Pearson VUE Real Estate Exam

Every state below is linked to its own exam facts and practice test. The two portions are usually sat back to back in one appointment, and you pass or fail them separately.

Question counts and fees come from each state's own page on this site, where every figure carries its own handbook citation and verification date. The handbook column links the document we used to confirm that state's provider, all checked 2026-07-31. A fee shown here is the figure that state publishes and is not always comparable with its neighbor's: some states charge per portion, some per attempt, and one charges an application fee alongside every sitting.

Worth being precise about how this list was built, because the evidence is not as strong as the equivalent claim on PSI real estate exam. The set of 23came from Pearson VUE's own A to Z program list, which is a vendor inventory rather than a regulator statement. Each state was then corroborated against a candidate handbook, and for Florida, Idaho, Maine, North Carolina and Oklahoma against a document hosted by the regulator itself. What we did not do is collect 23 separate commission statements.

So read it as this: the vendor says it runs these 23 programs, and a handbook in every one of them agrees. That is a good deal stronger than copying a list off another prep site, and it is not the same thing as 23 commissions each saying so in their own words. If your state is on this list and your commission tells you otherwise, your commission is right and we want to hear about it.

The list also matches the provider field on our own 50-state dataset exactly, with no discrepancies, and none of the states we record as PSI or state-administered appears anywhere under a real estate salesperson or broker program on Pearson VUE's list. That second finding is a negative one drawn from a vendor inventory, so we record it as no contradiction found rather than as confirmation of anything.

A naming change is underway. Pearson VUE now describes itself as Pearson Professional Assessments, formerly Pearson VUE, and North Carolina's April 2026 booklet says simply Pearson throughout. The candidate handbooks still say Pearson VUE, which is also what candidates search for, so that is the term used on this page.

Pearson VUE publishes scored item counts rather than percentages, which is more useful: you can count questions, and you cannot count a percentage. The current outline is dated effective April 1, 2025. Its own words:

The national/general portion of the real estate exam is made up of eighty (80) scored items, which are distributed as noted in the following content outline.

Contracts and agency is the largest area on both exams at 16 items for salespeople and 15 for brokers. That is one question in five. If you have limited time, this is where it goes. The broker exam shifts weight toward real estate practice, which rises from 10 items to 12, which is what you would expect of an exam written for someone who will supervise other licensees.

The outline also states that the national portion carries five unscored pretest items on top of the 80. Two of the handbooks we read contradict their own outline on that number inside the same document, which is covered in the scoring section below.

Two constants are the same in every Pearson VUE handbook we opened, and the handbooks are explicit that they are not supplied at the desk: 43,560 square feet per acre and 5,280 feet per mile. The wording is that this information is not available at the test center and should be memorized. Proration items state inside the question itself whether to use a 360-day or 365-day year and which party owns the closing day, so there is no house convention to learn. can you use a calculator on the real estate exam covers what you are allowed to compute with, which is not the same everywhere.

This is the single most useful thing Pearson VUE publishes and almost nobody uses it. Every item on the exam is classified into one of three cognitive levels, and the outline prints the counts per area. PSI publishes no equivalent. In Pearson VUE's words:

Every test item is classified into one of three categories: knowledge, application, or analysis. A knowledge item requires candidates to recall specific facts or definitions. An application item requires candidates to use their knowledge and apply it to a situation. An analysis item requires candidates to use their knowledge and examine a fact pattern in order to draw a conclusion or make a decision.

42 of the 80 salesperson items are application or analysis, not recall. On the broker exam recall falls to 21 of 80, so 59 items require you to do something with what you know. And real estate math calculations is 7 of 7 application or analysis on both exams: there is not one recall item in it.

This changes how you should study, and it is the reason so many candidates who genuinely know the material still fail. Memorizing definitions can earn you the 38 recall items and not one more. The other 42 present a short fact pattern about named people and ask which rule governs it, and knowing what a term means is a different skill from recognizing it inside a story that also contains two irrelevant details.

The practical consequence: flashcards are worth doing, and they are worth doing for less than half the exam. After that, timed question practice is the only thing that moves the number. real estate exam questions breaks down the five formats the exam uses and what each one is built to catch, real estate exam simulator runs a full-length attempt under the clock, and national real estate exam is the national portion on its own.

If you have been studying to a table with 11 content areas and percentages, that is PSI's outline, not this one. The two providers publish genuinely different documents, and the difference is not cosmetic.

