A renewal of a registration certificate or license under Insurance Code Chapter 6002 is valid for two years, and Insurance Code § 6002.201 prices it in an unusual way: the renewal fee FOR EACH YEAR of the two-year period is payable on renewal. The fee is annual and the payment is not — which is why the schedule in Chapter 5 shows a two-year renewal at exactly twice the annual ceiling the statute sets. The same section lets the commissioner adopt by rule a system under which certificates and licenses expire on various dates through the year, and provides that where an expiration date falls less than a year from issuance or from the anniversary date, the fee is prorated monthly so that a holder pays only the portion allocable to the months the credential is valid.

Expiry itself is exact. Insurance Code § 6002.203 says a license or registration certificate expires AT MIDNIGHT on the date printed on it, and that a renewal application and fee must be POSTMARKED on or before the expiration date to be accepted as timely. Both halves matter. The date on the document is the date, not the end of that month or the end of a grace period; and timeliness is judged at the postmark, so a renewal in the mail on the expiration date is timely and one delivered two days later is not late for having arrived late.

The state carries an obligation of its own here, and you are owed it. Insurance Code § 6002.202 requires the state fire marshal to send WRITTEN NOTICE of the impending expiration to the holder at the holder’s last known address at least 30 days before the expiration date. Two things follow. The notice is not a courtesy, and a firm that has moved without filing the revised certificate 28 TAC § 34.610 requires has broken the address the notice depends on — so the fourteen-day duties in § 6.5 are not administrative housekeeping, they are what keeps this notice arriving. And a notice that never comes changes nothing about the expiration date; the statute obliges the office to send it, and nowhere makes the credential’s expiry contingent on the holder receiving it.