North Dakota Casualty Insurance Exam 2026

The North Dakota Casualty Producer Licence

Casualty is its own line in North Dakota with its own exam. It covers third-party liability business — auto liability, general liability, commercial casualty, professional liability — and carries none of the first-party property authority that the Property line does.

There is no combined Property & Casualty exam here. Two lines, two 110-item papers, two $64 fees. The $100 licence fee is charged once per licence regardless.

The route in is short — 18, pass the exam, one fingerprint check, file at NIPR within a year. No pre-licensing course. All testing is in person since April 24, 2026.

This guide owns the fingerprint process, which in North Dakota is stranger than in most states: the Department does not accept electronically submitted prints, so every applicant ends up putting a physical card in the post — even the ones whose prints were captured digitally.

Casualty, Property, or Personal Lines

Casualty alone suits a producer heading into commercial liability or workers' compensation work. Casualty plus Property is $128 and covers everything. Personal Lines at $58 covers noncommercial property and casualty in a single exam — cheaper and narrower, and it will not reach a commercial account.

Every paper is 110 scored items in 150 minutes: 40 state-specific and 70 general, plus 5 to 10 unscored experimental questions. 70% passes, which the bulletin states as 77 correct.

Because the $100 licence fee attaches to the licence rather than the line, and because a second line never triggers a second fingerprint check, adding Property later costs exactly one exam fee. There is no structural penalty for building your licence up one exam at a time.

Most Tested Topics on the North Dakota Casualty Exam

North Dakota is a no-fault state, and that single fact reorganises the whole casualty syllabus. Basic benefits are compulsory, they are paid by your own insurer regardless of blame, and the right to sue the other driver for pain and suffering is gated behind a threshold. Candidates trained on tort-state material get the structure right and the numbers wrong. From the TESTivity North Dakota regulations curriculum, statute-verified:

The threshold is the highest-yield item, because it is the mechanism the whole system turns on and it has five limbs. Two are numerical and both get tested: medical expenses over $2,500, and disability beyond 60 days. The other three — death, dismemberment, serious and permanent disfigurement — are qualitative and appear as distractors that look incomplete. An item describing a claimant with $2,600 in medical bills is telling you the threshold is met and nothing else.

Stacking is second, and it is where the state law most cleanly contradicts intuition. North Dakota compels both UM and UIM, at matching limits — generous — and then forbids you from adding the limits across vehicles. Candidates who learn "UM and UIM are mandatory" often infer a generous regime and pick the stacking answer. The statute says the opposite in terms.

Third, keep $30,000 in its place. It is the ceiling on basic no-fault benefits per person per accident, and the work-loss, funeral and replacement-services figures sit inside it. A distractor that adds $3,500 of funeral benefit on top of a $30,000 limit is describing a structure North Dakota does not use.

Getting Fingerprinted in North Dakota, Step by Step

North Dakota's fingerprint requirement is narrow, one-time, and mechanically old-fashioned. Understand three things and the rest is logistics: it applies only to an initial resident licence, the Department will not accept prints submitted electronically, and the $40 is payable to the Attorney General rather than to the Insurance Department.

Who has to do it. Every applicant for an initial resident producer licence: "All resident applicants applying for their initial resident insurance producer license must provide a set of fingerprints to the North Dakota Insurance Department for the purpose of conducting a state and national fingerprint-based criminal history records check." The check runs through the ND Bureau of Criminal Investigation and the FBI.

Who does not. Anyone adding a line of authority — the Department is explicit: "Resident producers adding a line of authority to an existing license are not required to be fingerprinted after passing the exams." Renewal never repeats it either. It is genuinely once in a career.

The part that surprises people: hard cards only. "The Department does not accept digital fingerprints (i.e., Fieldprint), which are submitted electronically to BCI and FBI. We require hard-copy fingerprint cards." There is no electronic channel and no vendor portal to upload to. Whatever route you take, the process ends with a physical card in an envelope.

Path A — at a PSI test centre, on exam day if you like. "Applicants may be fingerprinted at one of the PSI test centers during regular testing hours on the day of examination." You pay $29 to PSI, which takes a card, check or money order, and hand over a separate $40 check or money order made payable to the North Dakota Attorney General — credit cards are not accepted for that one. PSI then "will mail the signed consent form, fingerprint card, and North Dakota Attorney General payment ($40) directly to the North Dakota Insurance Department." You do nothing else.

