Who Can Become a POSP: Eligibility, Examination and Registration

If you have completed 18 years of age and passed the 10th standard, you are eligible to become a point of sales person. That is the whole test. There is no third condition waiting further down the page.

The door is low by design. IRDAI built this category because the traditional advisor route was too heavy for the selling it wanted to reach: a two-wheeler cover in a tier-3 town, a term plan for a shopkeeper, a personal accident policy sold across a counter by someone who already knows the buyer. Those sales do not need a person who can structure a complex contract. They need someone trustworthy, local, and able to fill a proposal correctly. So the regulator lowered the door and narrowed the room behind it.

This post is about the door: who qualifies, which papers you hand over, who decides, and what you are actually holding at the end. It is deliberately not the full account of the training and the examination that follow, which are covered in the training and certification your principal runs, nor of the short product list you emerge with, which is covered in what a POSP is allowed to sell. Read this one to find out whether you qualify and what qualifying costs you. Read those to find out whether it is worth it.

You must have completed 18 years. The word doing the work is completed.

This catches people out more than it should, because the phrasing of eligibility rules elsewhere in Indian financial services varies. Completed 18 years means eighteen full years have elapsed since your date of birth as recorded on the document you produce. It is not eighteen during the training. It is not eighteen by the time the first policy is issued. It is not eighteen in the calendar year of application. The engaging entity checks the date of birth on your identity document against the date you are being onboarded, and that arithmetic either passes or it does not.

There is no upper age limit. A retired schoolteacher of sixty-eight who wants to write policies for a neighbourhood she has lived in for forty years is as eligible as a twenty-two year old. In a channel whose economics run on whether households trust you enough to answer the phone at renewal, that absence of an upper bound is worth noticing. Standing in a community is an asset this route does not tax.

The date of birth on your identity document is the operative fact, not the date you believe you were born. Mismatches between a school certificate and an Aadhaar record are common in India and they will stall your onboarding, because the engaging entity has to reconcile them before it can certify that it checked. If your papers disagree with each other, fix that before you apply rather than during.

You must have passed the 10th standard. That is the educational floor, and there is nothing above it.

What that means in practice deserves spelling out, because the recruitment material around this channel muddies it:

• No graduation requirement. A degree is not asked for and confers no formal advantage on this route.
• No stream requirement. Commerce, science, arts and vocational streams are treated identically. No accounting or finance background is expected.
• No minimum marks. A pass is a pass. There is no percentage threshold and no merit ranking.
• No age-of-passing requirement. A 10th standard certificate from 1994 works exactly as well as one from 2024.
• No language requirement. Nothing in the eligibility test requires English.

That last point matters more than the others combined, and it is the one most often left out. This channel exists to reach households a metro call centre cannot serve, and the advisor's ability to explain a waiting period in the language a family actually argues in is the channel's reason for existing. The regulator did not put a language bar in the door. Some principals effectively add one through their systems and their training material, which is a fact about that principal rather than a fact about the rules.

Your proof is the pass certificate or marksheet from a recognised board. Keep a clean scan of it. You will be asked for it again by every principal you ever engage with, and the original tends to live in a family file in another city.

Eligibility is two facts. Onboarding is a stack of documents, and the difference between the two is where most confusion about this route comes from.

The master circular names acceptable identity proofs, and the two that matter in practice are the PAN Card and the Aadhaar Card. Between them they establish who you are and anchor the tax treatment of whatever you are paid. Beyond those, expect the engaging entity to ask for:

1. Your 10th standard pass certificate or marksheet.
2. A recent photograph.
3. Address proof.
4. Bank account details, usually with a cancelled cheque or a passbook page, because that is where your payouts land.
5. A signed set of declarations and the engagement terms.

Only the first two categories, identity and education, are the eligibility test. The rest is the entity's own onboarding practice: it needs to pay you, reach you, and prove to a regulator that it checked. No principal will process you without them, so the distinction is academic on the day. It stops being academic when a platform implies that something on its list is an IRDAI requirement and uses that to charge you for it.

This is the part that surprises people, and it is the most useful thing to understand about becoming a POSP.

You do not register with IRDAI. There is no form you file with the regulator, no fee you pay it, no queue you join, no number it issues you. The regulator does not know your name. What exists instead is this: an insurer or an intermediary decides to engage you, checks that you clear the two eligibility facts, trains you, examines you, and appoints you. The entity does the certifying. IRDAI supervises the entity.

Three consequences follow, and each one saves somebody money:

There is no such thing as an IRDAI POSP licence you can buy. The phrase appears constantly in recruitment advertising and it describes nothing. There is a certificate and an appointment letter, and both are issued by the entity engaging you, at its cost, as part of engaging you.

