Life insurance license — North Carolina

North Carolina changed in October 2025 and most of what is written about it online has not caught up. Pre-licensing education is no longer required before sitting the state exam for Life. If a course provider tells you otherwise, they are quoting the old rule or selling you something.

The second thing worth knowing is stranger and better: a North Carolina producer licence for Life, Accident and Health does not expire. It is valid until you surrender it, or the Department cancels or revokes it. There is no renewal date to miss.

What you have instead is a CE compliance date. Miss that and the licence expires — so the obligation has not gone away, it has just moved.

The steps, in order

1. Study, on your own schedule. No required hours since October 2025. The exam is still a real exam.
2. Pass with Pearson VUE. 60 questions — 55 scored plus up to 5 unscored pretest — in 75 minutes. North Carolina scales raw scores onto a 0–100 range and you need a 70, so "70%" and "a scaled 70" are not quite the same thing.
3. Submit fingerprints electronically. State and federal check, with a $38 criminal record history fee per applicant.
4. Apply. $50 licence fee.
5. Get appointed. As everywhere.

What it costs

| Item | Cost | Paid to | | --- | --- | --- | | Exam | $45 per attempt | Pearson VUE | | Criminal record check | $38 | NC DOI | | Licence | $50 | NC DOI | | Study course (optional) | $0–300 | Provider of your choice |

The $38 and $50 are first-party from the Department. Confirm the exam fee with Pearson VUE.

After you're licensed

Twenty-four hours of continuing education on a two-year cycle, with mandatory ethics hours. The Department gives you four months from your CE compliance date to finish the hours — a genuine grace period, not a courtesy. Fail to complete them, or skip the mandatory ethics, and the licence expires despite the perpetual-licence rule above.

One detail that matters if you are building a non-resident footprint from somewhere else: non-resident producers have no North Carolina CE requirement at all. You satisfy your home state and North Carolina accepts it. That makes NC one of the cheaper states to add once you are licensed elsewhere — and one of the better resident states to hold, given the licence itself never lapses.