Georgia’s Public Adjuster license, issued under the authority of the Georgia Office of Commissioner of Insurance and Safety Fire (OCI), qualifies an adjuster to represent policyholders — never the insurer — in property insurance claims. The licensing examination is the Georgia Public Adjuster examination (12-GA-20), delivered by Pearson VUE: 100 scored questions in 2 hours. PassProfessor’s Georgia public adjuster program is in the works, built on the published examination outline for this license and on Georgia’s own licensing rules, and this guide states the verified facts of both.
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The companion program is in the works, built on the published outline of the Georgia Public Adjuster examination (12-GA-20). Join the notify list and you will be emailed when enrollment opens. Until then, this guide gives preparation a structure worth starting now, because a public adjuster license is not earned at a test center alone: it is assembled through a state-controlled sequence — in Georgia, a sequence with its own order, its own documents, and its own deadlines — and the examination sits inside that sequence at a specific point. Candidates who understand the whole route prepare differently from candidates who see only a test date, and they waste less of both.
Start with the guide’s central distinction. A public adjuster works for the insured. Every other adjuster a candidate may have studied alongside — the company adjuster on an insurer’s staff, the independent adjuster an insurer contracts — works for the insurer. Georgia licenses those roles separately, examines them separately, and binds them to different duties, because the person paying for the adjustment is different. This guide never blends the two sides: every fact below belongs to the policyholder’s license, the Public Adjuster, and to its examination alone.
Which license is this?
Georgia keeps its adjuster licenses carefully separated, and the separation is printed on the examinations themselves. The Adjuster examination, 12-GA-24, qualifies the insurer-side adjuster. The Public Adjuster examination, 12-GA-20, qualifies the adjuster who represents the insured. A candidate who books, studies for, or passes the wrong code has done nothing toward this license — OCI’s own licensing page lists the public adjuster requirements as their own track: a property and casualty public adjuster prelicensing course, a passing score on the Public Adjuster examination, a $5,000 bond, and a consumer contract the Commissioner must approve before it is used.
The 12-GA-20 / 12-GA-24 distinction is the whole ballgame in Georgia, and this package never merges the two. The outlines make the point numerically: the public adjuster paper carries 95 questions on national and general content and 5 on Georgia state-specific content, a different composition from its adjuster sibling, because the license it feeds carries different duties — including the Georgia rule, in force since July 1, 2021, that a public adjuster’s contract be pre-approved by the Commissioner before the adjuster works with consumers.
The license at a glance
| Fact of record | Detail |
|---|---|
| License | Public Adjuster — Georgia |
| Regulator | Georgia Office of Commissioner of Insurance and Safety Fire (OCI) |
| Examination | Georgia Public Adjuster examination (12-GA-20) |
| Vendor | Pearson VUE |
| Format | 100 scored questions; 2 hours |
| Examination fee | $67 per attempt (third-party examination fee, paid to Pearson VUE when the examination is scheduled) |
| Passing standard | not published as a figure this page can state — no passing figure could be pinned to the regulator’s or the vendor’s published handbook text for this examination in this pass, so none is printed; the current candidate handbook is the authority |
| Companion program | In the works — enrollment is not open; join the notify list |
The examination in detail
The Georgia Public Adjuster examination (12-GA-20) is a computer-delivered, multiple-choice licensing examination of 100 scored questions, taken in 2 hours. Georgia front-loads the route: approved coursework, then the examination, then bond and a state application, then a contract that cannot be used until the Commissioner approves it. The examination is the middle gate of five, and its state block tests rules the candidate will operate under immediately. Scheduling, identification, and test-center conduct run under Pearson VUE’s candidate rules for Georgia: arrive as the vendor directs, with the identification the handbook names, and expect the sitting’s non-scored elements — a tutorial, and in many administrations unscored pretest or experimental items mixed invisibly among the scored ones — to sit inside the same appointment. Those unscored items cannot be identified in the room and must simply be paced for: the correct response to a question that feels unfamiliar is the same careful work as on any other, because it may be scored.
Scoring follows the standard this guide states once and does not embellish: the passing standard is not published as a figure this page can state — no passing figure could be pinned to the regulator’s or the vendor’s published handbook text for this examination in this pass, so none is printed; the current candidate handbook is the authority. A result below the standard is not the end of the route — licensing examinations in this family are retaken by re-registering with the vendor and paying the examination fee again, under any waiting period or attempt limit the state publishes for this license — but each retake costs the fee again and, in states whose licensing sequence gives a passed result a validity window, the calendar around a failed attempt matters as much as the score. The preparation plan below is built to make the first sitting the considered one, not a reconnaissance trip.
