What This License Is
The Wisconsin casualty line of authority covers insurance against legal liability — personal and commercial auto liability, commercial general liability, professional and management liability, umbrella and excess, and workers compensation. It is issued by the Office of the Commissioner of Insurance.
Wisconsin keeps casualty strictly separate from property. There is no combined Property and Casualty exam: property is Series 22-05, casualty is Series 22-07, and a producer who wants both sits both and pays two license fees. That is unusual enough to be worth planning around before you register.
The narrower alternative is Personal Lines (Series 22-09), one 100-question exam covering the personal property and personal casualty market — homeowners and personal auto together. Casualty-only makes sense for commercial-liability and work-comp-focused roles; for a personal-lines desk, 22-09 does the same job for one exam fee instead of two.
Exam Options & Format
The Casualty exam is PSI Series 22-07, "Wisconsin Casualty: General and State" — 100 scored questions plus 5 to 10 unscored pretest items, 2 hours, $75, with Wisconsin law embedded rather than examined separately.
Series 22-08 is the 35-question, 1-hour state-specific variant, available only to someone who previously held the Wisconsin casualty license.
One rule that matters more on a casualty exam than most: handheld calculators are prohibited. PSI's prohibited-items list names them explicitly alongside phones, smart watches, tablets and recording devices. The bulletin does not say whether an on-screen calculator is provided, so do not plan on one — practise limits, retentions and comp benefit arithmetic without a device in your hand.
If you test remotely there is a second constraint that bites here: no scratch paper. Working a multi-layer liability tower in your head is a different exercise from working it on paper, and casualty is the line where that difference is felt. The Accident and Health guide covers the remote format in full.
Most Tested Topics on the Wisconsin Casualty Exam
Wisconsin's casualty content divides cleanly into auto and worker's compensation, and both diverge from the national template in ways that reward precision. From the TESTivity Wisconsin regulations curriculum, statute-verified — auto first:
| Wisconsin auto concept | The rule, and where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Fault system | Tort / at-fault. Wisconsin mandates no PIP and is not a no-fault state (§632.32; ch. 344) |
| Minimum liability limits | 25/50/10 — $25,000 bodily injury per person, $50,000 per accident, $10,000 property damage (§344.01(2)(d), §344.33(2)) |
| Uninsured motorist | MANDATORY and not rejectable — "uninsured motorist coverage, in limits of at least $25,000 per person and $50,000 per accident" must be included (§632.32(4)(a)1.) |
| The town mutual carve-out | The UM mandate excludes "a policy written by a town mutual organized under ch. 612" — an obscure exemption and a favourite of item writers (§632.32(4)(a)1.) |
| Underinsured motorist | Not mandatory, but the insurer must give one named insured written notice of its availability (§632.32(4m)(a)) |
| UIM acceptance or rejection | "Need not be in writing" — unlike the notice, the response has no writing requirement (§632.32(4m)(b)) |
| UIM limits if accepted | At least $50,000 per person and $100,000 per accident — double the mandatory UM floor (§632.32(4m)(d)) |
| Medical payments coverage | At least $1,000 per person must be included by the insurer (§632.32(4)(a)2.) — but "the named insured may reject medical payments coverage" (§632.32(4)(bc)) |
| Getting med pay back after rejection | Once one named insured rejects, it "need not be provided in a subsequent renewal policy … unless a named insured under the policy requests it in writing" — the writing attaches to the request, not the rejection (§632.32(4)(bc)) |
| Negligence doctrine | Modified comparative, 51% bar — a claimant recovers only if their negligence is not greater than that of the person they seek recovery from (§895.045) |
| Residual market | The Wisconsin Automobile Insurance Plan (WAIP), referenced in auto nonrenewal notices |
And worker's compensation, where Wisconsin's structure is unusual on two counts:
| Wisconsin worker's comp concept | The rule, and where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Administering agency | The Department of Workforce Development (DWD), Worker's Compensation Division — not the insurance department, and not a standalone commission |
| Mandatory coverage, general | 3 or more full-time or part-time employees — and coverage is required on the day you employ the third person |
| Mandatory coverage, small employer | Even one employee triggers it if the employer paid combined gross wages of $500 or more in any calendar quarter |
| Mandatory coverage, farms | 6 or more workers on the same day for any 20 days during the calendar year |
| Out-of-state employers | Covered if they have employees working in Wisconsin |
| Temporary total disability rate | 66-2/3% of the average weekly wage, capped at a statutory maximum tied to the state average weekly wage and reset annually by DWD (§102.43) |
| Deadlines | §102.12 — captioned "Notice of injury, exception, laches" — carries both the notice-of-injury rule and a 2-year bar on the application. §102.17 is a procedure section whose sub. (4) adds longer outer limits (12 years for occupational disease, 6 for traumatic injury). Confirm current counts with DWD |
| Compliance options | A policy from a private carrier or approved self-insurance. Wisconsin has no monopolistic state fund |
| Insolvency treatment | Worker's comp claims are expressly excluded from the Insurance Security Fund's $300,000 cap (§646.31(4)(ap)) |
The four-way split in §632.32(4) is the highest-yield thing on this exam, and national material flattens it into a single "UM/UIM must be offered" rule that is wrong on three counts. Learn them as four separate treatments: UM is mandatory and cannot be rejected. UIM is optional, but the offer must be in writing while the answer need not be. Med pay must be included but may be rejected, and the rejection carries no writing requirement. And getting med pay back on a renewal after a rejection does require writing. Four rules, one subsection, and the writing requirements land on the opposite sides from where instinct puts them.
