Virginia P&C Insurance Exam 2026

What This License Is

Virginia's Property and Casualty line covers the whole P&C field — homeowners, dwelling fire, private passenger and commercial auto, commercial package, businessowners, workers compensation and the rest. Two structural facts define it, and both differ from what candidates arriving from other states expect.

First, there is no standalone Property-only or Casualty-only license or exam. Property and Casualty is one indivisible line of authority in Virginia. Plenty of states split them and let a producer buy half; Virginia does not.

Second, this license already includes Personal Lines authority. Personal Lines is a separate, narrower credential for producers who will write only personal business — not a component you add on. Applying for both is money spent on nothing. The Personal Lines guide covers that choice from the other direction, and if you are still deciding, decide before you register.

The regulator is the Bureau of Insurance inside the State Corporation Commission, and the arrangement is genuinely unusual rather than merely differently-named. The SCC is a constitutional body that is also a court of record; its three members are elected by joint vote of both houses of the General Assembly to staggered six-year terms, with the Governor filling a vacancy only pro tempore between sessions. The Commissioner of Insurance is, in § 12.1-16's words, "the employee or agent who is placed by the Commission at the head of the bureau" — not elected, not gubernatorially appointed, not Senate-confirmed. And § 38.2-200 charges the Commission — not the Commissioner — with the execution of all laws relating to insurance. Every licensing and disciplinary power in Title 38.2 runs to the Commission.

No pre-licensing education is required for this line. Title is the only Virginia line that carries one, at 16 classroom hours.

Exam Options & Format

The Property and Casualty exam is Prometric Series 11-03 — 135 scored questions plus 10 unscored pretest items, 145 in all, 2 hours 30 minutes, $35. It is the only P&C exam Virginia gives.

The 11-03 content outline: Insurance Regulation 15% (20 questions) · General Insurance 9% (12) · P&C Basics 13% (18) · Dwelling 5% (7) · Homeowners 13% (18) · Auto 16% (21) · Commercial Package 12% (16) · Businessowners 5% (7) · Workers Compensation 7% (9) · Other Coverages 5% (7).

Twenty questions on Virginia insurance regulation is the largest single regulation block of any Virginia exam in absolute terms, and the material below is where those questions live. Auto is the largest substantive domain at 21 questions, and Virginia's auto law moved recently in two places — the Personal Lines guide covers the 2025 limit increase and the 2024 abolition of the uninsured motor vehicle fee in detail, and both apply equally to a P&C producer.

Workers compensation is nine questions, which is small enough to skip and expensive enough not to. It also sits outside Title 38.2 entirely, under Title 65.2 and a separate agency — see the most-tested section.

Virginia embeds its law rather than testing it separately — one form, one timer, one score, no state section. 150 minutes for 145 questions is 62 seconds each, the tightest per-question pace of any Virginia exam. The Personal Lines guide covers where you may sit it; the Life & Health guide covers exam-day rules and the fingerprint process.

Most Tested Topics on the Virginia P&C Exam

Four bodies of Virginia law carry the twenty regulation questions on this form: what happens when a P&C insurer fails, who must carry workers compensation, how rates become usable, and who is actually in charge. Each contains at least one figure that national material gets wrong. From the TESTivity Virginia regulations curriculum, statute-verified:

The guaranty association rows reward reading the units. Three hundred thousand dollars per claimant is the ceiling on ordinary covered claims — and then workers compensation steps outside it entirely and is paid in full. Virginia caps a liability claim and refuses to cap an injured worker's. The return-premium figure inverts the same instinct: fifty dollars is a deductible, so the Association pays the excess above it rather than capping you at it. A question that offers "$50 maximum" is testing exactly that misreading.

Three employees, not two. This is the most reliably wrong fact in Virginia workers-compensation material, and the error is regional as well as national — plenty of mid-Atlantic sources say two. § 65.2-101 defines "employee" so as to exclude a person working for an employer that "has regularly in service less than three employees in the same business within this Commonwealth." A two-employee shop is not required to carry coverage, though it may elect to. Note also where workers compensation lives: the Virginia Workers' Compensation Commission, a separate agency under Title 65.2, with no connection to the Bureau of Insurance. A candidate who looks for comp law in Title 38.2 will not find it.

