What This License Is
A North Carolina Casualty line of authority covers insurance against legal liability for injury to persons or damage to property — personal and commercial auto liability, general liability, workers' compensation, professional liability and the commercial casualty lines. It is issued by NCDOI.
Like Property, it is a standalone exam. North Carolina offers no combined Property & Casualty sitting, so full P&C authority is two exams at $45 each. Casualty alone is a legitimate license, but a personal-lines book needs Property too, and a producer writing only personal auto and homeowners may be better served by the separate Personal Lines line.
This is the line where studying the state section actually matters most. North Carolina auto law is not a regional variation — it is a distinct system, and two of its central rules changed as recently as July 1, 2025.
Exam Options & Format
The Casualty Agent exam is 55 scored questions plus 5 unscored pretest items, 1 hour 15 minutes, $45 through Pearson VUE.
The five major producer exams here are two-part — a general-knowledge section and a North Carolina section — and the handbook is clear about what that means: "the two parts are scored together, not individually." You get one overall score. There is no separate pass mark per part, no partial credit, and no carrying a passed part into a retake.
The passing standard is a scaled score of 70 on a 0-100 scale — which is not the same thing as 70% correct. The handbook is explicit: the reported score "is neither the number of questions you answered correctly nor the percentage of questions you answered correctly." Raw answers are converted onto a common scale so a marginally harder form is not a harder pass.
Pre-licensing education is no longer required. Session Law 2025-45 amended G.S. 58-33-30(d)(1) effective October 1, 2025 so that "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 old 20 hours per line is gone. Courses still exist and are still worth taking — but they are optional, and any site telling you to buy 20 hours before you may sit the exam is describing the law as it stood before last October. NCDOI's own legacy prelicensing page is among them.
And note the order, because North Carolina inverts it. You file the NIPR application before you test. Pearson then emails an authorization carrying a six-month eligibility window, and the exam must be passed and the license issued inside that window or you reapply and pay again. There is no "your score is good for twelve months" rule here — the application is what expires.
Testing is in person only, booked as late as one calendar day ahead subject to availability. Walk-in examinations are not available. Fail and you may rebook after 24 hours; there is no published cap on attempts, but each is another $45 and all of them have to fit inside your six-month application window.
Most Tested Topics on the North Carolina Casualty Exam
North Carolina auto and workers' compensation law supplies most of this line's state section, and it is unusually rich in both specific numbers and structural oddities. Every figure is cited:
| Concept | The North Carolina rule |
|---|---|
| Compulsory auto limits | 50/100/50 — $50,000 bodily injury per person, $100,000 per accident, $50,000 property damage — effective July 1, 2025, raised from 30/60/25 (G.S. 20-279.21(b)(2)) |
| Fault system | Tort, not no-fault. There is no mandatory PIP in North Carolina; medical payments coverage is optional |
| 🚩 Negligence rule | PURE CONTRIBUTORY NEGLIGENCE — any negligence by the claimant that is a proximate cause of the injury bars all recovery. Even 1% fault means nothing. North Carolina is one of only a few jurisdictions that still applies this, with Virginia, Alabama, Maryland and the District of Columbia |
| Uninsured motorist | Mandatory, at limits equal to the highest bodily injury liability limits on any one vehicle on the policy, capped at $1,000,000 per person and per accident (§ 20-279.21(b)(3)) |
| Underinsured motorist | Now included on every new or renewed policy since July 1, 2025. Previously it attached only above minimum limits. Commercial-only and fleet-only policies are excepted |
| 🚩 UIM trigger, redefined | An "underinsured highway vehicle" is now one where the sum of all applicable liability limits is less than the total damages sustained — a limits-versus-damages test, replacing the old limits-versus-limits comparison |
| UIM set-offs | Eliminated as of July 1, 2025, except against workers' compensation |
| 🚩 Residual market | The North Carolina Motor Vehicle Reinsurance Facility, Article 37 — insurers cede the risk to the Facility and keep the policyholder, issuing and servicing the policy themselves. An assigned risk plan, by contrast, assigns applicants out to carriers. Membership is a prerequisite to writing auto in the state |
