What is on the Texas property and casualty exam

Short version

145 questions, 150 minutes, 130 of them scored, and you need a scaled score of 70 to pass. That is not 70 percent of the questions, and there is no fixed number of correct answers that guarantees it. Six sections are general property and casualty knowledge and two are Texas law. The current outline took effect on 1 September 2026. Use its topic lists and references when checking your study materials.

Texas licenses property and casualty agents through a single General Lines — Property and Casualty exam, delivered by Pearson VUE. Most candidates walk in knowing the pass mark and almost nothing else about the structure, which is a shame, because the structure is published, it is specific, and it tells you exactly where your study time is worth the most.

Everything below comes from the official Pearson VUE Texas Insurance Content Outlines, document #124401, effective September 1, 2026, and the candidate handbook.

The shape of the exam

The exam code is InsTX-PC06. Pearson VUE administers dozens of Texas insurance exams, and that code is specifically General Lines Property and Casualty in English. When you are checking pass rates, scheduling, or fee tables, it is how you confirm you are reading about your exam rather than the adjuster or life and health versions.

The gap between 145 and 130 is the part that surprises people. 15 of the questions you answer are pretest items — unscored questions the vendor is trialling for future exams. They are not marked, they are not identified, and they are mixed in with everything else. You cannot tell which is which, so the only workable strategy is to treat all 145 as real.

The practical effect is on pacing, not on scoring. 150 minutes across 145 items is about 62 seconds each. That is comfortable for a definition and tight for a coinsurance calculation, so the habit worth building before exam day is flagging and moving on rather than sitting on a hard item.

The passing standard is a scaled score of 70 on a 0 to 100 scale — not a percentage, and not a count of correct answers. This trips up almost every guide to this exam, including an earlier version of this one, so it is worth being precise about.

A scaled score is not your raw score expressed as a percentage. Pearson VUE builds several forms of the exam and adjusts for the fact that some draws are harder than others, so the number of correct answers behind a 70 is not fixed and moves with the form you sit. Any guide that tells you exactly how many questions you must get right — 91, or any other number — has done arithmetic the scoring model does not support.

What you can rely on: the exam is scored as a whole, so there is no section you must pass individually, and a run of wrong answers in one area costs you nothing if the rest are right.

Why you will see different numbers elsewhere

Four distinct mistakes account for nearly all of the confusion, and it is worth being able to recognize each one.

Quoting 130 as the number you will see. The most common and the most understandable. 130 is the count that determines your result, but 145 appear on screen. If you go in expecting 130 and the counter reads 145, that is a bad moment to have during a timed exam.

Quoting a number higher than 145. Several widely read pages state 150. There is no version of this exam with 150 questions. The figure looks like the time limit, which is genuinely 150 minutes, having migrated into the wrong field.

Quoting an old time limit. At least one high-ranking page still says 120 minutes. The current handbook says 150.

Naming the wrong test provider. One guide states the exam is administered by Prometric. It is not, and has not been. Texas insurance exams run through Pearson VUE, which matters practically because you will otherwise be looking for the wrong scheduling site.

These persist because most exam prep pages are written once and lightly revised, and the handbook is a fifty-page PDF nobody enjoys reading. When two pages on the same site give different question counts, which does happen, that is a reasonable signal about how the rest of it was researched.

The eight sections, and what each is worth

The exam is delivered in two parts. General Knowledge carries 100 scored questions across 6 sections, and Agent State Specific carries 30 across 2. Weights below are each section's share of the 130 scored questions.

Two things fall out of that table immediately.

The two "types of policies" sections are 45 questions between them — over a third of the scored exam. Sections 1 and 4 are the largest on the paper by a wide margin, and they are the most concrete: they ask what a particular form covers, not what a term means.

Texas law is 30 questions, nearly a quarter of the exam. That is more than any single general-knowledge section, and it is the part a national study guide cannot teach you. Include these topics when reviewing your practice results.

Sections 1 to 3: property

Section 1 covers homeowners, dwelling policies, commercial lines, inland marine, the National Flood Insurance Program, and a catch-all "others". Inland marine is worth a note because the Texas administrative definition of it lives at 28 TAC Section 5.5008, "Inland Marine Insurance — Other Inland Marine Risks", which lists the classes of risk that qualify — contractors' equipment among them.

Section 2 is vocabulary, and it is the section people underestimate. Insurable interest, proximate cause, indemnity, coinsurance and insurance to value, occurrence, vacancy and unoccupancy, blanket versus specific. Fifteen questions is a lot to lose to definitions you half-know.

