The North Carolina Surplus Lines license
Surplus Lines
Places North Carolina property and casualty business directly with carriers not admitted here, and files the forms and taxes that go with it. Anybody who goes through a wholesaler does not need it.
Course
None
This license has no pre-licensing course route.
Ways in
1
It requires the state exam.
Exam
$45
Required.
Every way to qualify
-
Route 1 Pass the examination
State exam required
No pre-licensing course. S.L. 2025-45, s. 1(a) rewrote G.S. 58-33-30(d) with effect from 2025-10-01 so that the Commissioner may not require any hours of pre-licensing education of anybody. The crosswalk chart draws the boundary by how the business is placed rather than by what it covers: the license "allows an agent to place property and casualty business directly with carriers that are not admitted in North Carolina and to file the forms and taxes required with such policies", and "agents placing surplus lines policies through a wholesaler or broker are not required to hold this license."Texas, South Carolina and Virginia all stack their surplus lines license on an underlying producer license; North Carolina states no such prerequisite on either chart.
Read at the Department on 2026-08-18
No national seller sells a course for this license. Forty-two states here license surplus lines and WebCE, which sells the widest surplus lines catalogue of the seven, carries a product in eight of them: Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, Louisiana, Texas and Utah. North Carolina is not one.