This site uses PSI's 11areas as its internal taxonomy for one reason: they are the finer-grained set. Pearson VUE's 8 areas can be composed out of them. The reverse does not work, because Pearson VUE has no standalone agency area, no standalone land use area, no standalone transfer of title area and no standalone property management area at all. Here is where each of our quizzes actually lands on the Pearson VUE outline.

The two outlines are not commensurable and must never be averaged. A blended table looks authoritative and matches no real exam. Any prep site showing you one set of weights for "the real estate exam" without naming a provider has either not checked or does not care which one you are sitting.

What to do with this in practice. If your state is in the table at the top of this page, the 8-area item counts are your budget, not the percentages. Our quizzes are organized by the 11 areas because that is the more granular split and it makes for better drilling, but the underlying material is identical, and the third column above tells you which Pearson VUE area each quiz feeds. what is on the real estate exam has the PSI side of it in full, including a correction we had to publish about our own earlier weights.

The April 1, 2025 outline replaced one effective June 1, 2020, and the item counts genuinely moved. Handbook refresh cycles are per state, so some current handbooks still print the old version. Oklahoma's regulator-hosted handbook, dated March 2024, is one of them.

The largest single move is real estate practice on the salesperson exam, down from 14 items to 10. Property disclosures went the other way, up from 8 to 9. Both totals still land on 80, which is exactly why the change is easy to miss: nothing about the headline number tells you the weights underneath it moved.

Check the date printed above the content outline in your own handbook. If it says June 1, 2020, the weights you are studying to are superseded. There is a quicker tell as well: the June 1, 2020 version published no cognitive-level breakdown at all. If your handbook has knowledge, application and analysis columns, it is the current one. If it does not, it is not.

One genuine oddity we cannot resolve. Texas's January 2026 handbook prints "Effective: March 1, 2025" while Alabama, Montana and Pennsylvania print "Effective: April 1, 2025". The item counts and the cognitive splits under both dates are identical. The likeliest explanation is a staggered per-state rollout of one revision, but that is an inference, so both dates are reported here rather than one being chosen.

This is the exception that breaks every generalization on this page, and it affects more candidates than any other state in the table. The Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation writes its own examination. Pearson VUE is the delivery vendor and nothing more. The bulletin says so plainly:

The Department of Business and Professional Regulation has retained the services of Pearson VUE to schedule, administer, score and report the results for computer-based testing.

The Florida sales associate exam is a single 100-item paper written by DBPR across 19 content areas covering Chapter 475 Part I of the Florida Statutes and Chapter 61J2 of the Florida Administrative Code. It runs 3.5 hours, it is graded out of 100 points and 75 points passes. There is no national portion and no state portion, because there is no split.

None of the 8-area outline above applies in Florida. A prep page that renders the Pearson VUE national weighting for a Florida candidate is telling them to study the wrong document, and it is a mistake made purely because Florida appears on the provider list.

• Remote proctoring is forbidden outright. Every DBPR candidate must test in a physical center.
• The Certificate of Prelicensing Education Completion must be produced at every attempt, not just the first. Candidates are refused admission without it.
• DBPR owns the challenge process. Incorrectly answered questions can be reviewed on request within 21 days, and a written challenge is reviewed by a psychometrician.
• Foreign-language translation dictionaries are permitted if they contain word-for-word or phrase translations only, one per candidate, inspected and approved by center staff first. Electronic ones are effectively refused.

Our dataset records Florida as 100 national questions and zero state questions, using the convention that zero means the exam is combined. That convention is right about the combining and loose about the label: Florida's 100 items are not the Pearson VUE national portion in any sense. Read the Florida row in the table above as one 100-item state exam.

A core of exam-day procedure is identical across every handbook we read. Arrive 30 minutes before the appointment. Your ID is reviewed and you are photographed, and the photograph goes on your score report. You review and sign a Candidate Rules Agreement. There is an on-screen tutorial first and the time it takes does not come out of your exam time. Note materials are given to you at the desk, you may not write on them before the exam begins, and you may not take them away.

The handbooks are unusually precise about when the clock starts: the examination begins the moment a candidate looks at the first examination question. Unscheduled breaks are taken by raising a hand, and the exam clock does not stop. You must leave the testing room but you may not leave the floor or the building.

Beyond that core, the differences are contractual rather than procedural, and the calculator rule is the one that catches people out. Four mutually incompatible policies are live at the same time.