PSI captures the prints by LiveScan — an optical scanner rather than ink — and then prints them onto a card and posts it. That is how the Department's "no digital fingerprints" rule and PSI's LiveScan service coexist: the scanner is a capture method, not a submission channel. It is also why the card count differs below.

Path B — anywhere else that rolls prints. A sheriff's office, a police department, a commercial print service. You pay them whatever they charge, and the card count depends on the method: "If the fingerprinting service conducting the fingerprints does ink prints, two fingerprint cards must be done. If the fingerprints are obtained by scanning, only one set of fingerprints is required, so only one card is needed." Either way, "the fingerprint cards must be sealed in an envelope and initialed by the individual conducting the fingerprints."

You then mail, yourself: the sealed and initialled card or cards, the completed Criminal History Record Check Request form, and a $40 check, cashier's check or money order payable to the North Dakota Attorney General — "DO NOT SEND CASH", and starter or counter checks are refused. The instruction sheet adds a small physical warning worth heeding: do not bend the cards.

Where it goes: North Dakota Insurance Department, Attn: Producer Licensing, 600 E Boulevard Ave Dept 401, Bismarck, ND 58505-0320. There is no ORI or service code for you to obtain — the consent form's ORI field sits in a block the agency completes, and is blank on the published versions.

Order of operations, and the clock you are inside. Prints come after the exam and pair with the NIPR application; two Department documents describe the sequence slightly differently, which in practice means they are concurrent rather than strictly ordered. What is not flexible is the outer bound: your passing score is good for one year, and the licence application has to reach the Department inside it. The card travels by post, then through BCI, then the FBI. Start it early rather than in month ten.

What it costs, in order: $64 exam to PSI · $29 to PSI only if they roll the prints · $40 to the ND Attorney General, unavoidable either way · $100 licence fee via NIPR.

What the North Dakota Licence Costs

North Dakota's entry cost is middling, and the shape of it is unusual: there is no course to buy, but there is a fingerprint fee, and the licence fee is charged per licence rather than per line — so the more lines you take, the better the arithmetic gets.

The $100 comes from NDCC 26.1-01-07: "For issuing an insurance producer's license, one hundred dollars." Lines of authority ride on that single licence, so a producer who sits Life and Annuity, Accident and Health, Property and Casualty pays four exam fees but still one $100 licence fee.

The $40 is not optional and not payable by card. It goes to the North Dakota Attorney General by check, cashier's check or money order — "STARTER CHECKS... CASH AND CREDIT/DEBIT CARDS ARE NOT VALID PAYMENT METHODS." The $29 is separate and only applies if you have PSI roll your prints at a test centre; go elsewhere and you skip it.

Exam fees are not refundable and not transferable, and each fee stays valid for one year from the date of payment. There is no retake discount — a failed attempt costs full price again.

The recurring cost is small. The biennial continuation is $25 under NDCC 26.1-01-07, plus whatever your CE courses cost. What is expensive is missing it: there is no late fee to pay, because there is no late renewal. A cancelled licence is replaced by a new application at $100.

The $40 is the one fee here with an unusual payee. It is made out to the North Dakota Attorney General, not the Insurance Department and not BCI, and it travels in the same envelope as the fingerprint card. The $29 is optional in the sense that it only applies if PSI rolls your prints — but for most candidates a single trip that covers the exam and the prints together is worth the money.

Eligibility Requirements

North Dakota's bar is low and its paperwork is specific. You must be at least 18, pass the examination for each line you want, clear a fingerprint-based criminal history check, and file through NIPR within a year of passing.

No pre-licensing education. NDCC 26.1-26-13.2(1) requires only that a resident applicant "must pass a written examination unless exempt under section 26.1-26-25." There is no coursework condition anywhere in the chapter, and the Department confirms applicants "will not have to provide verification of study." North Dakota is one of the states where the exam is the whole gate.

Fingerprints, but only once. Every applicant for an initial resident producer licence submits fingerprints for a state and national check through the ND Bureau of Criminal Investigation and the FBI. The Department is explicit that this does not repeat: "Resident producers adding a line of authority to an existing license are not required to be fingerprinted after passing the exams." Nor is it repeated at renewal. The Casualty guide walks the process step by step.