On the maximum duration of temporary total disability, we are going to give you an absence rather than a number. § 65.2-500 states no maximum number of weeks. The commonly quoted 500-week cap sits elsewhere in Title 65.2 and we could not confirm it against a current section this session, so it is not printed here. What § 65.2-500 does give you is the 66 2/3 percent rate and the statewide-average-weekly-wage ceiling, plus the striking rule that permanent total incapacity continues for the injured employee's lifetime with no limit as to total amount.

Rate regulation rewards precision about the label. Read § 38.2-1906(A)'s filing trigger: rates are filed "on or before the date they become effective." Not thirty days before, not subject to approval — on or before the effective date, with the standard of § 38.2-1904 (not excessive, inadequate or unfairly discriminatory) doing the substantive work afterwards. That is the textbook definition of file and use. It is not open competition (sometimes called "no file"), which means rates need not be filed at all — Virginia requires the filing. If an answer choice offers both labels, filing-is-mandatory is the tell.

And on the residual market, correct a claim you will meet almost everywhere, including in older versions of this page: Virginia does have a FAIR-Plan equivalent. Title 38.2 chapter 27 is captioned "Basic Property Insurance Residual Market Facility and Joint Underwriting Association," and § 38.2-2702 requires that "a residual market facility shall be established and maintained by all insurers licensed to write basic property insurance or other insurance containing a basic property insurance component." The purpose, per § 38.2-2700, is to assure the availability of basic property insurance for qualified property — and if the facility is not doing that job, § 38.2-2708 lets the Commission create a joint underwriting association instead. Given the Commonwealth's coastal hurricane and storm-surge exposure, a mandatory residual mechanism is exactly what you would expect, and it sits alongside — not instead of — the surplus lines market, which is where risk that is not "qualified property" still goes.

Reciprocity, Relocation and Nonresident Licensing

Virginia's reciprocity rules are generous in one direction and unusually closed in another. Take them in the order you are most likely to need them.

Moving to Virginia with a resident license from another state. § 38.2-1817 waives the exam: an applicant for a resident Virginia license "who was previously licensed for the same lines of authority in the individual's home state shall not be required to complete any prelicensing examination." Two conditions attach. You must be currently licensed in that state, or apply within 90 days of the prior license's cancellation and be in good standing. And the waiver reaches only the same lines of authority — a P&C producer relocating from Maryland skips the Virginia P&C exam, but a new life line goes through Series 11-05 like anyone else.

Note what the waiver does not touch. Fingerprints are still required. § 38.2-1819 applies to every resident individual applying for a new license, and a relocating producer is applying for a new Virginia license. Some states waive prints on relocation; Virginia waives the exam and takes the prints.

Getting a Virginia nonresident license while living elsewhere. § 38.2-1836 asks for three things: proof of a current home-state resident license, a proper application, and — the condition people forget — your home state must reciprocate. Virginia extends nonresident licensing to producers from states that extend it to Virginians. The Commission may verify your status through the NAIC Producer Database rather than asking you for paper.

Nonresident CE reciprocity. Virginia does not make a nonresident sit a second CE cycle: a nonresident who satisfies their home state's reciprocal continuing-education requirement is exempt from Virginia's (§ 38.2-1871). Keep your home state current and Virginia follows.

Changing your home state. A nonresident licensee who moves must file an address change and a new home-state certification "within thirty calendar days." Thirty days is short, nothing prompts you, and letting it slip is one of the commonest ways a clean nonresident license goes sideways. Diarize it the week you move.

Now the part that surprises people, and it is a real deviation. Virginia grants no professional-designation waivers. Not CLU, not ChFC, not CPCU, not CIC, not FLMI, not LUTCF. We searched Chapter 18 Article 2 and § 38.2-1817 and there is no designation-based waiver of any exam or prelicensing requirement in Virginia law. The only non-limited-lines exam waiver in the Commonwealth is the home-state relocation waiver above. Producers arriving from Florida or Texas, where designations do shorten the process, consistently expect otherwise — in Virginia a CPCU sits Series 11-03 alongside everyone else.