| Facility "clean risk" | Nonfleet private passenger where the owner, principal operator and all licensed household operators have 2 years' driving experience and zero SDIP points in the preceding 3 years. Clean-risk rates "shall not exceed" comparable voluntary-market rates (§ 58-37-35(l)) |
| SDIP accident tiers | Major: at-fault accident causing bodily injury or death, or property damage of $3,850 or more. Intermediate: property damage over $2,300 but under $3,850. Minor: $2,300 or less (§ 58-36-75) |
| SDIP lookback changes | For convictions on or after July 1, 2025, 4 or more points extends the surcharge period from 3 to 5 years; the lookback for speeding 10 mph or less and for Prayers for Judgment Continued also rose from 3 to 5 years |
| Inexperienced operator | The surcharge now reaches drivers with less than 8 years of driving experience, up from 3, for those first licensed on or after July 1, 2025 |
| Auto cancellation | 15 days for nonpayment; at least 60 days for any other reason. The insured has 10 days after receiving the notice to request departmental review, and the policy stays in force during review (§ 58-36-85) |
| Workers' comp threshold | 3 or more employees regularly employed — but 1 where any employee works with or around radiation, and 10 for nonseasonal agricultural workers (G.S. 97-2(1)) |
| Workers' comp benefits | 66⅔% of average weekly wages, minimum $30 per week (rising to $50 on July 1, 2027), for up to 500 weeks, with extended compensation available after 425 weeks on proof of total loss of wage-earning capacity (§ 97-29) |
| Workers' comp claim deadline | 2 years after the accident (§ 97-24(a)); administered by the North Carolina Industrial Commission |
Pure contributory negligence is the single most important concept on this page, and it is worth understanding rather than memorising. In most states a claimant who is partly at fault recovers a reduced award. In North Carolina a claimant who is at fault at all, in any degree that proximately caused the injury, recovers nothing. That is not a rounding difference from comparative fault — it is a different rule producing opposite outcomes on identical facts, and it drives how liability claims are actually defended here.
The second high-value item is the Reinsurance Facility, because the distinction the exam wants is mechanical. An assigned risk plan takes an applicant nobody wants and assigns them to a carrier. The Facility does the opposite: the insurer must write the eligible risk, keeps the customer, issues the policy and services it — and then cedes the risk to a pool shared among all members. The policyholder may never know. Learn it as "the risk moves, the relationship does not," and note the article number, because Article 37 sits next to several other residual-market articles that are easy to confuse.
North Carolina's Fingerprint Process — Every Step
North Carolina requires fingerprints from every resident producer applicant under G.S. 58-33-48, and the process here is genuinely unlike most states'. There is no statewide vendor. No IdentoGO appointment, no Fieldprint booking, no national scheduling portal. You go to a local law enforcement agency.
The order of operations matters, and it is the reverse of what you might expect. Fingerprints come after the NIPR application, not before. The trigger is an email you receive from NIPR once the application is submitted, and the prints must be submitted within 30 days of applying. Because North Carolina also makes you apply before you test, the practical sequence is: apply, then get printed, then sit the exam.
Step 1 — Print the fingerprint packet. NCDOI publishes a resident producer fingerprint packet. It is per-applicant — there is no shared service code or universal ORI number you look up, which is a common cross-state assumption that does not hold here.
Step 2 — Complete your pages. You fill in pages 1 and 3 of the packet. You also complete a separate SBI Electronic Fingerprint Submission Release of Information form. Do this before you go, not at the counter.
Step 3 — Find an authorized local law enforcement agency. Your local police department or sheriff's office, provided it is authorized to submit electronically to the State Bureau of Investigation. Call ahead: agencies keep limited fingerprinting hours, some serve residents of their jurisdiction only, and some require an appointment.
Step 4 — Get Live Scan prints. Electronic only. The handbook is explicit that electronic prints are mandatory and that fingerprint cards are not accepted. If an agency offers you an ink card because their scanner is down, that card will not be processed — find another agency. The law enforcement officer completes page 2 of your packet, certifying that they took the impressions.
