How hard is the Texas P&C exam? The real pass rate data

Short version

Over August 2025 through July 2026, 59.2 percent of first-time candidates passed the Texas General Lines Property and Casualty exam. Repeat candidates passed at 37.4 percent. Counting everyone together, the rate was 49.8 percent. The number you have seen quoted elsewhere is probably one of these three without saying which.

The gap between those first two figures is the part worth paying attention to. Candidates sitting the exam again do measurably worse than candidates sitting it for the first time, by 21.8 percentage points, and that gap has held in every month we have checked.

Where these numbers come from

Pearson VUE administers the Texas insurance licensing exams and publishes pass rates as a monthly report, broken out by exam code and by language. The Texas General Lines Property and Casualty exam in English is exam code InsTX-PC06.

Every figure in this post comes from those reports. The window is August 2025 through July 2026, which is 12 consecutive monthly reports covering 20,190 graded attempts. Figures were last verified on 2026-08-25. The reports themselves are on Pearson VUE's Texas pass rate page, published roughly a month in arrears.

Stating the window matters, because a pass rate with no window and no exam code attached is not really a statistic. Much of what circulates online is a national range across all insurance exams in all states, which blends life and health, adjuster, and personal lines results from fifty different exams into a single band. That number cannot tell you anything about the exam you are actually booking.

The three pass rates, and why the answer depends on which one

The combined rate is the one usually quoted, and it is the least useful of the three. It is a blend of two populations that behave very differently, and its value depends heavily on how many retakers happen to be in the pool that month. It tells you what share of exam sittings ended in a pass. It does not tell you what your odds are.

If you have not sat this exam before, the first-time rate is your reference point: 59.2 percent. If you have failed once already, the repeat rate is: 37.4 percent.

What happens on a retake

Most people assume a second attempt is easier. You have seen the format, you know what the question style feels like, and you know which sections hurt. The data says otherwise, consistently.

Across the 12 months in this window, the first-time rate moved between 56 and 62 percent month to month. The repeat rate moved between 35 and 40 percent. The two bands do not overlap in any month. The narrowest monthly gap was 18.3 points.

The pattern is not confined to the current window either. Counting the earlier months we spot-checked from the same report series, the gap appears in all 19 months observed, going back to December 2023, and never falls below 18.3 points in any of them.

The volume behind this is not small. Retakes make up 43 percent of all graded attempts in Texas. Over this window there were 8,679 repeat sittings, and 5,432 of them ended in another failure.

Why the gap exists

The reports do not say. They publish counts, not explanations, and it is worth being straight about the limits of what the data supports.

At least three things could produce this pattern, and they are not mutually exclusive:

1. Selection. The repeat pool is, by construction, made up of people who were not ready the first time. Candidates who were well prepared passed and left the pool. What remains is a group that skews toward less preparation, so a lower rate is partly just arithmetic.
2. Unchanged preparation. Texas allows a new attempt the next day with no cap on attempts. That makes it easy to rebook quickly, and rebooking quickly without changing anything about how you studied is unlikely to change the result.
3. Diagnosis. A score report tells you that you failed and roughly how close you came. Turning that into a study plan requires knowing which of the eight sections cost you the points, and that is not obvious from the outside.

What the data cannot tell you is how much of the gap is each of these. A first-time candidate should not read 37.4 percent as a prediction about themselves. What it does establish is the direction: whatever the mechanism, a second attempt is empirically not the easier one, and planning as though it will be is planning against the evidence.

What this actually means before you book

The practical read is narrow and it is this: the cost of sitting the exam before you are ready is higher than it looks.

Each attempt is $49, which is the visible cost and the smaller one. The real cost is that failing moves you from a population passing at 59.2 percent into one passing at 37.4 percent. That is a worse position than the one you started in, and it is the single strongest argument for treating your first attempt as the one that counts.

Which means the question worth answering is not "is this exam hard." At 49.8 percent combined, roughly half of all sittings end in a pass, so it is hard enough to take seriously and not so hard that preparation cannot solve it. The better question is whether you are ready yet, and that is answerable in advance rather than discovered at the test center. It comes down to whether you can hold a passing standard across all eight sections under time rather than just the ones you find comfortable, since the exam is scored as a single scaled result out of 130 questions with 70 to pass, and a strong showing in one section does not offset a weak one somewhere else. The Texas exam guide sets out how the 130 scored questions are distributed across those sections and which ones carry the most weight.

There is one thing the pass rate genuinely cannot tell you, and it is the thing most people want from it. It describes a population, not a person. Nobody in either of those two groups experienced a 59.2 percent or a 37.4 percent outcome. Every one of them either passed or did not, and which side they landed on was decided well before they sat down.