What This License Is
The New Mexico Casualty line of authority covers insurance against legal liability — personal and commercial auto liability, commercial general liability, workers compensation, professional liability and umbrella coverage. It is a statutory line at NMSA 1978 §59A-12-17(A)(4).
It does not reach first-party property damage. A producer who needs to write both sides of a commercial account holds Casualty and Property, or takes the combined Series 18-31 in a single sitting.
PSI's published content outline for this exam is a useful study map in itself: Casualty Insurance Basics carries the heaviest weight at 28 items, followed by General Insurance Concepts at 14, the Personal Automobile Policy at 15, Commercial General Liability at 12, Insurance Regulation at 10, Commercial Automobile at 8, and Other Types of Casualty Insurance at 8, with Workers' Compensation Laws at 3 and Federal Laws at 2.
Casualty Exam Options in New Mexico
| Route | Exam | Items | Time | Fee |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Casualty only | Series 18-29 | 100 (+5-10 unscored) | 2 hr | $75 |
| Property + Casualty together | Series 18-31 | 150 | 2 hr 30 min | $75 |
Both are administered by PSI Services and both are available onsite and by live online proctoring. The pass mark is 70% of scored items, a raw percentage.
Note how little of the Casualty paper is formally allocated to workers compensation law — 3 items out of 100. That is worth knowing before you spend a third of your study time there. The state-specific comp facts below are worth learning because they are cheap to learn, not because they carry weight.
Most Tested Topics on the New Mexico Casualty Exam
New Mexico's auto rules deviate from the national baseline in three separate ways, which makes them unusually productive exam material. From the TESTivity New Mexico regulations curriculum, statute-verified — first, auto:
| Auto concept | The New Mexico rule | Cite |
|---|---|---|
| Fault system | Fault-based (tort) - New Mexico is not a no-fault state | §66-5 |
| Minimum liability limits | 25/50/10 - $25,000 bodily injury per person, $50,000 per occurrence, $10,000 property damage | §66-5-215 |
| Uninsured and underinsured motorist | Must be made available at the §66-5-215 minimum limits and such higher limits as the insured desires; the insured may reject it, and the rejection must be endorsed on or attached to the policy | §66-5-301; 13.12.3.9 NMAC |
| Personal injury protection | No PIP requirement - medical payments coverage is optional | §66-5 |
| Negligence doctrine | Pure comparative - recovery is reduced by the claimant's share of fault with no percentage bar; a claimant 99% at fault still recovers 1% | Scott v. Rizzo, 96 N.M. 682 (1981) |
| Auto residual market | The New Mexico Automobile Insurance Plan, the AIPSO-administered assigned-risk plan | §59A-32-1 |
And workers compensation, where New Mexico's thresholds are genuinely distinctive:
| Workers comp concept | The New Mexico rule | Cite |
|---|---|---|
| Coverage threshold | 3 or more workers - but construction businesses at ANY number, including one | §52-1-2; §52-1-6 |
| Administering agency | The New Mexico Workers' Compensation Administration (WCA) - a standalone agency, not a division of labour or industry | §52-5 |
| Wage replacement rate | Two-thirds (66 2/3%) of the average weekly wage, capped at the state maximum | §52-1-41 |
| Waiting period | No benefits for a disability lasting 7 days or less; if disability lasts more than 4 weeks, benefits are allowed from the date of disability | §52-1-40 |
| Compliance options | Buy commercial cover, qualify as an approved self-insurer, or join a group self-insurance programme | §52-1-4 |
The most-missed item in the auto set is pure comparative negligence, and it is missed because it comes from case law rather than statute. New Mexico adopted it in Scott v. Rizzo in 1981, and it has no percentage bar at all. Modified comparative rules elsewhere cut recovery off once a claimant passes a stated percentage of fault; New Mexico sets no such threshold, so a candidate carrying that assumption in will answer that a claimant more than half at fault recovers nothing.
In the comp set, the trap is the construction carve-out. "Three or more workers" is the headline, and a question that names a two-person roofing or framing operation is testing whether you know construction is excepted from the threshold entirely. The seven-day waiting period with its four-week retroactive trigger is the other reliable point — and note it lives at §52-1-40, not in the benefit-rate section.
