How to study for and pass the property and casualty exam
Most agency owners meet this exam twice: once for themselves, and again every time they hire somebody who cannot write business yet. If you are the one taking it, start here and read the rest of this site afterward. It will make considerably more sense once you hold a license.
The exam is not hard in the way people expect. It is a vocabulary and recall test against a clock. People fail it because they study it like a subject they find interesting instead of like a definitions test, and then run out of time.
The five steps in Arizona
The most useful thing to know first: Arizona does not require pre-licensing education for a property and casualty producer license. No mandatory classroom hours, no certificate to file. You can book the exam as soon as you are ready.
That is a real advantage and it is also the trap. With no required course, nothing structures your preparation except you, and the people who fail are almost always the ones who read "no course required" as "no course needed".
- Study deliberately. Not more hours. Different hours. The method section below is the part that decides this.
- Book the exam with PSI, who run it for the Arizona Department of Insurance and Financial Institutions. Property and casualty is one combined exam in Arizona, series 13-34, not two. You get four attempts in any twelve months; after a fourth failure you wait a year.
- Apply through NIPR, the National Insurance Producer Registry, once you have passed.
- Then get fingerprinted, through Fieldprint, and in that order: the Department is explicit that you should not complete the fingerprint appointment until after the NIPR application is in. Doing it the other way round is a wasted trip.
- Join our network. Passing that exam and holding that license is what makes you eligible to apply to us, and this is the step people do not see coming. It is also the one that decides whether the first four were worth anything: a license is permission to sell insurance, it is not permission to sell any particular carrier's insurance, and on its own it places no business at all.
WE DO NOT REPRINT THE FEES OR THE EXAM LENGTH, AND THAT IS DELIBERATE. Every figure attached to this process belongs to somebody else and moves without telling anyone: fees change, content outlines are revised, and Arizona changed its exam vendor outright. A number copied onto a third party's website is the least reliable place you could read it, and it goes on being read long after it stopped being true. One document carries all of it and is revised when it changes: PSI's Arizona candidate information bulletin, which has the fee for every line of authority, the fingerprinting steps and the content outlines. Read that, not this.
The one number worth carrying in your head is the pass mark: 70 percent, and the bulletin above is where that is published.
Once licensed, Arizona resident producers with a major line of authority need 48 hours of continuing education every four years, at least six of them in ethics, and the license renews on the last day of your birth month. Put it in a calendar now rather than discovering it later.
Every state is different
More than people assume. Pre-licensing hours, the exam vendor, whether property and casualty are one exam or two, the passing score, the fees and the fingerprinting process all vary. Plenty of states require 20 to 40 hours of pre-licensing education that Arizona does not.
So do not study from a friend's material from another state, and do not assume the sequence above transfers. Start at your own state's insurance department, then buy a course built for that state.
Kaplan publishes state-specific property and casualty packages. That link opens Arizona; change the state on that page to find yours. Their packages run from a study manual up to a career package with live instruction, and access is time-limited, so buy it when you are ready to work rather than when you are thinking about starting.
How to actually study
Treat it as vocabulary, not comprehension. Most of the exam is whether you know what a word means in this specific context. Coinsurance. Subrogation. Indemnity. Named insured versus additional insured. Occurrence versus claims-made. You either recall those against a clock or you do not, and understanding them slowly is not the same skill.
Take a practice exam in week one, not week four. The common mistake is reading the manual cover to cover and only then testing yourself, which is how people discover in the final week that they have been reading passively the whole time. Take one early, fail it, and let the score tell you where your hours should go.
Learn the policy structures as shapes. Declarations, insuring agreement, conditions, exclusions, endorsements. Once a policy is a shape in your head rather than a list, a whole class of questions stops needing to be memorized and starts being obvious.
Do not skip the state-specific section. It is a small share of the exam, it is pure memorization, and it is the part people leave until last. Which makes it free points.
Book the exam before you feel ready. A date on a calendar does more for most people's preparation than another week of reading does.
The video worth your time
The most widely recommended free resource for this exam is Insurance Exam Queen, run by Melissa, who teaches property and casualty and life and health prep and leans on memorization techniques and visual aids rather than reading definitions aloud at you.
Start with How to memorize general insurance terms for the insurance exam, which is precisely the skill the exam tests. Then work the rest of her channel against whatever your practice scores say you are weakest on.
We have no relationship with Kaplan or with that channel and earn nothing if you use either. They are here because they are what people actually pass with.
The part nobody warns you about
You pass. The license arrives. And then nothing happens, because a license is not a business.
What you are missing is carrier appointments, and carriers do not grant those on merit. They grant them on volume. A carrier weighing a newly licensed agency is weighing the cost of appointing, training, auditing and servicing one more relationship against the premium it expects to see, and at your volume that math does not work for them yet. This is why the answer is so often no, or a production requirement you have no path to meeting in year one.
It is not a reflection of how good you are. It is arithmetic, and you cannot study your way out of it.
That is the problem this network exists to solve. Inside a group, the volume a carrier is evaluating is the group's rather than yours, which changes which carriers will talk to you, what they expect in return, and how quickly a line of business becomes something you can actually quote.
Before you speak to anybody, including us, two things are worth reading: how market access actually works, which sets out the four ways business reaches a carrier and why the difference decides what you own, and our terms, which are published rather than described on a call.
Then answer four questions and find out where you stand. It takes about two minutes and ends in a real answer, including an honest "not yet" with what would change it.