Getting an insurance license in North Dakota
North Dakota licenses through the North Dakota Insurance Department, which calls the licensee a producer. Which license you need depends on what you intend to sell, and the requirements differ sharply between them.
License types
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Accident and Health or Sickness
Sells cover for sickness, disease, injury, accidental death and disability in North Dakota. No pre-licensing course is required.
No course
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Bail Bond Agent
Executes or countersigns bail bonds for an insurer in North Dakota and is paid for it. The license and the appointment come together: chapter 26.1-26.6 defines a bail bond agent as somebody the commissioner has licensed AND an insurer has appointed by power of attorney, so neither half is enough on its own. No pre-licensing course is required, and the Department names eleven prelicensing providers on the same page while saying it does not approve or regulate any of them.
No course
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Casualty
Sells cover against legal liability in North Dakota, including liability for death, injury or disability and for damage to real or personal property. No pre-licensing course is required.
No course
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Credit
Sells insurance written in connection with an extension of credit in North Dakota. The rule draws the product type wide: credit life, credit disability, credit property, credit unemployment, involuntary unemployment, mortgage life, mortgage guaranty, mortgage disability and guaranteed automobile protection, plus anything else the commissioner determines is a form of credit insurance. Credit life also sits inside the Life line here, which is why the two overlap.
No course
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Crop
Sells crop and crop hail cover in North Dakota. The rule defines it as protection against damage to crops from unfavorable weather, fire or lightning, flood, hail, insect infestation, disease or other yield-reducing conditions, whether the peril is carried by the private market or subsidized by the federal crop insurance corporation, and it takes in multiperil crop insurance.
No course
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Discount Plan Organization
Sells members access to doctors and other providers at a discount, which is not insurance and is regulated as though it nearly were. The Department calls this a license and prices it at $500 with a $250 annual renewal; the statute that creates it calls the same thing a registration throughout.
No course
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Insurance Consultant
Advises on insurance for a fee in North Dakota rather than selling it. The Code excuses attorneys, trust officers, actuaries and certified public accountants acting in their own professional capacities, and excuses licensed producers too, so this license is for somebody who advises and does not sell. It is narrower than it was: the Department took public adjusting out of it with effect from 1 July 2019 and issues a separate Public Adjuster license for that work. It sits under the same examination section as the producer license and needs no pre-licensing course.
No course
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Legal Expense
Sells legal expense insurance, including prepaid legal service, in North Dakota. The seller takes a reduced examination; the organization behind the plan is licensed separately and much more heavily, under chapter 26.1-19, which asks it for a certificate of authority and a $500 application fee.
No course
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Life Settlement Broker
Negotiates life settlement contracts on behalf of the owner of a policy in North Dakota. There are two ways in and they are not variations of one route: a full application, or a notification filed by a life producer of a year's standing which the Department processes as an application. Either way the applicant shows $150,000 of financial responsibility and files an anti-fraud plan.
No course
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Life Settlement Provider
Buys life insurance policies from their owners in North Dakota. The application runs to sixteen headings: five years of balance sheets, five years of income and expense statements, three independent audits, every life settlement contract to be used in the state, and a plan of operation describing how the settlement to the viator is worked out.
No course
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Life
Sells life insurance in North Dakota, and the Code draws this line wider than most: coverage on human lives including endowment benefits, fixed and indexed annuities, and credit life. Credit life sits inside this line here rather than in a credit line of its own, because North Dakota does not have one. No pre-licensing course is required.
No course
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Limited Lines Travel Insurance Producer
Sells, solicits or negotiates travel insurance in North Dakota through a licensed insurer, and carries the travel retailers who offer it over a counter. Nobody starts here: the Code defines the licensee as somebody who already holds one of three other things, and the license is laid on top of that.
No course
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Personal Lines
Sells property and casualty cover to individuals and families for primarily noncommercial purposes in North Dakota. It is one of five product types the Department examines on a reduced paper rather than on the full property and casualty ones, and it needs no pre-licensing course.
No course
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Pharmacy Benefits Manager
Manages prescription drug benefits for a covered entity as a third party in North Dakota. The license runs a fixed year from 30 April to 31 March rather than from the day it is issued, it costs $10,000 to get and $10,000 again every year, and the applicant shows a million dollars of financial responsibility with the application and with every renewal.
No course
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Portable Electronics Insurance
Lets a vendor of phones and other portable electronic devices sell cover on them to the customers it sells or leases those devices to. The license is the vendor's and it carries the vendor's staff: employees and authorized representatives sell under it without licenses of their own, at every location the vendor trades from.
No course
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Premium Finance Company
Lends people the money for their insurance premiums in North Dakota, under agreements the Department reads before it licenses anybody. The license is annual and expires on 1 April, and the statute exempts a long list of businesses that already lend money under some other regulator, insurance producers among them.
