P&C Insurance Continuing Education Requirements by State (2026)
Hours, cycles, ethics carve-outs, mandated flood and homeowner's topics, carry-over rules and what happens when you miss the deadline — verified for 25 states against Department of Insurance sources and statute.
Problem this solves
This guide solves the next-step problem for Insurance candidates: it explains what matters, then gives you a direct way to test that knowledge with practice questions instead of guessing what to study next.
The Pattern: 24 Hours Every 2 Years, Including 3 of Ethics
Of the 25 states we verified against primary sources, **20 use the same design: 24 hours per two-year cycle, with 3 of those hours required to be ethics — counted inside the 24, not on top of it.** California, Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, New Jersey, Washington, Tennessee, Indiana, Maryland, Wisconsin, Colorado, Minnesota, South Carolina, Alabama and Louisiana all follow it. The five that do not are worth knowing if you hold a licence there: - **New York — 15 credits** per biennial period, the lightest we found. - **Virginia — 16 hours** for a P&C-only licensee (24 if you also hold Life or Health, with a minimum of 8 per category). - **Missouri — 16 hours** per biennium. - **Massachusetts — 45 hours over 36 months**, and 60 in your first period. - **Arizona — 48 hours** with 6 ethics, though we could not confirm the term length from an Arizona source. See the caveat below before relying on it. This is the part of licensing that never ends, and it is the reason exam prep is a one-time cost and CE is a career-long one. VoltExam's P&C bank holds 450 questions for the exam side; the CE side is a separate, recurring obligation you satisfy through state-approved providers.
Try it now — no account, no download
Practice Insurance questions free
Answer 5 real Insurance exam questions with instant explanations before you keep reading.
Insurance · Question 1 of 5
What type of risk involves only the possibility of loss or no loss, with no chance of gain?
Pick an answer to see the explanation + an instant AI breakdown.
The 25-State Table
| State | Hours | Cycle | Ethics | Other mandated topics | Miss the deadline | |---|---:|---|---:|---|---| | California | 24 | 2-yr term | 3 inside | LTC and annuity product training separately | Up to 1 yr to reinstate: renewal fee **+50% reinstatement fee**; after 1 yr, new application | | Texas | 24 | 2 yrs | 3 inside | ≥half must be classroom or equivalent | 90-day grace, then **$50 per deficient hour**; licence goes inactive | | Florida | 24 (4+20) | 2 yrs | 4-hr Law & Ethics Update inside | Update course covers law, ethics, discipline, suitability | Department may terminate or refuse to renew appointments | | New York | **15 credits** | Biennial | 1 ethics | 1 insurance law; 1 diversity/bias; **1 flood** for P&C; +3 enhanced flood if you sell NFIP | Not stated on the DFS page | | Pennsylvania | 24 | 2 yrs | 3 inside | — | Treated as voluntary termination; reinstate within 1 yr (retroactive within 60 days) | | Illinois | 24 | Biennium | 3 inside | Up to 4 hrs from professional-association participation | Licence **automatically terminates**; penalty = double the unpaid renewal fee; reinstate within 12 months without re-exam | | Ohio | 24 | Biennial, birth month | 3 inside | **3-hr NFIP flood**, one time; LTC 8+4; annuity 4 one-time | Late renewal up to 1 yr, **$50 late fee**; beyond that, reapply | | Georgia | 24 | Biennial, birth month | 3 inside | — | Not stated on the OCI page | | North Carolina | 24 | Biennial | ethics + flood mandated (split not published) | Flood hours mandated for P&C | Licence expires; **4-month grace**, $75 fee; after that you redo prelicensing **and re-sit the exam** | | Michigan | 24 | 2 yrs | 3 inside | — | Qualifications suspended 90 days, then terminated; reinstate within 1 yr | | New Jersey | 24 | 2 yrs, birth month | 3 inside (1 may be fraud) | — | Renewal not granted without proof | | Virginia | **16** (P&C only) | Biennium | 3 inside | — | Termination of each licence; **no extensions permitted** | | Washington | 24 | 2 yrs | 3 inside | LTC, flood, annuity product training may apply | CE