The outline, area by area
| Outline area | Weight | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| National and general content | 95 of 100 scored questions | Property and casualty fundamentals, policy forms, valuation, and adjusting practice — the general body of knowledge the examination is weighted toward. |
| Georgia state-specific content | 5 of 100 scored questions | A compact block with outsized consequences: Georgia licensing, bond, contract-approval, and conduct rules for public adjusters, where a handful of questions separate prepared candidates from generic ones. |
Pearson VUE’s Georgia outline publishes the 95 / 5 split for 12-GA-20 expressly. Five state questions sounds small until the pass line is near: they are the questions a national-only preparation cannot answer, and they test the Georgia rules — bond, contract approval, solicitation — that govern the license from its first day.
National and general content — 95 of 100 scored questions
Property and casualty fundamentals, policy forms, valuation, and adjusting practice — the general body of knowledge the examination is weighted toward. In preparation terms this area rewards reading for application: the tested move is rarely recall of a definition in isolation, and far more often the correct handling of a fact pattern — a described loss, a described policy, a described deadline — under the rule or form this area covers. Candidates should expect to meet the same concept from several directions, because a 100-question paper can afford to test its major areas in depth rather than in survey.
Georgia state-specific content — 5 of 100 scored questions
A compact block with outsized consequences: Georgia licensing, bond, contract-approval, and conduct rules for public adjusters, where a handful of questions separate prepared candidates from generic ones. Study this area as working knowledge rather than vocabulary. The items that decide results here present a situation the licensee will actually face and ask for the professionally correct response among plausible ones; the distractors are typically the responses an untrained practitioner might genuinely give. Grounding in the underlying form or rule — not memorised fragments — is what separates the keyed answer from the attractive one.
Sitting the examination: the vendor’s room
On the day, the examination belongs to Pearson VUE and the Georgia OCI jointly: Pearson VUE runs the room, the check-in, the workstation, and the clock, and the Georgia OCI receives the result. The practical rules are the vendor’s standard ones and they are enforced without discretion at the desk — photographic identification matching the registration name exactly, no personal items at the workstation, no reference material of any kind, and a hard stop at 2 hours regardless of where the candidate sits in the paper. Candidates should read the current Pearson VUE candidate handbook for Georgia in the final week rather than relying on any summary, including this one, because the handbook is the document the test center applies and it is the document that settles any dispute about what was permitted. Arrive early enough that a documentation question at check-in is an inconvenience rather than a forfeited sitting: a candidate turned away at the desk has spent the examination fee and the preparation alike, and in states whose sequences run on validity windows the delay can cost more than either.
The state-law material, studied properly
Every public adjuster outline in this family divides, visibly or not, into material that travels and material that does not. Coverage forms, valuation methods, and adjusting process are recognisably similar from state to state; the licensing law is not. Pearson VUE’s Georgia outline publishes the 95 / 5 split for 12-GA-20 expressly. Five state questions sounds small until the pass line is near: they are the questions a national-only preparation cannot answer, and they test the Georgia rules — bond, contract approval, solicitation — that govern the license from its first day. For Georgia that means the state material deserves a study method of its own: read it as a code of practice rather than as trivia, in the order a licensee meets it — who may be licensed, on what documents, under what contract, with what compensation, subject to what prohibitions, and answerable to which regulator. Worked through real claim situations, the rules organise themselves; memorised as a list, they dissolve under examination pressure precisely because the items present them as situations. Candidates consistently underrate this material in week one and overrate their command of it in the final week; the correction in both directions is timed practice that reports the state areas separately, which is how the companion program’s practice is organised.
Deciding you are ready
Readiness for this examination has a measurable shape, and it is not a feeling. It is: full-length timed practice at or above the standard this guide states, sustained across more than one sitting rather than achieved once; an area-by-area profile with no outline area left as a known weakness, because a 100 scored questions paper samples every area it lists; and the licensing sequence around the sitting understood well enough that nothing in it can still surprise you. A candidate who meets those three tests and still feels unready is experiencing the ordinary weather of a high-stakes sitting, not evidence. A candidate who feels ready and meets none of them is the candidate this examination was weighted to catch. Use the notify list while the companion program is in the works, prepare against the outline and the sequence together, and book the sitting when the measures — not the mood — say so.