A fee charged for eligibility is a fee charged for nothing. Legitimate principals do not charge you to be onboarded. They are recruiting you because your production is worth more to them than your onboarding costs them. When money flows from the advisor to the recruiter at the start of the relationship, ask what the recruiter's actual business is.

Your eligibility is not portable in the way a licence would be. Because the entity certifies you rather than the regulator registering you, moving to a different principal means being engaged, trained, examined and appointed again by the new one. That is a real cost of the channel's design, and it is the flip side of the low barrier. A door this light does not fit a lock you own.

The practical sequence, in the order it happens: an entity engages you, checks the two facts, puts you through fifteen hours of in-house training, examines you against an IRDAI model syllabus, and on your passing issues a certificate and an appointment letter within 15 days along with a unique POS Code. Every proposal you then source carries that code.

Get the source documents right, because much of what circulates online about this channel is written by platforms recruiting for it rather than by anyone reading IRDAI paper.

For non-life and health, the founding instrument is Circular No. IRDA/Int/GDL/ORD/183/10/2015, later modified by Circular No. IRDA/INT/GDL/PSP/058/031 2017 dated 16 March 2017. For life, two guidelines issued on 7 November 2016, IRDA/LIFE/GDL/GLD/222/11/2016 and IRDA/LIFE/ORD/GLD/223/11/2016, were later consolidated into the Master Circular on Point of Sales Products and Persons, Life Insurance, IRDAI/LIFE/CIR/MISC/215/12/2019. The eligibility facts in this post come from that master circular.

Now the correction, because it is a common error in commentary and it matters if you are trying to check anything for yourself. IRDAI consolidated a large body of regulation into nine gazette-notified regulations in 2024, covering expenses of management, products, registration, corporate governance, actuarial functions, policyholder protection, rural and motor third party obligations, Bima Sugam and foreign reinsurer branches. None of them is an intermediary or POSP instrument. The IRDAI (Insurance Products) Regulations, 2024 repealed six product regulations, and no POSP instrument was among them. Anyone telling you that your eligibility now flows from a 2024 regulation is citing a regulation that does not cover the subject. The door you are walking through was built in 2015 and 2016 and described again in 2019.

One honest caveat on the other side: absence of a later circular in a search is not proof that nothing changed. The right claim is that these are the instruments that govern the route in, not that the framework has sat untouched since 2019.

You pass, you are appointed, you have a code. What exactly do you own?

Less than the recruitment material implies. Training and examination records must be retained for at least five (5) years, and that obligation sits on the engaging entity rather than on you. Your attendance log, your paper, your result and your appointment file live in its systems and are produced when a regulator asks. That five-year figure attaches to training and examination records specifically. It is not a KYC retention rule, and it should not be quoted as one.

So keep your own copies from day one, because nobody will assemble them for you later:

• The certificate and the appointment letter, with the issue date visible.
• Your POS Code, and the code from any earlier engagement.
• The training completion record, however thin it looks.
• Your own client book: who you placed, with which insurer, when, at what premium, and when it renews.

That last line decides whether changing principals costs you a quarter or costs you a book, and it is the subject of record-keeping for POSPs.

One widely repeated claim deserves an explicit non-answer. You will read that a POSP certificate is valid for three years, or that it renews on some cycle. That claim appears on marketing pages and could not be verified against any IRDAI instrument, so this post does not make it. Ask your principal what its own certificate practice is, in writing, and treat any confident number you read elsewhere as unsourced until you see the paper.

A 10th standard pass and eighteen completed years are a deliberately low barrier. The regulator opened a wide door into a small room, and being clear about the room is the difference between an advisor who lasts and one who quits in year two feeling misled.

What the door opens onto: a restricted list of products specifically approved as POS products, simple and standardised and largely pre-underwritten. Pure term with or without return of premium, non-linked non-participating endowment, immediate annuity, non-linked non-participating health and microinsurance on the life side. On the non-life and health side the list began with motor, travel, personal accident and home, and has been expanded over time beyond that original set to include certain health and rural covers. The operative list is the one IRDAI publishes at its point of sales page, not the one a recruiting platform summarises.

What the door does not open onto: general insurance advice, a shop's fire cover, a contractor's liability programme, or the freedom to represent several insurers on your own account. You are tied to one insurer or one intermediary at a time, and any multi-insurer reach you appear to have belongs to that intermediary's licence rather than to you, which is the subject of the tie-in rule.

The advisors who build something durable here stop arguing with the constraint and start working inside it. The room is small. The households are not. A two-wheeler policy is an introduction to a family that also has a car, a term gap, no personal accident cover, and parents with no health policy. Everything in this channel that compounds comes from working a household across years, not a product across strangers. Eligibility takes a fortnight to prove. The book takes a decade, and it is built out of renewal dates you actually know.