Three acts need a license. Fifty-six regulators issue it.
Which acts are reserved to licensed humans, and which acts a licensed professional may supervise a machine in doing.
Nothing on this site sells, solicits or negotiates insurance, and nothing here is insurance advice.
A person shall not sell, solicit or negotiate insurance in this state for any class or classes of insurance unless the person is licensed for that line of authority in accordance with this Act.
Section 3 of the Producer Licensing Model Act, the model law the state insurance regulators keep. The 56 regulators and their zones are the NAIC's 2026 members; the boundaries are the U.S. Census Bureau's.
The licensed act
To sell, solicit or negotiate insurance, a person needs a license, and licensing runs state by state.
The rule is written down, and it is short.
The state insurance regulators' own association keeps a model law for it, the Producer Licensing Model Act. Section 3 is one sentence, shown above, and each verb in it is defined:
- Sell
- “To exchange a contract of insurance by any means, for money or its equivalent, on behalf of an insurance company.” Section 2M
- Solicit
- “Attempting to sell insurance or asking or urging a person to apply for a particular kind of insurance from a particular company.” Section 2N
- Negotiate
- “The act of conferring directly with or offering advice directly to a purchaser or prospective purchaser of a particular contract of insurance concerning any of the substantive benefits, terms or conditions of the contract, provided that the person engaged in that act either sells insurance or obtains insurance from insurers for purchasers.” Section 2K
And the licensing is genuinely state by state: the association's own account records that each state historically set its own requirements, and that a producer licensed in one state generally had to meet the separate nonresident requirements of every other state where they worked. The burden was real enough that the regulators built shared infrastructure for it: a national producer registry, incorporated in 1996, that now carries license applications and renewals across states.
A law that names the acts needing a licensed human is exactly the raw material for our question: which of the work around those acts may a licensed professional supervise a machine in doing? That is the mapping this program makes next, one state code at a time.
The method
One method, in every field the Foundation maps.
Four steps, in this order, in every field.
- Read the rules from the regulator's own site.Nothing cited that was not fetched.
- Publish a short list of reserved acts that stay with the licensed human.
- Design the supervision so the machine is the professional's instrument.With a log a regulator can read.
- Publish the map before doing anything.So the people who regulate the field can read it first.
In insurance, that means the state insurance codes read one by one, a reserved-acts list for insurance, then a supervision design, all of it in the open.
In law, the same steps have produced a published, versioned catalog of the acts that stay with a licensed lawyer: law.org.ai/reserved-acts.
Where it comes from
Every factual claim on this page names a primary source we actually fetched. There are six.
- The rule
sell, solicit or negotiate
Section 3, the license requirement, and the definitions of its three verbs - Model lawProducer Licensing Model ActThe January 2005 codification
- Kept byThe state insurance regulators' associationFetched from content.naic.org
- Changed by usNothing.Section 3 and the three definitions are quoted from it
Producer Licensing Model Act
The January 2005 codification, fetched from content.naic.org.
Section 3's license requirement and the definitions of “sell,” “solicit” and “negotiate” are quoted from it.
Members by zone
The same association's 2026 list of its members, at content.naic.org, read on 11 October 2026.
Its 56 members are the insurance regulators of the 50 states, the District of Columbia and five territories, in four zones: Northeast 12, Southeast 14, Midwest 13 and Western 17.
Insurance directory
The same association's directory of the state insurance departments, read on 11 October 2026.
The website of each regulator on the map, for 50 of the 56. The other six (Virginia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming) are from the regulators' own sites, read the same day.
Producer licensing
The same association's topic page, at content.naic.org.
It records that each state historically set its own licensing requirements, and that the national producer registry was incorporated in October 1996.
nipr.com
The national producer registry.
Where that registry describes itself as a not-for-profit provider of licensing data and compliance services for insurance professionals.
The map's boundaries are the U.S. Census Bureau's cartographic boundaries, as the us-atlas project publishes them. Nothing else on this page is a factual claim about insurance. Every rule read is added here, with the date it was read.
The same method, in law
law.org.ai asks the same questions of the practice of law.
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