Read as a whole, the outline describes the license’s working week: the coverages under which Georgia property claims arise, the adjusting process that documents and values them, and the Georgia law that governs the adjuster’s contract, compensation, and conduct while doing it. A preparation plan that mirrors those proportions — rather than a plan that spends equal weeks on equal chapters regardless of weight — is the plan this examination rewards.
The licensing sequence, step by step
Step 1 — Complete the approved property and casualty course. OCI requires the Property and Casualty Public Adjuster prelicensing course before the examination track proceeds; course completions are uploaded electronically by the provider — paper completion forms are not accepted as proof.
Step 2 — Pass examination 12-GA-20 — not 12-GA-24. The Public Adjuster examination is delivered by Pearson VUE: 100 scored questions in 2 hours, 95 general and 5 Georgia-specific. Passing scores are uploaded electronically from the vendor; paper score reports are not accepted as proof.
Step 3 — File the $5,000 bond. The public adjuster bond, in the amount of $5,000 and in favour of the Commissioner, is provided with the application on OCI’s bond form; failure to maintain the bond cancels the license.
Step 4 — Apply through Sircon and clear the contract. Resident applications are submitted via Sircon with the $120 payment OCI lists. Before working with consumers, the public adjuster’s contract must be approved by the Commissioner.
Two features of this sequence deserve emphasis because candidates misread both. First, the order is the regulator’s, not a suggestion: a step the Georgia OCI places before the examination cannot be completed after it and backdated, and a document the sequence requires — a bond, a contract approval, an eligibility notice — is a gate, not a formality. Second, the examination result does not float indefinitely: where Georgia attaches a validity window, an application deadline, or an annual renewal date to this credential, the guide states it in the steps above, and the candidate’s calendar should carry it from the first week of preparation, not from results day.
A preparation plan that fits this examination
Phase one — the outline as a map (weeks 1–2). Work through the outline table above and mark, honestly, which areas are working knowledge and which are new. In Georgia that audit usually surfaces the same two findings: coverage knowledge carried over from general insurance familiarity is stronger than it feels, and the Georgia-specific law is weaker than it looks, because it has never been practised. Phase one’s product is a weighted plan: hours assigned in the outline’s proportions, with the state material scheduled early enough to be revisited, not crammed.
Phase two — area study in outline order (the middle weeks). Study one outline area at a time, in the depth the deep-dive sections above describe, working practice items as each area closes rather than banking them all for the end. The discipline that matters is the reworking of wrong answers by concept: a missed item identifies the rule, form, or provision to restudy, and the restudy — not the score — is the phase’s real output. Keep the Georgia law material in rotation throughout this phase even after its dedicated weeks close; spaced return is what moves statute-shaped material from recognition to command.
Phase three — timed, full-length practice (the final two weeks). Sit practice under the examination’s real constraints: 100 scored questions inside 2 hours, no pauses, no references. The purpose is pacing as much as knowledge — learning, in the body, how long a question may hold you before the correct move is to mark it and advance. Go over every sitting by outline area, and let the weakest area, not the most comfortable one, set the final week’s agenda.
Phase four — logistics and the sequence (the final days). Confirm the vendor appointment, the identification the handbook requires, and the state of every licensing step that stands before or immediately after the sitting in Georgia. Then stop adding material. The last days buy more through sleep, familiarity with the route to the test center, and a calm arrival than through one more pass at the hardest chapter.
The pitfalls this examination sets
Pitfall 1. Booking 12-GA-24, the Adjuster examination, in the belief that one adjuster paper serves both licenses — OCI licenses and examines them separately.
Pitfall 2. Bringing paper proof: Georgia accepts neither paper course completions nor paper examination scores; both arrive electronically from provider and vendor.
Pitfall 3. Signing a Georgia consumer before the contract is approved — since July 1, 2021 the Commissioner’s pre-approval is a precondition of working with consumers, not paperwork that follows.
Each of these is a preparation error before it is an examination error: every one of them can be corrected in the study weeks at no cost, and none of them can be corrected in the examination room or at the application window. That asymmetry is the argument for reading a guide like this one before the study plan is fixed rather than after the first sitting.
