What This License Is
A West Virginia Personal Lines licence covers property and casualty insurance sold to individuals and families for personal, non-commercial purposes — homeowners, personal auto, renters, personal umbrella. It is a narrower authority than the full Property and Casualty lines, and it is examined separately.
The trade is scope for specificity. Personal Lines cannot write commercial risks, but it is the right licence for a producer whose book is entirely personal, and its exam is a single sitting rather than two.
Note the direction of the relationship: holding the full Property and Casualty lines already covers personal-lines risks. Personal Lines is the narrower licence, not an add-on to the broader one — so the choice is made at the outset, not later.
Exam Options & Format
The examination is InsWV-Pers55: the handbook's registration table gives 120 questions in 150 minutes at $84.00 per attempt.
The content outlines effective June 16, 2026 give the per-part breakdown: 75 scored plus 5 pretest on the General Knowledge part and 38 scored on the West Virginia Specific part, with no pretest items on the state paper. That 75 is the largest general paper of West Virginia's five lines — Life, Accident and Health, Property and Casualty each carry 50.
The broader alternative is the combined Property and Casualty paper, InsWV-PC03, at 150 questions in 210 minutes for the same $84.00. It is more exam for the same money and a wider licence at the end of it; the Property & Casualty guide covers that route.
Testing is in person only. The Property guide covers the fourteen West Virginia test sites and the booking and reschedule rules.
Most Tested Topics on the West Virginia Personal Lines Exam
Personal Lines lives where property and auto meet, and West Virginia's termination law is written with unusual precision about which regime applies to what. These are the facts the state part tests:
| Concept | The West Virginia rule |
|---|---|
| Declination, defined | "the refusal of an insurer to issue a property insurance policy on a written application or written request for coverage" — §33-17A-3 |
| Termination, defined — and what sits inside it | "either a cancellation or nonrenewal of property insurance coverage in whole or in part. A cancellation occurs during the policy term. A nonrenewal occurs at the end of the policy term." — §33-17A-3. Cancellation and nonrenewal are defined only inside the definition of termination |
| Declination notice duty | A written explanation of the specific reason or reasons at the time of the declination — §33-17A-4(a). The subsection carries no day count |
| Reasons must be intelligible | Reasons must be sufficiently clear that a reasonable person can understand them; "underwriting reasons," "claims" and "increase in risk" are expressly inadequate — §114-3-2 |
| Transfer within an insurer group | Not a cancellation or nonrenewal if based on a valid underwriting reason involving a substantially increased risk — §33-6A-2. A transfer within the same group still requires an explanation of reasons — §33-17A-4(c)(2) |
| Reasons supplied on written request | Within 30 days of the insured's written request, where an auto liability policy has been in effect 60 days or has been renewed — §33-6A-3 |
| Renewal with reduced coverage | A renewal that removes, diminishes or reduces coverage requires a written explanation of the changes — §33-17A-4(c)(3) |
| Appeal to the Insurance Commissioner | Filing a complaint with the Commissioner constitutes an appeal satisfying the 45-day requirement under Article 33-6A — §114-3-3.8 |
| Sanctions for a termination violation | Up to $5,000 for each willful and knowing violation — §33-17A-8. A private action lies after a final order finding a violation, with a two-year limitation — §33-17A-9 |
| Residual market carve-out | Article 33-17A does not reach policies of property insurance issued through a residual market mechanism, nor inland marine — §33-17A-2 |
| Substandard risk notices | A bold-faced rating notice on the application and the policy, plus a one-time written notice of possible eligibility for a standard or preferred policy after three years of continuous coverage with no moving traffic violation convictions and no at-fault accidents. Administrative penalty not to exceed $1,000 for each incidence of failure to give notice — §33-6-31c |
Four words that are not synonyms. Article 33-17A defines declination, termination, cancellation and nonrenewal as distinct regimes — and it defines the middle two only inside the definition of termination: a cancellation occurs during the policy term, a nonrenewal at the end of it. A declination is neither; it is a refusal to issue on a written application, and it carries its own duty to explain at the time of the refusal, with no day count attached. An exam question that uses the wrong one of these four words is usually testing whether you noticed.
What counts as a reason. The statute requires "the specific reason or reasons." The Commissioner's rule tells you what that means in practice: reasons must be clear enough that a reasonable person can understand them, and §114-3-2 names three formulations that are not enough — "underwriting reasons," "claims," and "increase in risk." A notice that says only one of those is defective on its face.
Scoring, Retakes, and the Two-Part Exam
Two things about West Virginia scoring surprise almost everyone, and both change how you should plan.
### It is not one exam. It is two parts.
West Virginia does not deliver a single exam per line. Each major line has a General Knowledge part and a West Virginia Specific part covering state law. The handbook's exam list is headed "MAJOR LINES (PART I AND/OR PART 2)," and the waiver section states the rule plainly: "Candidates must pass both parts of the licensing exam within 12 months of the date of the first exam portion passed. If both parts of the exam are not successfully passed within 12 months the applicant must take and pass all parts of the exam again."
