What Is on the Real Estate Exam?

Sorted by weight, which is also the order you should study them in. The question count is that area's share of an 80-item national portion, rounded to whole questions.

The top four areas are 54% of the exam. Contracts, Agency, Practice of real estate and Property ownership together decide whether you pass. The bottom five areas combined are 28%, which is fewer than 22 questions.

Our national practice pools include 287 contracts questions and 47 property management questions. Use the exam percentages to budget study time and the question counts to see how much practice is available in each area.

Weightings come directly from the test provider’s published examination content outline for the national portion of the salesperson exam. PSI publishes percentages only; Pearson VUE publishes scored-item counts only. PSI and Pearson VUE use different content taxonomies, so their weightings are not interchangeable and should not be averaged. Check which provider administers your state’s exam, and confirm against the current candidate handbook before you study. Outlines are revised periodically and older versions stay in circulation online.

This matters more than it sounds. The two providers do not publish the same document. PSI gives percentages across 11 content areas. Pearson VUE gives scored item counts across eight broader ones, and has no standalone land use, agency or transfer of title area at all. There is no combined contracts-and-agency area on the PSI side.

Averaging the two produces a table that matches no real exam. We use PSI's areas as the internal taxonomy because they are the finer-grained superset, and Pearson VUE's eight compose cleanly out of them while the reverse does not work. Check PSI real estate exam or Pearson VUE real estate examfor which one runs your state's exam, then study that provider's outline.

Worth being direct about, because it is the kind of thing sites in this niche never disclose. An earlier version of this table carried weights that were our own construction. They summed to 100 and looked entirely plausible. They were wrong, and three of them were wrong by enough to misdirect real study hours.

The current figures come from PSI's published national salesperson outline, cross-checked against three independent state bulletins carrying the same outline so that one stale handbook cannot skew it. All four documents are linked at the foot of this page.

Our national practice pool contains 1,500 questions. The practice counts come from the authored bank; the exam percentages come from PSI's outline. They describe different things, and both are shown in the table above. See our methodology.

Not as a reading list. As a budget. Convert each percentage into hours the same way it converts into questions: if you have 40 hours to study, contracts deserves about 8 of them and property management about 1.

1. Take a full practice run first, before studying anything, to find out where you already stand. Your weak areas weighted by the table above are your actual priority list.
2. Work down the table in order. Do not start at the beginning of a textbook, because textbook order is not exam order.
3. Stop studying an area when you are reliably scoring on it, even if you do not feel finished. The exam does not award partial mastery, and the hours are better spent on the next area down.
4. Leave the bottom five areas until last and give them a single pass. They are 28% between them.

how to study for the real estate exam turns this into a dated schedule with the days already allocated by weight. how to pass the real estate exam covers the technique for the questions themselves, which is a separate skill from knowing the material.

None of this covers your state portion, which is tested separately and has its own outline published by your state commission. how many questions are on the real estate exam has the split for every state.