Two narrower waivers that do exist. A limited lines credit insurance agent license may be obtained without taking an examination. And on the Title side, Florida and Pennsylvania agents are exempt from Virginia's 16-hour title pre-licensing course, as are officers and employees of a title insurer who are not agents, and agents who were authorized title agents as of January 1, 1987.

A note on where authority sits. Because the Bureau of Insurance is part of the State Corporation Commission, a constitutional body and a court of record, everything above is administered by the Commission rather than by a commissioner exercising delegated power. It changes nothing about the paperwork and it explains the statutory language you will be reading.

Renewing Your Virginia License

Start with the correction, because a great deal of material has not caught up. Virginia licenses are no longer perpetual. For years the Commonwealth issued a licence that never expired and charged an annual continuance fee to keep it. That ended on January 1, 2021. Since then, § 38.2-1825.1 has made every individual agent license biennial, and the continuance fee is gone. Anything written before 2021 — and a surprising amount written since — still says Virginia licenses do not expire. They do.

When yours expires is keyed to two things about you: your birth month, and whether you were born in an odd or an even year.

Born in an odd-numbered year, your license expires at the end of your birth month in odd-numbered years. Born in an even-numbered year, at the end of your birth month in even-numbered years. That is unusual — most birth-month states assign parity by licensee rather than by birth year — and it means your renewal date is fixed for the whole of your career by a fact you cannot change.

Your first renewal never falls sooner than 13 months after initial issuance, so a producer licensed in the month before their expiry is not caught out immediately.

The mechanics. The renewal window opens 90 days before expiration. The fee is $10 per line of authority. Renew through Sircon or NIPR. You will get three prompts along the way — a courtesy notice from the CE Board about six months out, the Bureau's renewal notice at 90 days, and a Bureau reminder at 30 days — but the obligation is yours whether or not any of them reaches you.

All CE must be complete before you renew. Not merely completed — reported and on your transcript. The continuing-education section below covers the hours; what matters here is the sequence: hours first, renewal second.

If you miss the date. Virginia gives you 12 months from the renewal date to reinstate, and the arithmetic is simple: the original $10 per line renewal fee plus a $20 per line reinstatement fee, so $30 per line of authority. The statute frames it as double the renewal fee. All outstanding CE must be complete first. NIPR labels the same thing a "late renewal fee" of $30 per line.

If you miss the twelve months, there is no reinstatement. You apply for a brand-new license — a new application, new fingerprints, and a new examination if your old score has gone stale, which after a year it certainly has. That is the whole process again for the sake of a $10 renewal you forgot.

And one consequence that reaches further than the line you neglected. Under § 38.2-1869, failure to complete continuing education causes the administrative termination of each license held — not merely the deficient one. A P&C producer who also holds a life license and comes up short on hours loses both.

Agencies run on an entirely separate clock, and it is less forgiving. Every agency license in Virginia is due May 1 of every odd-numbered year, regardless of when it was issued or whose birthday is when. And there is no reinstatement available for an agency at all — a lapsed agency license means a new agency license application. If you own or manage an agency as well as holding an individual license, you are tracking two dates that have nothing to do with each other.

What It Costs

$35 to Prometric for Series 11-03 and $15 to the Bureau for the Property and Casualty line of authority — $50 on a first-attempt pass, plus the unpublished Fieldprint live-scan fingerprint fee.

Note where the structure saves you money. Because Property and Casualty is one indivisible line, the $15 application fee is charged once, not once for property and once for casualty. And because the license already contains personal lines authority, a producer who sits 11-03 never needs to buy Personal Lines separately. The mistake that costs real money in Virginia is buying Personal Lines first and then discovering a commercial account — a second $35 exam and a second $15 line fee for authority the broader license already carried.

No pre-licensing tuition. Virginia requires no course for this line.

Ongoing costs are modest and easy to forget. $10 per line of authority every two years at renewal. $30 per line if you are reinstating within the 12-month window. And CE course costs, set by private providers rather than by the Bureau.

Both initial fees are nonrefundable. Cancel or reschedule an exam appointment inside 24 hours and the exam fee is forfeit; sit an exam unnecessarily or be found unqualified and the bulletin refunds neither fee; and let the 183-day score-validity window lapse and § 38.2-1817 forfeits both.

