Editorial policy for exam facts

A fact is taken from the body that owns the exam, its test vendor, the law or regulator behind it or, for an employer rule, the accrediting body whose standard sets that rule. For the exams on the site today that means:

• Mortgage loan originator test: the NMLS testing handbook and content outline, NMLS and CSBS fee notices, state regulators' licensing pages, and the SAFE Act sections on licensing and renewal.
• Life and health insurance exam: the candidate bulletin that a state's vendor (Pearson VUE, PSI or Prometric) prints for that state, plus the content outlines the state issues.
• WCC: the NAWCO candidate handbook, recertification handbook and the statistics NAWCO posts.
• CWS: the ABWM certification handbook and its application pages.
• FP-C: the IBSC candidate handbook, fee and retesting policies, and IBSC annual reports, plus the CAMTS accreditation standards for the employer requirement.

Prep course sellers, discussion boards and rival study sites never count as a source, however widely their figures are copied. Their copies are where outdated numbers live longest.

Each fact is stored a single time, together with its value, the title of the document it rests on and the date that document was last read, and every page that mentions it pulls from that one entry. That is why fact tables can print, row by row, a document and a date, and why two pages cannot quote two different fees for the same exam. Money figures are undiscounted prices in US dollars. A value that the owner says may vary, such as a member discount or a rescheduling charge, is marked as such in its row.

A change is reported at the stage it has reached, and the current rule stays in the tables until the new one takes effect.

• SAFE test fee, still a proposal: proposed increase to $120 from March 1, 2027; not confirmed as final.
• FP-C outline, expected but undated: IBSC funded an FP-C job analysis starting in early 2026, so a new outline is likely; no date announced.
• Life and health outlines, published with a start date: Florida and Illinois have published outlines effective January 1, 2027.

Old specifications that still circulate are not repeated. The current SAFE test is 120 questions with 5 unscored; for the FP-C pass rate, the figure used here is the one IBSC reports, 57.6% in 2024.

Exam owners sometimes print two different numbers for the same thing. We do not choose the friendlier one. Both are shown, with a note to confirm before you pay:

• CWS retest fee: $275 per retest in the fee table; the same handbook's retest section says $150.
• FP-C rescheduling: IBSC's fee page and its candidate handbook price late changes differently, with the handbook the stricter of the two; the FP-C registration page prints both schedules.

The life and health exam has no national version, so it gets no national figure. Each state row in its tables cites that state's own bulletin. When a bulletin does not state a value, the cell shows a dash; it is never filled in from a neighboring state or from a typical value.

Since every fact sits in a single entry, fixing it once fixes it everywhere it appears, and its check date moves forward. When a practice question turns out to be faulty, it comes off its page to be repaired or replaced, and the repaired version goes through the full question review before it appears again.

Credential House runs no ads, carries no affiliate links and accepts no sponsorship, and it has nothing to sell. No exam owner, test vendor, school or course provider pays to be covered, sees a page before it goes live or has a say in what it says.