That twelve-month window is the deadline nobody plans for. Pass the general part in March, stall on state law, and everything resets the following March.
The Commissioner's own 2025 pass-rate data shows where the difficulty actually sits:
| Exam | Delivered | Pass rate |
|---|---|---|
| General Education Life | 944 | 85% |
| West Virginia Life | 1,468 | 48% |
| General Education Accident and Sickness | 1,246 | 70% |
| West Virginia Accident and Sickness | 1,431 | 59% |
| General Education Personal Lines | 23 | 83% |
| West Virginia Personal Lines | 35 | 54% |
| West Virginia Property and Casualty (Combined) | 667 | 42% |
The general part is not the problem. Every state-law paper in that table sits below the general paper it pairs with, and West Virginia Life is nearly forty points behind. The state-specific material in this guide is where the marginal hour of study pays.
### The passing score is scaled, not a percentage.
The handbook's Score Explanation section says it directly: "The scaled score that is reported to you is neither the number of questions you answered correctly nor the percentage of questions you answered correctly." The passing scaled score for the producer and adjuster exams is 70. That is not seventy percent, and you cannot work backwards from it to a number of questions. Only the Bail Bond exam is reported as a true percentage, at 80%. Ignore any advice built on "you can miss N questions."
You get your result at the center. Candidates leave the test center with their official scores in hand, and the original passing score report is a required attachment to the paper licence application — so you are the courier. The handbook has a Duplicate Score Reports section if you lose it. Whether failing candidates receive a per-topic diagnostic is not something the handbook states; there is a Score Explanation section and a separate Review of Exams section, but no sentence describing what a failure report contains.
Question counts — read carefully. The content outlines and the handbook's registration table do not reconcile. For Personal Lines the outlines give 75 + 5 general and 38 state, which totals 118; the handbook prints 120. For Life the outlines total 89 against the handbook's 90, and for Accident and Health 91 against 90. Both are current Pearson VUE publications, and neither states that the handbook's figure is the two parts added together. Use the outlines to plan what to study and the handbook to plan how long you will be sitting, and do not force the two into one number.
Retakes. W. Va. Code §33-12-5(e) puts it as "An individual who fails to pass examination is limited to seven additional attempts to pass the examination" — the first attempt plus seven more, which is why the handbook renders it as eight attempts. Between attempts you must wait 24 hours before making a new reservation, and reservations for reexamination cannot be made at the test center.
One unit conflict worth knowing if you are near the limit: the handbook applies the cap "to pass each line of authority," while the Commissioner's 2025 pass/fail report footnote says repeat takers are limited to eight attempts by exam type. Under the two-part structure those are not the same unit. Confirm with the Licensing Division before relying on either reading.
The score's shelf life. Exam scores are valid for one year, and applicants not licensed within one year of passing must complete pre-licensing again and retake the examination. A passed exam is a perishable asset, and the twelve-month both-parts window sits inside that year.
What It Costs
$84.00 to Pearson VUE per examination, $47.25 to IdentoGO for fingerprinting, $50.00 to the Insurance Commissioner with the application, plus a 20-hour pre-licensing course priced by the provider — about $181.25 in fixed costs on a first-time pass.
Retakes are where this gets expensive: each is another $84.00, and the statutory ceiling is seven additional attempts. At the 2025 West Virginia Personal Lines pass rate of 54%, a second sitting is closer to a coin flip than an outlier — budget for one.
The combined Property & Casualty examination costs the same $84.00 and earns a broader licence, which is worth weighing before you commit to the narrower line.
Eligibility Requirements
The candidate handbook sets five requirements: be a resident of West Virginia; be eighteen (18) years of age or older; satisfy the Insurance Commissioner that you are trustworthy and competent; take the examinations administered by Pearson VUE; and — the item most study material still gets wrong — sponsorship by an insurance company is no longer required on the application.
A criminal conviction is not an automatic bar. The OIC's Resident Producer FAQ addresses it directly, and the Commissioner maintains a 1033 Information set — 1033 Procedures, 1033 FAQs and a 1033 Short Form Application — with a $100.00 waiver fee on the published schedule. Federal law (18 U.S.C. 1033) bars anyone convicted of a felony involving dishonesty or breach of trust from working in insurance without written consent, and the 1033 waiver is how that consent is obtained here.
Keeping Your License Active
Important CE details: Twenty-four hours per biennial compliance period, three of them ethics. Up to six hours over the minimum carry into the next biennium, but ethics hours carry forward as general credit only — three fresh ethics hours are due every cycle. Providers have 30 days to file your credits, and the Commissioner warns that courses taken less than 30 days before expiration may not post in time to renew.
Twenty-four hours per biennial compliance period including three ethics hours, renewing by the last day of your birth month. The Property & Casualty guide covers the mechanics, the carryover rule and the late-renewal ladder.
Personal Lines producers carry no product-specific training gate of their own. Note the continuing education exemption that does exist: producers licensed only for credit, surety, travel, title, crop and car rental — or any combination of those lines — need no continuing education at all. Personal Lines is not on that list.
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