must be complete before renewal or reinstatement | | Arizona | **48** | per licensing term (unconfirmed) | 6 inside | — | Late renewal up to 1 yr; late fee **$220** vs $120 normal | | Massachusetts | **45** | **36 months** | 3 inside | 60 hrs in the first period | Not stated on the state page | | Tennessee | 24 | Biennial | 3 inside | **3-hr flood** one time; annuity 4-hr one-time from 2024 | Not stated | | Indiana | 24 | 2 yrs | not published | LTC referenced | Not stated | | Missouri | **16** | Biennium | 3 inside | — | Not stated | | Maryland | 24 (21+3) | 2 yrs, birth month | 3 inside | 4 hrs bail bonds if you sell them | **$100 reinstatement fee** | | Wisconsin | 24 | Biennial | 3 inside | **3-hr NFIP flood**; LTC 8 then 4; annuity best-interest 4 | Licence expires and **all appointments terminate** | | Colorado | 24 | Biennial | 3 inside | **3 hrs homeowner's insurance** for P&C; ≥18 of 24 must match licence type | Civil penalties, cease-and-desist, suspension or revocation | | Minnesota | 24 | per licensing period | 3 inside | ≤half from insurer-affiliated courses | Renewal denied; up to 90-day extension then 30-day cure | | South Carolina | 24 | Biennial | **no statutory carve-out** | — | Licence lapses | | Alabama | 24 | Biennial, birth month | 3 inside | — | Not stated | | Louisiana | 24 | 2 yrs | 3 inside | **3 hrs flood**; 2 hrs legislative update from July 2027 renewals | Not stated | Sources are named at the end. Where a cell says 'not stated', the state's own CE page does not publish it — we did not fill those gaps from vendor sites.
Free: the 20 facts Insurance exams keep testing
Top 20 most-tested facts for your exam. Delivered instantly.
The Mandated Topics That Catch P&C Producers
The generic 24 hours is the easy part. What trips people is the topic-specific mandate sitting inside or alongside it, because a course you already took may not count toward it. **Flood / NFIP is the most common P&C-specific mandate.** Ohio requires a one-time 3-hour NFIP course by the end of your first renewal period. Wisconsin requires 3 hours of NFIP flood. Louisiana requires 3 hours of flood. New York requires 1 flood credit for P&C licensees, plus 3 additional enhanced-flood credits if you actually sell NFIP policies. North Carolina mandates flood hours without publishing the count. **Colorado is the unusual one:** 3 hours specifically on homeowner's insurance coverage for P&C producers, and at least 18 of the 24 hours must match your licence type. A pile of general-interest credits will not satisfy Colorado. **Maryland** adds 4 hours of bail bonds if you write bail bonds as a P&C producer. **Product training that is not CE.** California is explicit that long-term care and annuity product training is required separately even if you are CE-exempt. Washington and Wisconsin both say the same thing about product-specific training surviving other waivers. Treat product training as a parallel obligation, not as hours you can count twice.
Carry-Over: Bank Extra Hours Where You Can
If you over-complete, several states let you carry the surplus forward — usually into the next cycle only, and usually with ethics excluded. **Allows carry-over:** Pennsylvania up to 24 hours. Georgia up to 50% of the requirement, with carried ethics credits unable to satisfy the next ethics requirement. Michigan up to 12, counted as general only. New Jersey up to 12, once only, ethics excluded. Indiana up to 12, ethics and LTC excluded, earned within 120 days of renewal. Colorado up to 12, earned in the 120 days before renewal. Louisiana up to 10 general hours, with carried flood/ethics/legislative counting as general only. Virginia to the next biennium only. Massachusetts classroom hours to the next 36-month period only. **No carry-over:** Washington, Maryland, Alabama (which ended it in 2013), Wisconsin. **Not published:** California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, Ohio, North Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, Minnesota, South Carolina. The practical read: in a carry-over state, finishing early with a surplus is worth real money. In a no-carry-over state, hours completed beyond the requirement are simply gone.