Section 3 is the anatomy of a policy — declarations, insuring agreement, conditions, exclusions — plus contract law: elements of a contract, warranties, representations and concealment. It also reaches two federal statutes that show up on the paper: the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which governs the underwriting information you may pull, and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act's privacy provisions. The Terrorism Risk Insurance Act appears here and again in section 6.

Sections 4 to 6: casualty

Section 4 is the single largest section on the exam at 23 questions, and the broadest: commercial general liability, personal and business auto, workers compensation and employers liability, crime, bonds, professional liability, umbrella and excess, and the Business Owners Policy.

Section 5 repeats several section 2 concepts on the casualty side, and adds the ones that only make sense for liability coverage — damages, negligence, certificates of insurance, deposit premium and audit, law of large numbers, pure versus speculative risk.

Section 6 is casualty policy provisions, and the two items worth memorising are supplementary payments and consent to settle, both of which are the kind of specific provision a well-written question turns on.

Sections 7 and 8: the Texas half

This is where the exam stops being transferable.

Section 7, Texas Statutes and Rules Common to Property and Casualty Insurance (18 questions) covers the Commissioner of Insurance, insurance definitions, licensing requirements, marketing practices, and agent duties and responsibilities. The outline's own reference list points at the Texas Insurance Code provisions establishing the Department and the Commissioner's authority (TIC Sections 31.001, 31.002 and 31.021), the unfair methods of competition provisions at TIC Sections 541.107 and 541.108, claim settlement at TIC Section 542.010, and the agent definitions at TIC Section 4001.005.

The licensing subtopic is the most heavily referenced part of the whole state outline. The current version points at TIC Sections 4001.201 through 4001.206 and 4001.252 and 4001.255 on applying for and issuing a license, 4003.001, 4004.051 through 4004.055 on grounds for discipline, and 4005.101 and 4005.102 on enforcement.

Section 8, Texas Statutes and Rules Pertinent to Property and Casualty Insurance (12 questions) is the line-specific half: property and casualty definitions, surplus lines (TIC Chapter 981), approval of rates and forms, homeowner's insurance, automobile insurance, workers' compensation, the Texas Property and Casualty Insurance Guaranty Association (TIC Chapter 462), and the Texas Medical Liability Insurance Underwriting Association, usually called the JUA (TIC Chapter 2203).

One Texas peculiarity is worth knowing cold because it is genuinely unusual and it makes for an easy question: Texas does not require most private employers to carry workers' compensation insurance. Coverage is elective, under Texas Labor Code Section 406.002, and an employer who opts out — a "nonsubscriber" — gives up the common-law defenses the Act would otherwise provide. Workers' compensation in Texas sits in the Labor Code rather than the Insurance Code, which is itself a distinction the exam can test.

Where you take it, and the one option Texas does not offer

There is no online proctored option for Texas insurance exams. You take this exam in a physical Pearson VUE test center. Some sit on military installations, but the requirement is the same: you attend in person.

This is worth stating plainly because it is widely reported wrongly. One high-authority licensing guide states that Texas allows a single online attempt per exam with subsequent attempts in person. That is not the case here. Pearson VUE's own Texas insurance page says candidates may reserve an appointment in a physical test center, and offers no remote alternative.

If you have been planning on sitting this at home, that plan needs changing, and the week of your exam is a bad time to discover it. Two related scheduling facts: appointments must be booked at least 24 hours ahead, walk-ins are not accepted, and payment happens when you book rather than at the center.

The outline changed on 1 September 2026

The current official outline is labeled effective September 1, 2026. It now contains the current outlines, rather than the earlier combined file containing both versions.

The section weights stayed the same in our earlier comparison, but some Texas subtopic wording and citation lists changed. A changed outline reference does not itself establish that the underlying law changed. See the September outline guide for context when comparing older study materials.

What to do with this

Three things, in order of return on effort.

1. Do not treat the Texas sections as an afterthought. They are 30 of 130 scored questions, they need Texas-specific study alongside general insurance concepts.
2. Spend the largest block of time on sections 1 and 4. Forty-five scored questions between them, and they reward knowing what specific forms cover rather than understanding concepts in general.
3. Practice against the timer, not just the material. Sixty-two seconds an item is fine until you meet three calculations in a row. Knowing when to flag and move on is worth several questions on its own.

Every question in our Texas bank is tagged to one of the eight sections above and cited to the statute or form it comes from, so you can see which section you are actually weak in rather than guessing.

Sources

• Pearson VUE Texas Insurance Content Outlines, effective September 1, 2026, for topics and section counts.
• Pearson VUE candidate handbook, for timing, scoring, fees, and scheduling.

For a different view of preparation, see the pass-rate guide.