The Alaska Independent Adjuster license

AS 21.27.830(1) is an experience bar with a clock on both ends: six months of active working experience, inside the previous two calendar years, in one of eight named roles, plus the director’s opinion that the applicant can competently do the work. The eight roles are the point. Alaska does not ask for six months of adjusting; it accepts a producer, a managing general agent, either reinsurance intermediary, a surplus lines broker, an underwriter or a claims adjuster employee of an insurer, and its own trainee independent adjuster. AS 21.27.020(b) is the closed list of six general qualifications behind every individual license in the chapter and no course is in it: eighteen or older; a bona fide resident actually residing in the state, for a resident license; the examination under AS 21.27.060 passed; trustworthy; not using the license principally to write controlled business; and no act that is a ground for denial anywhere. AS 21.27.020(f) lets the director add education or experience requirements by regulation, and the regulations adopted under it, 3 AAC 23, are continuing education from end to end. Two provisions shrink what this license is for. AS 21.27.850 lets a producer or managing general agent adjust claims for an insurer that appointed them, a surplus lines broker adjust for a non-admitted insurer, and either reinsurance intermediary adjust under the contract the chapter requires, all without an adjuster license. And AS 21.27.860 lets a non-resident adjuster licensed at home adjust one loss a year here with no Alaska license at all, or adjust catastrophe losses the director has declared, on ten days’ written notice naming themselves, their firm, their addresses and their home state license number. Alaska therefore issues no emergency adjuster license: the catastrophe case is a notice exemption rather than a license. And there is no public adjuster license in the chapter. The words do not appear in AS 21.27 at all.

Read at the Department on 2026-08-18

AS 21.27.830(2) is the alternative to the experience bar and it is a lapsed-licensee route rather than a reciprocity one. Four calendar years, good standing, and no suspension or revocation. AS 21.27.060(d)(2) is what removes the examination on it, and it is written more tightly than the four years suggest: an applicant licensed in good standing in this state within the one-year period immediately preceding the application, under a license requiring substantially similar qualifications, does not sit the paper. So between one year and four, the license comes back on this route and the examination comes with it.

Read at the Department on 2026-08-18

AS 21.27.270(h) is the widest waiver in the chapter: a non-resident applicant licensed and in good standing as an independent adjuster at home "does not have to meet the requirements of AS 21.27.060 or 21.27.830", which is the examination and the six months of experience together. AS 21.27.270(i) then answers the seventeen-jurisdiction problem the other way from Rhode Island: where the applicant’s home state licenses no independent adjusters at all, the applicant may designate as a home state any state in which they are licensed in good standing. And AS 21.27.270(j) closes the loop, because a non-resident who designates Alaska as their home state gets no benefit from any of it and qualifies exactly as a resident does. AS 21.27.020(f)(5) is the matching continuing education rule: non-residents are exempt, except a non-resident independent adjuster who has designated Alaska.

Read at the Department on 2026-08-18