What Actually Happens If You Miss the Deadline
The consequences range from a modest fee to redoing your entire licence, and the difference is worth knowing before you cut it fine. **Cheapest to fix.** Ohio: renew up to a year late with a $50 late fee. Maryland: $100 reinstatement. Illinois: the lapse penalty is double the unpaid renewal fee, and you can reinstate within 12 months without re-examination. Arizona: a $220 late renewal against a $120 normal one. **Expensive.** California: the original renewal fee plus a 50% reinstatement fee, and you cannot transact until reinstated; after a year you file a new application. Texas: a 90-day grace period, then **$50 per deficient hour** — a producer eight hours short pays $400 before the licence goes inactive. **Worst case.** **North Carolina** is the one to be genuinely careful about: the licence expires, you get a four-month grace period with a $75 fee, and if you miss that, you must redo prelicensing education **and re-sit the state exam**. That is the only state we verified where a CE lapse can put you back in a test centre. **Wisconsin** terminates all your carrier appointments when the licence expires — so even a short lapse breaks your ability to write business with every carrier at once. **Virginia** permits no extensions at all. **Where extensions exist:** Minnesota allows up to a 90-day extension plus a 30-day cure period. Ohio grants a discretionary extension for a $100 fee. Wisconsin accepts hardship requests filed 90 days before expiry. Pennsylvania and Washington have hardship and military provisions.
Exemptions — Narrower Than the Rumour
There is a persistent belief that long-tenured producers stop owing CE. Something like it exists, but it is much narrower and more varied than the rumour: - **California** — a full exemption at **30 continuous years licensed and age 70+**, and it does **not** apply to anyone first licensed on or after 1 January 2010. LTC and annuity product training still applies regardless. - **South Carolina** — 25+ years licensed in the state and age 65+. - **Pennsylvania** — continuously licensed since before 1 January 1971. - **Tennessee** — continuously licensed since 1 January 1994. - **Texas** — **not automatic.** Twenty years of continuous licensure lets you *request* an exemption on Form FIN517, documenting circumstances beyond your control. Workload is never accepted. - **Georgia** — a reduction, not an exemption: 20+ years cuts the requirement by 4 hours from 2026. Holders of CPCU, CIC, CLU, AAI or CFP need only 12 hours including 3 ethics. - **Florida** — reduces with tenure: 6+ years licensed means the 4-hour update plus 16 electives; 25+ years plus a CLU or CPCU or relevant degree means the update plus 6 electives. - **Maryland** — explicitly rejects age-based relief. All producers, regardless of age, must comply. - **Alabama** — 12 hours (2 ethics) for producers working only in an employer's office and not non-resident licensed elsewhere; exempt at first renewal if licensed under 12 months. - **Virginia** — exempt if newly licensed within the last 13 months of the biennium. If you hold a professional designation, check your state before buying courses. Georgia's designation route more than halves the requirement.
Non-Resident Licences: Your Home State Usually Covers You
The shorthand is broadly right — satisfy your home state's CE and you satisfy the others — but it is **conditional reciprocity written into each state's own law, not a national rule**. The NAIC Producer Licensing Model Act makes it explicit that a non-resident producer's home-state CE counts *if the home state recognises this state's producers on the same basis*. States we verified as waiving CE for non-residents: North Carolina ('nonresident insurance producers do not have continuing education requirements for North Carolina'), Michigan ('reciprocal with all other states'), Washington, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin and Louisiana. States where the waiver is explicitly reciprocity-tested: Virginia, Colorado, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. **Two things survive the waiver.** Washington and Wisconsin both state that product-specific training — flood, long-term care, annuity — must still be completed even when general CE is waived. Do not assume a home-state flood course satisfies another state's NFIP mandate. **And one contradiction worth flagging:** Alabama's own CE page reads as holding non-resident producers to the full 24 hours unless they qualify for the employer's-office exception, which is at odds with how the model act and most states operate. If you hold a non-resident Alabama licence, verify directly with the Alabama Department of Insurance rather than assuming the general rule.