Step 5 — Pay two separate fees. The $38 state and federal criminal record check fee is paid to the state through your NIPR application — it is bundled into what NIPR charges you, not paid at the counter. Separately, the local agency may charge its own fee for taking the impressions. That amount varies by agency, there is no standard statewide figure, and it is not published anywhere. Ask when you call.
Step 6 — Submit the completed packet. NCDOI's stated order of preference is: the NIPR Attachment Warehouse first, then fax to 888-959-3010, then email to northcarolinalicensingoffice@pearson.com, and finally mail to NCDOI/Pearson VUE, 5425 Page Rd., Suite 100, Durham, NC 27703. Yes — Pearson VUE. The same company that administers the exams also operates NCDOI's outsourced licensing office, so your fingerprint packet goes to an address that looks like a test vendor's. That is correct.
Step 7 — Watch the 30-day clock. The prints are due within 30 days of the application. This is the step most likely to strand a North Carolina application, because it depends on a third party — a law enforcement agency with its own hours — over whom you have no leverage. Start it the same week you apply, not after you have passed the exam.
A note on re-licensing. A previous check does not necessarily carry forward. NCDOI says producers licensed before October 1, 2010 need not re-fingerprint when adding lines of authority "unless there are certain lapses of license authority" — without defining the lapse. If you are returning after a gap, ask NCDOI whether fresh prints are needed rather than assuming either way.
And non-residents are exempt. The fingerprint requirement applies to resident applicants only. A producer licensed and in good standing in another state, applying to North Carolina as a nonresident under G.S. 58-33-32, does not fingerprint here at all — the Property & Casualty guide covers that route.
What It Costs
$45 for the exam, plus the NIPR application: $82 initial resident (including the $38 criminal-record-check fee) and $50 for the line of authority, plus NIPR's transaction fee. Roughly $175 on a first-attempt pass, with the NIPR payment screen as the authority.
Then add the one cost nobody can quote you: the local law enforcement agency's fingerprinting charge. It varies by agency and no statewide figure exists. Budget something modest and call ahead.
What is not on the list any more is prelicensing. The 20-hour course requirement was repealed effective October 1, 2025, and it was typically the largest single expense on the path. There is also no renewal fee, because North Carolina producer licenses do not renew.
Eligibility Requirements
You must be at least 18 years old and, for a resident license, live in North Carolina. There is no education requirement of any kind — the prelicensing coursework that used to gate the exam was repealed on October 1, 2025 — so the exam and the background check are the whole test.
The background side is real, though. G.S. 58-33-48 requires every resident producer applicant to give the Commissioner a complete set of fingerprints for a state and federal criminal record check, and the NIPR application carries the usual uniform disclosure questions on criminal history, administrative actions and unsatisfied judgments. A criminal history is not an automatic bar, but crimes involving fraud, dishonesty or breach of trust weigh heavily. Casualty producers should note that the fingerprint requirement is not a formality here — it depends on a third-party law enforcement agency's schedule, and it carries a 30-day deadline from the date you apply.
Keeping Your License Active
Important CE details: North Carolina producer licenses do not renew — they are perpetual. What keeps one alive is CE: 24 credit hours per two-year compliance cycle, including 3 hours of ethics, due by the last day of your birth month in odd or even years matching your birth year. CE is administered by Prometric, not by Pearson VUE. The 3-hour flood requirement attaches to Property and Personal Lines authority rather than to Casualty.
North Carolina producer licenses are perpetual — no renewal date, no renewal fee. Continuing education is what keeps one alive: 24 credit hours per two-year compliance cycle including 3 hours of ethics, due by the last day of your birth month in years matching your birth-year parity, administered by Prometric rather than by Pearson VUE.
The 3-hour flood requirement does not attach to Casualty — it applies to Property, Personal Lines and adjuster licensees. If you later add Property authority for full P&C, it comes with you. There is no casualty-specific product training equivalent to the annuity rules on the life side.
The Property & Casualty guide covers the compliance mechanics in full: the four-month makeup window, the $75 reinstatement fee and what happens when a compliance date passes.
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