Alaska and Texas are direct opposites.Texas recommends the financial calculator that Alaska bans by name. So the sentence "you cannot bring a calculator to the Pearson VUE exam" is wrong in four of the states we checked, and "bring your financial calculator" is wrong in three. There is no provider-level answer to give you, only your own handbook. can you use a calculator on the real estate exam covers the rule state by state.

Identification requirements vary the same way, and turning up with one ID in a two-ID state means losing the appointment and the fee.

An expired driver license is never accepted. A temporary paper license is accepted only when the expired plastic card is presented alongside it. Texas adds a physical search at check-in: empty your pockets, show your ears if they are covered by hair, roll up your sleeves, and expect a pat down of arms, legs and waistline. Knowing that in advance is worth something at eight in the morning.

Two things you might assume are standard and are not. Score delivery: Alabama, Oklahoma and Florida candidates leave the center with an official score report in hand, while Pennsylvania candidates receive only a document stating that they have taken their exam and must fetch the official report from the state's Clarus portal. Exam review after a failure: Oklahoma allows one hour within 30 days at a test center and not via remote proctoring, Florida allows a review of incorrectly answered questions on request within 21 days, and Alabama and Texas refuse outright on the grounds that examination material is not available to candidates for review.

Score reports are marked pass or fail. A numeric score and the per-area diagnostic breakdown are released only to candidates who fail. That is standard across every handbook we read, and it means passing tells you nothing about which areas were weak.

Whether your score is a count of correct answers or a psychometrically scaled number is set per state, not by Pearson VUE. This matters because a scaled 75 is not 75% of the questions, and treating it as one will tell you that you passed when you may not have.

Texas is the useful outlier because it publishes the actual cut counts, which almost no state does:

The examination score is reported as a raw score. It is the number of questions answered correctly on the examination. For salespersons, you need to answer 56 questions correctly on the National examination and 28 questions correctly on the State examination in order to pass.

Alabama, Alaska and Pennsylvania use identical boilerplate going the other way: raw scores are converted into scaled scores that can range from 0 to 100, numeric scores are reported only to failing candidates, and the scaled score reported to you is neither the number of questions you answered correctly nor the percentage of questions you answered correctly. The reason is that multiple exam forms are in circulation, they differ in difficulty, and they are statistically equated.

Two of these documents contradict themselves, and we would rather show you that than pretend the sources are clean.

1. Pennsylvania calls one number two different things.Its exam table heads a column "minimum passing score" and gives 75%. Four pages later the score explanation says the scaled score is neither the number nor the percentage of questions answered correctly. Both statements cannot be true. We treat Pennsylvania as a scaled-score state and do not draw a percentage pass line for it.
2. Texas has an arithmetic error in its fee table.The row for booking both salesperson portions on one order gives a combined item count ten items short of the same table's own figures for the two portions separately. The broker row adds up correctly. We have not reproduced the wrong number anywhere on this page, because publishing a figure we believe to be a typo would just spread it.
3. Pretest counts disagree inside single documents. Alabama says five pretest items in its content outline and a larger range in its own fee table for the same exam. Pennsylvania says five in the outline and a range in the fee table. The outline figure is the one tied to the current effective date, so it is the likelier one, but the conflict is real and we have not resolved it.

One thing we could not verify. North Carolina's 75 is almost certainly a scaled score: it has two sections of different lengths scored separately, and every other Pearson VUE handbook describing that arrangement calls it scaled. But three passes over NCREC's own booklet returned no sentence using the word, and the commission's licensing FAQ says only that the passing score is 75 for both sections and is computed separately for each. So we hold North Carolina as scaled on structural grounds, and the justification is an inference rather than a quotation.

how many questions are on the real estate exam has the question counts and time limits for every state, and each state page carries its own pass mark with the handbook it came from. Where a state publishes a scaled score, our practice quizzes deliberately draw no pass line at all rather than draw a misleading one.

The sequence is the same in every state we read, and you cannot shortcut it. There are no walk-in examinations anywhere.

1. Complete pre-licensing education and file your license application with the state commission. Several states want a background check first: Oklahoma uses IdentoGO live scan.
2. The commission approves your eligibility and transmits it to Pearson VUE.
3. You receive an Authorization to Test email with instructions for setting up your Pearson VUE profile.
4. Book online through your state's program page or by phone, at least 24 hours ahead.
5. Pay at booking by card or by voucher where one is offered. Payment is not accepted at the test center.