Eligibility Requirements

You must be at least 18 and must use a Virginia address for both mailing and residence. No pre-licensing education is required for Property and Casualty, and there is no experience prerequisite.

Since January 1, 2021, § 38.2-1819 has required every resident individual to be fingerprinted at the time of applying for a new license — Fieldprint live scan, routed through the Central Criminal Records Exchange to the FBI, with the cost borne by the applicant. Prints must be under 90 days old at application and stay valid on file for one year. The Life & Health guide walks the whole process, including the Virginia State Police report the SCC's applying page references alongside it.

Answer the uniform application's background questions completely. An affirmative answer moves you from the Bureau's 15-business-day processing lane to 30 business days or more — the SCC quotes 30 to 60 business days where a conviction is involved. A delay is survivable; an omission is a misrepresentation.

If you intend to write surplus lines, this license is the prerequisite: a resident surplus lines broker must already hold a Virginia Property and Casualty license and post a $25,000 surety bond. Virginia does have a mandatory basic property insurance residual market facility under Title 38.2 ch. 27 for qualified property, so surplus lines is not the only place a declined risk can go — but for anything outside that facility's reach it remains the route, and a documented diligent effort in the admitted market is required first.

Relocating from another state, or licensing as a nonresident? The reciprocity section above covers both, including the exam waiver Virginia does grant and the designation waivers it does not.

Continuing Education, in Detail

The hours. 16 credit hours per biennium if you hold one license type — and Virginia's definition of a type is worth committing to memory, because Life and Annuities plus Health together count as one. Hold licenses from two or more categories and it becomes 24 credit hours, with a minimum of 8 in each category. Public adjusters carry 24 regardless. A P&C producer who adds a life license is therefore a 24-hour licensee, with at least 8 hours on each side.

The ethics requirement. 3 credit hours of insurance ethics per biennium. For agents, a course in insurance laws and regulations applicable to Virginia may be applied toward it. For public adjusters it may not — they need three hours of Virginia ethics specifically. If you hold both credentials, one course does not clear both obligations.

The company-sponsored ceiling. No more than 75 percent of your required credits may come from courses provided or sponsored by an insurance company or insurance agency (§ 38.2-1866(J)). At 16 hours that is at least 4 hours from an independent source; at 24 hours, at least 6. The cap does not apply to public adjusters. This is the rule most likely to bite a captive producer whose carrier runs a full training calendar.

Carryover, and its limits. Excess hours carry forward — but to the next biennium only (§ 38.2-1867(D)), and they are forfeited outright if you fail to renew within the 90-day renewal window. So banking hours protects you against one slow cycle, not against a missed renewal. Public adjusters get no carryover at all.

Exemptions, and the one that was taken away. Genuinely exempt: agents newly licensed within the last 13 months of the biennium; consultants who meet agent CE requirements; and nonresidents who satisfy their home state's reciprocal requirement. And then the trap — the age-65-with-20-years-of-licensure exemption was REPEALED effective January 1, 2019. It survives only for agents who already held it on December 31, 2018, only so long as they keep renewing and paying fees, and it is lost permanently if the license lapses past the 12-month reinstatement window. National material and older Virginia material both still teach it as a live option. It has been closed to new entrants for seven years.

Waivers are not exemptions. A waiver is available only for long-term illness or incapacity, active military duty, and comparable circumstances the Board determines. The handbook lists what will not earn one, and the list is pointed: insufficient time, administrative problems, improper action by managers or support staff, or simply not knowing the requirements. There are no permanent waivers — you re-request each cycle.

How the system works. Virginia's CE program is administered by Pearson, not by the Bureau and not by Prometric. Your transcript lives at VirginiaInsuranceCE.com; courses are registered and submitted through Sircon. This is the same split that misleads people about the exam vendor: Prometric gives the licensing exam, Pearson runs continuing education.

And the penalty, once more, because it is worse than it looks. § 38.2-1869: failing to complete CE causes the administrative termination of each license held. Not the deficient line. Every one.

One thing we could not confirm. No long-term care producer training mandate was located in Virginia's CE article or in the Bureau's CE handbook this session. The commonly quoted "8 hours initial" figure is a pattern imported from other states, and we are not going to print it as a Virginia rule. If you intend to sell LTC in Virginia, confirm the position with the Bureau directly.

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