No course
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Prepaid Legal Services Organization
Runs a plan that pays for its members' legal services in North Dakota. The Department issues a certificate of authority for it and the application costs $500. A separate and much lighter license, Legal Expense, covers the person who sells the plan.
No course
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Property
Sells cover for direct and consequential loss of or damage to property of every kind in North Dakota. No pre-licensing course is required.
No course
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Public Adjuster
Acts for the insured, for a fee, in settling a first-party claim for loss or damage to property in North Dakota. It is the state's only adjuster license and it is new: it was carved out of the consultant license with effect from 1 July 2019, and a consultant who was doing the work had to reapply. An independent or staff adjuster working for an insurer needs no license here at all.
No course
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Reinsurance Intermediary-Broker
Places reinsurance cessions or retrocessions for an insurer without acting for the reinsurer. A resident cannot reach it without a North Dakota producer license first, and there is no renewal: the Department says so in one flat sentence on its own page.
No course
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Reinsurance Intermediary-Manager
Has binding authority over a reinsurer's business, which is why North Dakota asks it for two things the broker license does not: a $2,000 bond and $50,000 of errors and omissions cover. Same statute, same application forms, same absence of any renewal.
No course
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Self-Service Storage Insurance
Lets the owner of a storage facility sell cover on what occupants keep in it, and on that property in transit to and from the facility. Like the portable electronics license it is the business's rather than the salesperson's, and the counter staff sell under it. It is the only limited lines license in the producer chapters that the Department's own Other Licenses page does not name: the page lists eleven and this is a twelfth, found in the Century Code's own chapter index at 26.1-26.9.
No course
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Surety
Writes surety in North Dakota: insurance or a bond covering an obligation to pay somebody else's debts or answer for their default, including faithlessness in a position of public or private trust. The rule defines it and then takes one thing back out of it in the same sentence, which is why a surety licensee is not a bail bond agent here.
No course
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Surplus Lines Insurance Producer
Places business with insurers North Dakota has not admitted. It is not a sixth line: it is a second license laid on top of the producer one, and the Code says so in a single sentence. No pre-licensing course is required, and no separate examination either.
No course
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Third Party Administrator
Underwrites, collects premiums from, or adjusts and settles claims on North Dakotans in connection with life, annuity or health coverage, including coverage under a self-funded plan. The Department calls the document a Certificate of Authority. Acting as one without it is a class C felony, which is the heaviest penalty on this schedule and is shared with exactly one other North Dakota license, the pharmacy benefits manager.
No course
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Title
Writes title insurance in North Dakota and no other property and casualty business. It is the one North Dakota license with a pre-licensing hour count in front of it, and the hours are not the Department's: eighty hours of training given by an insurer licensed in the title line, certified by that insurer on the application. An abstracter's license or a law license takes the place of the eighty hours.
80 hrs
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Utilization Review Agent
Decides whether somebody else's medical care was necessary and appropriate. North Dakota certifies rather than licenses it, annually, and neither the chapter nor the Department's fee schedule prices the filing. The qualification is not the agent's at all: the reviews have to be made by a physician licensed by the North Dakota board of medicine or a psychologist licensed by the state board of psychologist examiners.
No course
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Variable Life and Variable Annuity
Sells cover provided under variable life insurance contracts and variable annuities in North Dakota. The Code lists it among the five lines a producer may be licensed to market and the Department's rule then adds two conditions the Code does not carry: the qualifying paper is the Life and annuity one, because there is no variable examination in this state, and the applicant must first be licensed as a securities salesman under North Dakota law.
No course
Is a course required?
North Dakota requires no pre-licensing course for Every producer line of authority except Title.
The Department states that North Dakota law does not require classroom instruction, that preparation may be classroom or self-study, and that no verification of study is given to the Department or the test center. It follows that through: because no instruction is required, the material prelicensing providers hand out is neither approved nor regulated, and the Department will not recommend one over another. A sourced zero. The Code says the same thing in fewer words and with a citation. Chapter 26.1-26 still carries a section numbered 26.1-26-15.1 and headed Prelicensure education, and the whole of its text is now "Repealed by S.L. 2001, ch. 262, section 136". The section that would have required a course is still in the table of contents with nothing left inside it, which is New Hampshire's empty subsection arriving in a second state. The exception is Title and it was found on 2026-08-20 by reading the rule rather than the Code: N.D. Admin. Code 45-02-02-04(2) exempts the title applicant from the examination and puts eighty hours of training in its place unless the applicant is a licensed abstracter or attorney. Until that date this record said "Every producer line of authority", which was true of the Code and false of the rule.
