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To sell life insurance in the United States you need a producer license from the state you live in. Every state follows the same basic path: a course, an exam, a background check, an application, and then an appointment with the insurance companies you will sell for. The details, such as course hours, fees and which testing company runs the exam, are set by each state's department of insurance.
A life license lets you sell life insurance and, in most states, fixed annuities. Many agents get a health license (often called accident and health) at the same time, so they can also help clients with health, Medicare and supplemental coverage. You can start with life only and add health later.
Most states require a state-approved pre-licensing course before the exam. The number of hours is different from state to state. Most courses are online and self-paced, and they cover how policies work, the laws of your state, and the ethics rules agents follow.
You schedule the exam with your state's testing provider (Pearson VUE, PSI or Prometric, depending on the state), at a test center or, in some states, online. It is multiple choice: general insurance knowledge plus your state's own laws. If you do not pass the first time, you can retake it; each state sets its own waiting period and fee.
Most states ask for fingerprints and run a background check before they issue a license. Your state's instructions say where to have them taken. A past conviction does not always rule you out; states look at what it was and when, so answer the application questions honestly.
Most states take the application online through NIPR, the National Insurance Producer Registry, where you pay the state's license fee. Once you are licensed you have a National Producer Number (NPN). It follows you for your whole career and is how carriers and states look you up.
A license lets you sell insurance; an appointment lets you sell a particular company's policies. Most new agents contract through an agency or an IMO (independent marketing organization), which gives them several carriers at once, plus training, quoting tools and help with their first cases. Many carriers also ask you to carry errors and omissions (E&O) insurance.
Your resident license is the hard part. Once you have it, you can apply for non-resident licenses in other states through NIPR, usually without taking another exam. That is how agents serve clients across the country: you do not need to live in a state to be licensed there.
Licenses renew on a cycle, and you take continuing education to renew. Most states require 24 hours every two years, including ethics hours; a few states set different hours or cycles. Your state's department of insurance lists the exact rules.
Many people go from starting the course to holding a license in a few weeks. The course and the next open exam date set the pace. Fees for the course, the exam, fingerprints and the license add up to a few hundred dollars in most states, and every state publishes its own.
Life insurance agents help people protect their families: term life for income and a mortgage, final expense for funeral costs, whole life and indexed universal life for lifelong coverage and savings. Independent agents are usually paid by commission from the carrier, so income grows with the clients you help. The agents who do well are the ones who keep in touch with people, follow up, and learn the products well enough to explain them simply.
Watch a live presentation about our insurance division (Monday through Friday), then fill out a short form. For licensed agents and people who are not licensed yet.
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