How the areas combine in a real Georgia claim
The outline areas are studied separately and examined together, and it helps to see why. Picture the claim this license exists for in Georgia — a state where tornadoes, tropical remnants, and metro Atlanta hail all feed the same first-party property claim pipeline — arriving at a damaged property with a policy in one hand and Georgia law in the other. The first questions are coverage questions, drawn from National and general content and Georgia state-specific content: what form applies, what perils are covered, what the valuation language promises. The next questions are process questions: how the loss is documented, scoped, and priced so the file can carry the negotiation. And underneath every step sit the state questions: whether the adjuster’s contract with this insured is the approved one, whether the compensation sits inside Georgia’s rules, whether the contact that brought the adjuster to this door was permitted solicitation. An examination item compresses that whole scene into four options. The candidates who answer it well are the ones who have practised moving between the layers — coverage, process, law — rather than the ones who studied each layer as if the others did not exist. Build that movement deliberately in the final study phase: take a single described loss and work it through every outline area in turn, naming which area governs each decision, until the transitions feel like the job itself. That exercise, repeated across different loss types — water, fire, wind, theft, a commercial interruption — is the closest preparation comes to the integrated judgement the license certifies, and it is available in no summary: it has to be practised, loss by loss, area by area, until the layers stop feeling separate.
After the examination
A passed examination moves the candidate into the remainder of Georgia’s sequence — the steps above that follow the sitting, completed in the regulator’s order and inside any window the state attaches to the result. The license that issues is then maintained on the state’s terms: the renewal cycle, continuing obligations, bond maintenance, and conduct rules the examination tested are the same rules the licensee now works under, and the Georgia OCI disciplines the license against them. Treat the examination’s state-law block, in other words, as the first reading of a code you will be held to — because that is precisely what it is.
Frequently asked questions
What license does this guide cover? The Public Adjuster license issued by the Georgia Office of Commissioner of Insurance and Safety Fire (OCI) — the license for adjusting property claims on the policyholder’s behalf in Georgia.
What is the format of the Georgia examination? 100 scored questions, delivered by Pearson VUE, in 2 hours.
What score passes? The passing standard is not published as a figure this page can state — no passing figure could be pinned to the regulator’s or the vendor’s published handbook text for this examination in this pass, so none is printed; the current candidate handbook is the authority.
What does the examination cost? $67 per attempt (third-party examination fee, paid to Pearson VUE when the examination is scheduled)
What is the single most important outline fact for Georgia? Pearson VUE’s Georgia outline publishes the 95 / 5 split for 12-GA-20 expressly. Five state questions sounds small until the pass line is near: they are the questions a national-only preparation cannot answer, and they test the Georgia rules — bond, contract approval, solicitation — that govern the license from its first day.
What is the first step in Georgia’s licensing sequence? Complete the approved property and casualty course — OCI requires the Property and Casualty Public Adjuster prelicensing course before the examination track proceeds; course completions are uploaded electronically by the provider — paper completion forms are not accepted as proof.
What mistake do Georgia candidates most often make? Booking 12-GA-24, the Adjuster examination, in the belief that one adjuster paper serves both licenses — OCI licenses and examines them separately.
When will the PassProfessor Georgia program open? The program is in the works and enrollment is not open yet. Join the notify list on this page or on the companion program page and you will be emailed when enrollment opens.
How is the Georgia examination scheduled? Through Pearson VUE, under the Georgia OCI’s process for this license. Where the state’s sequence places a step before scheduling — an application, an eligibility certificate, a course — the guide’s licensing-steps section states it, because in this family the order of operations is itself a common failure point.
Can I retake the examination if I do not pass? Yes — licensing examinations in this family are retaken by re-registering with the vendor and paying the examination fee again, subject to any waiting period or attempt limit the state publishes for this license. Any Georgia-specific wait or limit verified for this examination is stated in this guide’s scoring section; where none is stated, none was pinned to the primary source in this pass.
Does this guide cover the independent adjuster examination instead? No. This guide covers the Georgia Public Adjuster examination (12-GA-20) only. The independent and company adjuster examinations are different papers for different licenses, and nothing in this guide is written to them.
Is PassProfessor affiliated with the Georgia OCI or Pearson VUE? No. PassProfessor is an independent preparation provider, not affiliated with the Georgia Office of Commissioner of Insurance and Safety Fire (OCI), Pearson VUE, or any state insurance department. This guide is a preparation document; the license, the examination, and every licensing decision belong to the state and its vendor.