Read at the Department on 2026-08-20 . N.D.C.C. 26.1-26-15.1, headed Prelicensure education, repealed by S.L. 2001, ch. 262, section 136
North Dakota requires pre-licensing education for Title , at 80 hours.
The only pre-licensing hour count in North Dakota insurance law, and it is in a rule rather than in the Century Code, on the one line the state does not examine at all. 45-02-02-04(2): "An applicant applying for a license for title insurance is exempt from any examination requirement but must meet the following qualifications: a. The applicant must be a licensed abstracter or attorney; or b. The applicant must have a minimum of eighty hours of training provided by an insurer licensed in the line of title insurance. A certification by the insurer that the training has been completed must accompany the application."The Department prints the same sentence on its title licensing page. Nobody approves the course and nobody could: the body that gives the training is the body that certifies it, and North Dakota keeps no register because the Department's position is that where no prelicense instruction is required the material providers hand out is neither approved nor regulated. So no product can satisfy this and no school can sell it, which is Massachusetts's motor vehicle damage appraiser course reached from the opposite direction: there the hours are the Board's and unpublished, here they are published and the insurer's.
Read at the Department on 2026-08-20 . N.D. Admin. Code 45-02-02-04(2)
North Dakota requires no pre-licensing course for Public adjusters.
The producer zero does not reach this license, because a public adjuster is not a producer and chapter 26.1-26.8 stands on its own. It reaches the same answer by its own route: 26.1-26.8-04 is a closed list of nine findings the commissioner must make and no course is among them. What stands in front of the license instead is the examination at 26.1-26.8-07, a surety bond of at least $20,000 at 26.1-26.8-11, an office in North Dakota open to the public, and a criminal history record check. The same page that carries the license answers the independent adjuster question in a shape nothing else on this site has: "Independent or staff adjusters representing an insurance company do not require licensing in North Dakota. Unfortunately, because North Dakota law does not require licensing for an independent or staff adjuster, we do not have any rules, codes, or statutes that specifically state that."
Read at the Department on 2026-08-20 . N.D.C.C. 26.1-26.8-04
Fees
| Charge | Paid to | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Insurance producer license N.D.C.C. 26.1-01-07(1)(l). One fee for the license whatever lines are on it, and adding a line of authority to an existing license is free, which the Department says twice on its fee page. It does not reach the self-service storage owner, whose fee 26.1-26.9-05(3) leaves to the commissioner and the Department has not published. | North Dakota Insurance Department | $100.00 |
| Annual renewal Annual, not biennial, which most states here are. Scoped to nothing on purpose: a renewal is not part of the price of getting a first license, and totalling it on a cost page told Connecticut readers a $334.95 license cost $494.95. The individual producer's is in fact a biennial continuation of $25 under N.D. Admin. Code 45-02-02-05.1, on the last day of the birth month following the two-year anniversary, and a license that misses it is canceled. | North Dakota Insurance Department | $25.00 |
| Company appointment Raised from $10 with effect from August 1, 2025, and the renewal with it. The Department publishes both figures side by side. Scoped to nothing because the appointing insurer pays it, not the applicant: N.D.C.C. 26.1-26-13.1(3) puts it on the insurer, and 26.1-26-13.1(1) says a producer who is not acting as an agent of an insurer needs no appointment at all. | North Dakota Insurance Department | $25.00 |
| Consultant's license N.D.C.C. 26.1-01-07(1)(k). Renewing it is $25 a year. | North Dakota Insurance Department | $100.00 |
| Surplus lines insurance producer license N.D.C.C. 26.1-01-07(1)(k), which prices the surplus lines producer and the consultant in the same sentence. It sits on top of the $100 producer license rather than replacing it, because 26.1-26-17 requires the applicant to be licensed as a producer for the lines to be written first, and the Department says so in its own arithmetic: "The fee for the producer license is $100 and the fee for the surplus lines license is $100."Renewal is $25 a year and the license expires every 30 April. | North Dakota Insurance Department | $100.00 |
| Public adjuster license, individual N.D.C.C. 26.1-01-07(1)(x), for a resident or a nonresident alike, with a biennial renewal of $25. New with the license itself on 1 July 2019. | North Dakota Insurance Department | $100.00 |
| Public adjuster license, business entity N.D.C.C. 26.1-01-07(1)(y), with a biennial renewal of $25. Scoped to nothing on purpose: a business entity acting as a public adjuster needs its own license under 26.1-26.8-06 and designates an individually licensed adjuster to answer for it, so this is a second license paid by a second licensee rather than a second charge on the individual. Totalling both told a reader the North Dakota public adjuster license costs $200 when an individual pays $100, which is Minnesota's business entity defect of 2026-08-19 in a second state. | North Dakota Insurance Department | $100.00 |
