How Hard Is the Real Estate Exam?

22states, and the "what it measures" column is the most important one on this page. Florida's first-time rate is 48% and its all-takers rate is 40%. Alabama's first-attempt rate is 70.1% and its all-attempts figure is 55.0%. Those two states look 22 points apart or 15 points apart purely depending on which row you read, which is why no row here is comparable to any other row unless the measures text matches.

Broker-tier figures exist for most of these states and are left out to keep one comparison on the page. North Carolina's current annual report implies 75.5%, but it never calls that a pass rate, never says first attempt, and counts persons rather than sittings, so a candidate who failed and then passed may appear twice. Only its properly labelled 2015/16 figure is shown, and it is a decade old.

The remaining 28 states either publish nothing or publish something that is not a pass rate. Georgia is the instructive case: it publishes a differential, saying its candidates score 4% above a multi-state average that it never states. That is very likely why prep-site rankings put Georgia near the top. Ohio publishes nothing at all, despite being widely cited.

This is the strongest and most consistent pattern in the entire dataset, and it is barely discussed anywhere online. Repeat takers do dramatically worse than first-timers, in every state that measures both, and the gap is never small.

Seven states, four different measurement bases, and the gap never falls below 17 points. At the extreme, a California candidate resitting has roughly a one in five chance where a first-timer has better than one in two. Whatever causes it, the conclusion is the same: treat the first attempt as the one that counts.

The likeliest explanation is not that resitting is intrinsically harder. It is that candidates who fail often rebook quickly without changing anything about how they prepared. real estate exam retake rules has the waiting rules, and the honest advice is to use the wait rather than minimise it.

Standard advice says the national portion is the one to worry about, because it is longer and covers more ground. The states that publish both portions separately do not support that, and they do not support the reverse either.

Of 10 comparisons, the state portion is harder in 6, easier in 3, and level in 1. So it leans toward the state portion being the harder half, which is already the opposite of the usual advice. But the lean is not strong enough to plan on, and the exceptions are enormous rather than marginal: Nebraska's state portion runs 32.2 points belowits national portion, while Tennessee's runs 28.9 points above. Those two states give exactly opposite advice.

So the useful conclusion is a negative one: you cannot infer anything about your state portion from national advice, including advice that it is the easy half you can cram at the end. Look up your own state. Oregon is the best evidence that these are stable rather than noise, publishing a five-year first-time series in which the roughly 15-point gap holds every year.

Whichever way it falls for you, the state portion is around a third of the questions and reliably gets far less than a third of most candidates' study time. how many questions are on the real estate exam has the split for every state.

Only three states publish per-topic performance, which makes this the only real evidence anywhere of where marks are lost. South Carolina's figures below are mean score by content area for first-time candidates on the national portion, against the maximum available in that area. It is the most precise of the three.

Real estate calculations is the worst-performing area on the exam, at 58.2% of the marks available, roughly twenty points below agency at 77.9%. It is also only about 7% of the exam, which makes it the most improvable points on the paper: the method never changes, so practice converts directly into marks. real estate math is the place to start.

Note what is not at the bottom. Agency scores highest at 77.9% despite being the area most prep material treats as treacherous. The genuinely weak areas are calculations, financing and transfer of title, which reward systematic practice most and get the least of it. what is on the real estate exam has the weights, so you can combine the two: an area that is both heavy and badly scored is where your hours belong.

The most widely syndicated pass-rate "data report" in this niche ranks Texas, Georgia and Florida among the highest-pass-rate states. Florida's official first-time rate is 48%, one of the lowest measured anywhere in the country, and Georgia publishes no rate at all.

There is a plausible origin for the fifty-state tables that circulate. Kentucky's July 2024 board minutes contain a two-column fifty-state table that looks exactly like pass rates by state, is not, and carries a "nationwide average 55" line. Kentucky's own row in it contradicts the real Kentucky data printed on the preceding page.

The familiar claim that "about half fail the first time" turns out to be roughly the right order of magnitude by accident. Across the states with real data, first-time rates run from the high thirties to the high seventies. But it is presented as a national statistic, and there is no national statistic.

Three cautions about the table above. Arizona and Washington have both stopped publishing: their last editions were Q4 2023 and Q4 2024, both URLs now return 404, and both survive only in the Internet Archive carrying a notice that they may contain privileged information. California publishes only inside a sunset review that comes round every four years, so its "current" figure is structurally two or more years old. And Alabama's and Nebraska's statewide totals are our arithmetic over the regulator's published school-by-school rows, not figures those states publish themselves.

One more, on Hawaii. Its older reports label the component ORIGINAL, meaning first attempt, and those are the figures shown above. Its July 2026 file drops that word, states no attempt basis, and reports markedly lower rates. We do not show the newer series, because the drop is far more likely a change in what is being counted than a real collapse in performance, and plotting the two together as a trend would invent a story the source does not tell.