The UIM limits are a second easy point. Because UM is the mandatory coverage, candidates assume it carries the higher floor. It does not: UM is 25/50 and UIM, if accepted, is 50/100. The optional coverage has the bigger statutory minimum.
On the comp side, the three separate triggers are the trap. Most states publish one employee-count threshold. Wisconsin publishes three, and they are not alternatives to be chosen between — any one of them requires coverage. A two-employee shop that pays $500 in wages in a quarter needs a policy just as much as a three-employee one, and the farm rule runs on a day count instead.
Fingerprinting for Your Wisconsin License, Step by Step
Wisconsin fingerprints every resident applicant, and the process is short. What makes it worth its own walkthrough is a single restriction that sends people back to square one.
Fieldprint is the only vendor, and digital is the only format. OCI's page answers the question directly: "No, OCI does not accept paper fingerprints completed at a police department, county office, or any other vendor besides our contracted vendor, Fieldprint." If you have licensed in a state that takes ink cards, set that habit aside — an FD-258 card from your local department is not a slow route in Wisconsin, it is a dead end.
Who has to do it. "Any individual resident applying for a resident license or adding additional lines of authority and who has completed and passed an exam" — plus legal expense license applicants, who take no exam at all. Note the second half of that first clause: adding a line to an existing license triggers a new fingerprint requirement if that line required an exam. This is not a once-in-a-career step the way it is in several other states.
The steps:
1. Go to fieldprintwisconsin.com and create an account. 2. Enter the code FPWIOCIInsurance — it is case-insensitive, so capitalisation will not trip you. 3. Schedule an appointment at a Fieldprint location and pay for digital fingerprinting. On the amount, Wisconsin's two primary sources disagree: OCI's fingerprinting page says $34.75, while PSI's current bulletin prints $36.00. Budget the higher figure; the amount charged at booking governs. 4. Attend the appointment with government-issued identification. 5. Wait 24 to 72 hours for OCI to receive the results electronically.
On timing, follow OCI's own advice. Prints may be taken at any point in the process, but OCI "recommends they be completed before the submission of the licensing application," and Wis. Admin. Code Ins 6.59 requires that they be submitted no more than 180 days before the test date. Between that rule and the 180-day validity window, the practical sequence is: finish your pre-licensing course, get printed, then test and apply — all inside a few weeks.
What the prints are for. The authority is Ins 6.59(4)(a) — note that §628.04(1c) is permissive, saying the commissioner may require fingerprints by rule, so the actual mandate lives in the rule — and the substantive standard they serve is §628.04's requirement that the commissioner find the applicant "is competent and trustworthy." The fingerprint check surfaces record; the application's background questions test candour. Nondisclosure sinks more applications than disclosure does.
One exception worth knowing: OCI's FAQ indicates fingerprints are not required for the Variable Life and Variable Annuity line of authority, which is also one of the lines requiring no exam. Confirm at application if that is your path.
What It Costs
$75 to PSI for Series 22-07, $34.75 to Fieldprint, $75 to OCI for the casualty line and a one-time $10 resident application fee — about $195 on a first pass, plus pre-licensing tuition.
Because Wisconsin does not combine Property and Casualty, a producer building a full commercial book pays $150 in exam fees and $150 in license fees for the pair. The $10 application fee is charged once, and the 8-hour general block of pre-licensing carries over to a second line taken within 12 months — so the marginal cost of adding property inside the year is $75 plus $75 plus 12 hours of coursework.
Retakes are the full $75 each and Wisconsin publishes no attempt limit, so the only discipline is your own. A paid exam fee stays valid one year from the date of payment, but it is non-transferable.
Eligibility Requirements
At least 18, with Wis. Stat. §628.04 supplying the substantive test: the commissioner must find the applicant "is competent and trustworthy" and intends in good faith to act as an intermediary. Twenty hours of pre-licensing education are required for this line, and the certificate has to be presented at the test center.
§628.10 authorizes revocation for false statements in an application, and §628.097 for delinquency in child support, taxes or unemployment insurance contributions — the last of which surprises people who think of licensing purely in terms of criminal history.
Keeping Your License Active
Important CE details: Providers bank credits electronically within 10 days of completion and the state counts them in the order completed — you never self-report a Wisconsin CE credit.
24 credit hours biennially, 3 of them ethics (Ins 28.04), on a license that expires the last day of your birth month. Wisconsin assigns no hours by line, so a casualty producer's requirement looks identical to a life producer's and may be filled with any approved major-line coursework.
Excess hours never carry forward, and the credits have to be banked by the provider before your expiration date rather than merely earned. The Property & Casualty guide covers renewal and reinstatement in full — including the fact that a lapse terminates every appointment you hold.
Quick Reference
Official Links
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