| Life settlement broker license N.D.C.C. 26.1-01-07(1)(w), and the same $100 whichever way in the applicant takes: the Department charges it on the full application and on the notification a life producer of a year's standing files under the deemed broker track. Renewal is $25 a year, raised from $12 with effect from 1 August 2025. | North Dakota Insurance Department | $100.00 |
| Life settlement provider application N.D.C.C. 26.1-01-07(1)(v). It fell from $250 with effect from 1 August 2025 while the annual statement filing fee went the other way, from $25 to $100, and the annual renewal fell from $100 to $25. | North Dakota Insurance Department | $100.00 |
| Life settlement provider annual statement filing fee N.D.C.C. 26.1-01-07(1)(f), payable with the annual statement every provider files before 1 March under 26.1-33.4-05. Scoped to nothing because it is an annual filing by an existing licensee rather than a cost of getting licensed. | North Dakota Insurance Department | $100.00 |
| Third party administrator certificate of authority N.D.C.C. 26.1-01-07(1)(z), which prices "a license or certificate for a life or health insurance administrator" at $250 with a $100 annual renewal, and the Department's fee page prints the same pair with effect from 1 August 2025. Its own third party administrator page still says $100 with a $50 renewal, which were the figures before that date; the statute and the fee schedule are what is recorded here. | North Dakota Insurance Department | $250.00 |
| Pharmacy benefits manager license N.D.C.C. 26.1-01-07(1)(aa) caps the initial and the renewal fee at ten thousand dollars each and leaves the amount to the commissioner; the Department has set both at the ceiling. Annual, due by 30 April. | North Dakota Insurance Department | $10,000.00 |
| Premium finance company license N.D.C.C. 26.1-01-07(1)(p), for the license and for each annual renewal, which falls due on 1 April. 26.1-01-07(1)(q) adds the actual expense of any examination or investigation of the licensee, on a per diem that may not exceed $50. | North Dakota Insurance Department | $100.00 |
| Prepaid legal services organization application Nonrefundable, on the application for the certificate of authority. The Department publishes the figure on its prepaid legal services page; chapter 26.1-19 leaves the fee to the commissioner and 26.1-01-07 does not price it. | North Dakota Insurance Department | $500.00 |
| Discount plan organization application N.D.C.C. 26.1-53.1-03(3)(a) writes the five hundred dollars into the list of what the application must be accompanied by, which is unusual on this schedule: almost every other North Dakota fee is set in 26.1-01-07 or left to the commissioner. The annual renewal is $250, due by 1 March. | North Dakota Insurance Department | $500.00 |
| Letter of certification N.D.C.C. 26.1-01-07(1)(m) prices a duplicate of any license or registration at ten dollars and the Department's fee page prices a letter of certification at the same. Scoped to nothing: it is a document an existing licensee asks for, not a step toward a first license. | North Dakota Insurance Department | $10.00 |
| Reinsurance intermediary license Searched and not published. N.D.C.C. chapter 26.1-31.1 licenses the reinsurance intermediary-broker and the reinsurance intermediary-manager and sets no figure; the Department's producer fee page prices twenty-two other licenses and names neither; and its reinsurance intermediary page carries the manager's $2,000 bond and $50,000 errors and omissions policy and no license fee. Both of those are security and cover rather than money leaving the applicant's hands, so neither is totalled here. The amount is left unread rather than guessed. | North Dakota Insurance Department | Not confirmed |
| Utilization review agent license Searched and not published. The Department's utilization review agent page carries the filing requirements and no fee, and its producer fee page, which prices twenty-two licenses down to a $10 letter of certification, does not name the utilization review agent at all. The amount is left unread rather than guessed. | North Dakota Insurance Department | Not confirmed |
| Self-service storage insurance license fee Searched and not published. The Department's producer fee page prices twenty-two licenses, from a $10 letter of certification to a $10,000 pharmacy benefit manager, and does not name the self-service storage insurance license. N.D.C.C. chapter 26.1-26.9 creates the license and sets no figure. The amount is left unread rather than guessed. | North Dakota Insurance Department | Not confirmed |
Every amount above was read at its own source between 2026-08-14 and 2026-09-05. Exam and fingerprint charges go to a vendor, not to the Department, and say so.
Approved courses
There is no register, and the Department says why in one sentence: because no prelicense instruction is required, what providers hand out is not approved or regulated. It goes further than that on its bail bond page, where it lists eleven prelicensing providers by name and address and then says in the next paragraph that it "cannot recommend one provider over another". A list of who to call is not a list of what is approved. The one course North Dakota does require, the title line's eighty hours, is outside all of this: the insurer that gives the training certifies it on the application, so the approval and the teaching are the same act and there is nothing for a register to hold.