced. Those hours count toward the 24 rather than sitting on top of them. The P&C guide covers renewal mechanics, the late-renewal window, and the carryover rules in full.

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