How long your authorization lasts, and how long a pass on one portion stays good, are per state and worth checking before you book anything.

Alabama adds a hard reset that catches people: a candidate who has not passed within the first six-month authorization period must retake the pre-licensing course and be authorized again. The course, not just the exam.

The change and cancel deadline is 48 hours in Alabama, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Texas. Inside that window you transfer the fee to a new reservation or request a refund. Outside it you forfeit the whole fee. Two states express the same idea in units that are not hours: North Carolina requires two business days, so a Monday exam has to be moved by the previous Thursday, and Florida requires two full calendar days, published as a day-of-week table rather than a duration.

If you miss the exam for a reason on the approved list, Alabama, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania give you 14 days to call Pearson VUE, at which point a case number is issued and documentation is emailed to you. The grounds are candidate or immediate-family illness, a death in the immediate family, a disabling traffic accident, a court appearance or jury duty, military duty, and weather emergencies. Florida is tighter: written verification within 4 days of the original date, and medical documentation needs an original signature rather than a stamped one. Severe weather is handled separately in all three: Pearson VUE contacts you, reschedules, and there is no fee consequence.

On cost, there is no single number to publish and anyone who gives you one has not checked. Across the 23 states in the table above, the published exam fee runs $36.75 to $150. Reading seven Pearson VUE handbooks directly for this page produced a spread of $39 for a Texas broker portion to $115 in Alaska for what is nominally the same 80-item national exam. A roughly threefold spread on an identical product is why a provider-level fee figure is meaningless. real estate exam cost itemizes the rest of the cost, which is much larger than the exam fee.

• Book both portions on one order where you can. Oklahoma discounts two exams scheduled at the same time on the same order as two for one, so a state and a national salesperson exam booked together cost $75 in total. Pennsylvania offers a combination discount on the same condition, and is emphatic that it applies only when both are on one order.
• North Carolina charges twice on every attempt. The $105 license application fee paid to the commission is collected alongside the separate examination fee paid to Pearson each time an applicant sits one or both sections.
• Pearson VUE sells its own practice test for the national portion at $19.95, in salesperson and broker versions. Ours is free and carries a written explanation on every question.

Fees change on announced dates and handbooks lag them. Alabama's cover carries fee updates effective August 1, 2025, which is exactly the drift that makes guessing a neighboring state's fee unsafe. Every fee on this site is read from a named document with a date attached, and where we have not read one we leave the cell empty rather than filling it.

OnVUE is Pearson VUE's at-home proctored delivery, and for real estate it is far less widely available than candidates expect. A real estate salesperson or broker program with an OnVUE page exists in exactly 7 states: Montana, Nevada, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Wyoming. In the other 16 there is no OnVUE real estate program at all, and Florida forbids it in writing: all Florida Department of Business Regulation candidates are required to take an examination in a physical test center.

Where it is offered, the requirements are strict enough that plenty of candidates fail check-in rather than the exam.

• Windows 10 or macOS 14 or higher, with a webcam, microphone and speaker. No headphones or headsets. One display only. At least 6 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up.
• No virtual machines, phones, tablets, watches, smart glasses, VPNs, corporate networks or public and shared networks.
• The desk must be completely empty except for the test computer, approved comfort aids and a beverage in an unmarked container. Whiteboards and note boards have to be cleared.
• Bathrooms, offices, libraries and coffee shops are prohibited testing spaces.
• Check-in starts 30 minutes early and includes technology checks, photographs of you and your ID, and a 360-degree room scan.
• The session is recorded throughout. There are no unscheduled breaks on real estate exams, and leaving the webcam view revokes the exam and forfeits the fee.
• Notes are taken on an on-screen whiteboard. There are no physical note boards, which is a real adjustment for math items.

Attempt limits differ even between the two OnVUE states whose handbooks we read. Oklahoma caps remote attempts at three per portion per authorization year, with unlimited attempts at a test center in the same year. Pennsylvania caps nothing but requires seven days between OnVUE attempts. Oklahoma also refuses exam review or playback for a remote attempt, so a failed OnVUE sitting has to be reviewed at a center.

can you take the real estate exam online covers the same question for every state including the PSI ones, and where do you take the real estate exam covers test centers if you would rather not gamble on your own bandwidth.

Read the explanations on the ones you got right as well. A lucky guess and knowing the rule look identical on a score report, and on this exam that gap is most of the difference between candidates who pass and candidates who are surprised.