The background review beyond the prints runs through the Uniform Application's disclosure questions. A "yes" answer obliges you to attach a written explanation and the underlying court or regulatory documents. The Health guide covers what triggers disclosure and how the Department reads it.

Grounds to refuse or revoke are enumerated at NDCC 26.1-26-42, and the one worth naming here is 26.1-26-42(10): "An improper withholding of, misappropriating of, or converting to one's own use any moneys belonging to policyholders, insurers, beneficiaries, or others received in the course of one's insurance business." North Dakota has no express premium-trust-account rule, so that misappropriation ground is doing the work a fiduciary regulation does in most states.

Two conduct rules in the administrative code have no national counterpart and apply from your first day licensed: a producer may not borrow money from a client (NDAC 45-02-02-14.1), and may not knowingly write excessive or unnecessary coverage (NDAC 45-02-02-14).

Keeping the North Dakota Casualty Licence

North Dakota does something almost no other state does: it issues a licence with no term at all. NDCC 26.1-26-31 is titled "Term of license" and then declines to give one — "A license issued under this chapter continues in force in perpetuity unless" one of eight conditions fails. The licence does not expire. It gets cancelled.

The conditions that end it include suspension or revocation, the licensee's death or an entity's dissolution, loss of residency, failure to meet continuing education, and failure to file the biennial continuation and pay its fee. Those last two are the ones a working producer actually has to manage.

The biennial continuation — NDCC 26.1-26-13.4 and NDAC 45-02-02-05.1. You file a continuation and pay $25, due "on or before the last day of the month of the licensee's birthday following the two-year anniversary of the issuance of a license." The commissioner must give at least 60 days' notice of the deadline, and the renewal window opens about 90 days before.

The CE requirement — NDCC 26.1-26-31.1. "Continuing education of not less than twenty-four hours of approved coursework, of which three hours must be in ethics", per two-year cycle. There is no line-specific allocation: 24 hours covers you whether you hold one line or five.

The carryover rule is genuinely unusual and worth exploiting. Excess hours — up to 12 — "may be credited to the year next preceding the year in which they were earned or to the year next following." Carryover that runs backwards as well as forwards is rare. A producer who over-studies in one year can apply the surplus to the year just gone as well as the year ahead.

Reporting has a fifteen-day tail that catches people. CE providers have 15 days to file your credits with the Department. A course completed inside the last fortnight before your deadline may not post in time, and the Department judges you on what is on file. Finish early enough that the provider's filing window closes before yours does.

Exemptions are narrow. Producers licensed exclusively for title, travel and baggage, surety, bail bonds, legal expense or credit insurance are exempt (NDAC 45-02-04-09.3), though they still file the continuation. The commissioner may grant an extension of up to one year (NDAC 45-02-04-08). And there is a grandfathered senior exemption frozen in time: no CE is required of a producer who, "as of January 1, 2010, is at least sixty-two years of age" and whose combined years of continuous licensure and years of age equal 85. It is a snapshot of that single date — it does not roll forward to anyone who reaches those numbers later.

And then the part that costs real money: there is no grace period and no reinstatement. The Department's own wording is blunt: "There is no grace period after the due date. If not renewed before the expiration date, your license and appointments will be canceled and you will have to reapply with an initial application and $100 fee." Your appointments go with it. The administrative rule that once carried a lapse procedure, NDAC 45-02-02-07.1, was repealed effective December 1, 2001 — do not rely on any summary that still cites it.

Annuity training is separate from CE. Selling annuities requires a one-time four-hour training course under NDCC 26.1-34.2-03.1. It is a training requirement, not a CE requirement, the Department does not track completions — carriers verify — and it reciprocates with substantially similar training completed in another state.

Long-term care is different, and this is where national material misleads. North Dakota's statutes and rules set no producer training hour count for LTC: NDCC ch. 26.1-45 contains no producer training section, and NDAC 45-06-05.1 puts the obligation on the insurer to establish agent training requirements. So the familiar 8-hour initial plus 4-hour recurring figure — the NAIC model regulation — is not codified here. Do not read that as "no training at all", though: North Dakota participates in the federal Long-Term Care Partnership programme, and the Department has issued bulletins on producer training for Partnership-qualified policies. The Department's own guidance is to "contact their company for long-term care partnership training requirements." Ask your carrier.

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