Fingerprinting for Your New Mexico Licence, Step by Step
Every New Mexico resident producer applicant is fingerprinted. The requirement sits in the rule at 13.4.2.9(C)(5) NMAC, replaced in full effective 1 April 2025 — the applicant's fingerprints must have been "submitted for purposes of a state and federal background check" — with the character and criminal-record authority at NMSA 1978 §59A-11-7.
It is genuinely two checks, not one. OSI's own wording: the checks "are run through both NM Dept of Public Safety as well as a national FBI background." A clean state record does not settle it.
Step 1 — Register first. This is the step people skip. OSI's instruction is unambiguous: "All applicants must register prior to being fingerprinted." New Mexico DPS has partnered with IDEMIA to provide IdentoGO fingerprint services, and the registration produces the reference the capture site needs. Walking into an IdentoGO location without having registered means being turned away.
Step 2 — Get the current service code and fee from OSI directly. New Mexico does not publish the insurance service code or the fingerprint fee anywhere this build could verify from a primary source, and the two identifiers circulating in older material do not agree with each other. Ask OSI Licensing on (855) 427-5674 or agents.licensing@osi.nm.gov for the current code and the current price before you register, and confirm the fee at booking rather than budgeting from a figure found online.
Step 3 — Book and attend the capture. IdentoGO's New Mexico enrolment portal is at nm.ue.state.identogo.com. Bring current government-issued photo identification. The capture itself takes a few minutes; the results transmit electronically to OSI.
Step 4 — Mind the 90-day shelf life. The background report is valid for 90 days. That is a much shorter clock than the one-year window you have to file the licence application, and the two are easy to confuse: let the report expire and you pay to be printed again. Sequence the prints close to the application, not close to the exam.
This is not only a first-time requirement. Fingerprints are re-triggered when someone activates a cancelled resident licence, and — the clause that surprises established producers — when amending a licence that was issued more than two years ago. Adding a line of authority to a licence you have held for a decade puts you back through the background check.
There is one more re-trigger worth planning around: Separately, NMSA 1978 §59A-12-26 lets the Superintendent impose a penalty of up to $50 for failing to report continuing education credits on time.
What the Casualty Licence Costs
$75 per exam attempt, $30 for the resident producer licence (NMSA 1978 §59A-6-1), $20 per insurer appointment, $60 biennial continuation.
The fingerprint charge is additional. New Mexico does not publish it on any page this guide could verify, so confirm it with OSI or at the IdentoGO booking screen — and remember the report only lasts 90 days, so paying for it too early means paying twice.
NIPR's transaction fee is also additional and is not published by the state.
Eligibility
At least 18 (§59A-12-12), a pass on Series 18-29, and a state and federal fingerprint background check. No pre-licensing course is required.
Criminal history is evaluated under §59A-11-7 and 13.4.2.9(C)(5) NMAC, which also routes the analysis through New Mexico's Criminal Offender Employment Act. A felony involving dishonesty or breach of trust engages 18 U.S.C. §1033, and transacting insurance in that position without the Superintendent's written consent is a federal offence independent of state licensing. If this applies to you, get the §1033 consent question answered before you file, not after.
A C.P.C.U. designation waives the casualty examination under 13.4.2.11(B)(3) NMAC.
Continuing Education for Casualty Producers
Important CE details: Three of the 24 hours must be ethics, leaving 21 general. Credit hours cannot be carried over into the next compliance period. The specialty trainings listed at 13.4.7.10(C)(2) NMAC - stop loss (8 hours), flood (4 hours) and long-term care (8 initial, then 4 per compliance period) - count toward the 24 rather than sitting on top of it. Annuity product training is a separate requirement under 13.9.20 NMAC and is not part of that clause.
24 hours every two years, 3 of them ethics, no carryover, on a period expiring the last day of your birth month.
Casualty producers have the lightest specialty-training load of any New Mexico line — there is no casualty equivalent of the long-term care or annuity training that health and life producers carry. The 24 hours are yours to allocate.
Courses and providers must be approved by the Superintendent. Providers have 10 business days to report completed hours, and once banked, NIPR advises it can take up to 72 hours for the status to update before the renewal will go through — which is why OSI encourages completing CE at least 90 days before expiry rather than in the final week.
Quick Reference
Official Links
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