What We Could Not Verify
Publishing an unverified CE number is worse than publishing none, because someone plans a renewal around it. So, plainly: **Arizona is the weakest row in the table.** The Department of Insurance and Financial Institutions site returned errors on every attempt, and the state statute pages would not resolve. The 48-hour and 6-ethics figures come from a trade association and a CE vendor — secondary sources — and **the cycle length is genuinely unresolved**: one source says a four-year term, another says only 'per licensing term'. Do not plan an Arizona renewal on this row without confirming with DIFI. **Indiana's ethics hour count** is not published on the Department's FAQ. **North Carolina's ethics and flood split** is mandated but the counts are not published. **South Carolina's statute contains no ethics carve-out at all**, and we could not reach the Department site to check whether a departmental rule adds one — vendors widely claim it does. **Minnesota's statute** specifies 24 hours per licensing period without defining the period's length in the text we could read. **Late and lapse consequences are simply not published** by New York, Georgia, Washington, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Indiana, Missouri, Colorado, Alabama, Louisiana or New Jersey. We left those cells empty rather than guessing. **Twenty-five states are not covered at all** — we verified 25 and did not attempt the rest. Their absence from the table means nothing about their requirements. For any state, the authoritative answer is your Department of Insurance's own CE page, and your CE transcript in Sircon or NIPR is where the state actually counts your hours. Check the transcript, not your provider's records.
Before CE, There Is the Exam
CE only starts once you are licensed. If you are still at the front of that process, drill the full 450-question P&C bank free at [the P&C practice test](/free-insurance-pc-practice-test), check what your state requires to sit at all with [the state requirement lookup](/tools/insurance-pc-state-lookup), and see your state's first-time pass rate in [P&C pass rates by state](/blog/p-and-c-insurance-exam-pass-rate-by-state). If you are choosing between lines, note that the Life & Health side carries additional mandatory product training that P&C does not — the comparison is in [P&C or Life & Health first](/blog/p-and-c-vs-life-and-health-which-insurance-license-first). Sources, all retrieved 19 August 2026: NAIC Producer Licensing Model Act #218; California DOI CE FAQ, Insurance Code 1749.3, ethics notice and late renewal pages; Texas Department of Insurance CE; Florida DFS CE and Florida Statutes 626.2815; NY DFS continuing education criteria; Pennsylvania Insurance Department and 40 P.S. §310.8; 215 ILCS 5/500-35; Ohio Department of Insurance and NIPR Ohio; Georgia OCI; NC Department of Insurance and G.S. 58-33-130; Michigan DIFS; NJ DOBI and N.J.A.C. 11:17-3.6; Code of Virginia Title 38.2 Ch. 18 Art. 7; Washington OIC; Massachusetts; Tennessee Commerce and Insurance; Indiana DOI; Missouri DCI; Maryland Insurance Administration; Wisconsin OCI; Colorado DOI Regulation 1-2-04; Minnesota Statute 60K.56; S.C. Code 38-43-106; Alabama DOI; Louisiana DOI. Arizona figures are from IIABAZ and ExamFX (secondary) and are flagged as unverified above.
Free Insurance Tools
Studying with VoltAI
Stuck on a Insurance question? Ask VoltAI why.
VoltAI is a built-in AI tutor that explains every practice answer in plain language — citing the actual code, protocol, or standard — and answers your follow-ups until it clicks. Most prep apps just tell you the right letter; VoltAI teaches the reasoning the exam actually tests, so you pass by understanding, not memorizing. Free to try, no account.
Try VoltAI free →Your next best step
Turn this guide into practice
Use the article to understand the topic, then do a short web practice session to find your weak spots. Paid web access is optional after the free preview.