Real Estate Broker Practice Exam
The 100 questions in this test are the national material the broker and salesperson exams share. They are not broker-only questions, and we do not have any. That shared material is most of the broker national portion, so this is a real and useful practice test. It is not the whole exam, and the second half of this page is a precise account of what it leaves out.
Take the full test. Answers and explanations are shown when you submit, as on exam day.
A vendee under a contract for deed should record the contract in the public records in order to:
This practice exam is a study aid, not the real exam. Our questions are written by us to match the published content outline. They are not actual exam questions, no score here predicts a pass, and this site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by PSI, Pearson VUE, ARELLO, any state real estate commission, or any government agency. Your state commission and your candidate handbook are the only authoritative sources.
What this page can and cannot do for you
Almost every broker prep page online serves a salesperson question bank under a broker heading and hopes you do not notice. We are doing something adjacent, so it is worth being exact about the difference.
| What you get here | What you have to get elsewhere |
|---|---|
| 100 questions on the 11 national content areas, with an explanation on every answer | The 24 broker-level concepts listed further down, none of which this bank tests |
| The shared syllabus: contracts, agency, financing, valuation, title, disclosures, land use | Your state's broker portion, which is where most genuinely broker-only content lives |
| Four-option questions testing recall and application | Multi-option scenario questions where several answers are defensible and only one is best |
| A diagnostic of which content areas are weak | A prediction of your broker exam score, which nothing on this page can give you |
If you want a broker-only question bank, we do not have one and we will say so until we do. Writing one properly means writing scenario items on trust account administration and supervision, not relabeling the questions above. Until that exists, use this page for the shared material and your state commission's own broker outline for the rest.
The broker exam is the same syllabus, written harder
This is the finding that surprises most candidates. On Pearson VUE, the broker national portion and the salesperson national portion are the same 8 content areas and the same 80 scored items. Only 3 areas gain an item at all, and the largest gain anywhere in the table is two.
| Content area | Salesperson items | Broker items |
|---|---|---|
| Real property characteristics, legal descriptions, property use | 11 | 10 |
| Forms of ownership, transfer, and recording of title | 9 | 8 |
| Property value and appraisal | 11 | 10 |
| Real estate contracts and agency | 16 | 15 |
| Real estate practice | 10 | 12 |
| Property disclosures and environmental issues | 9 | 9 |
| Financing and settlement | 7 | 8 |
| Real estate math calculations | 7 | 8 |
| Total | 80 | 80 |
What actually changes is the cognitive level. Pearson VUE builds these exams to a cognitive specification as well as a content one, and publishes both. The salesperson paper is 38 knowledge items, 26 application items and 16 analysis items. The broker paper is 21 knowledge, 32 application and 27 analysis. Almost half the recall questions are replaced with fact patterns you have to reason through.
| Item type | Salesperson | Broker |
|---|---|---|
| Knowledge, recall a fact or definition | 38 | 21 |
| Application, apply knowledge to a situation | 26 | 32 |
| Analysis, examine a fact pattern and decide | 16 | 27 |
Both tables: Pearson VUE, Real Estate National/General Content Outlines (#093901), verified 2026-07-31. This is the honest reason a salesperson question bank is a partial answer rather than a wrong one: the topics carry over almost exactly, and the difficulty does not.
On PSI the broker exam is a different instrument
PSI does not just rewrite the questions, it changes the scoring. Its salesperson national portion is 80 questions worth 80 points. Its broker national portion is 75 questions worth 80 points, because some items are scenario items with more than four options, scored zero, one or two points on a best-answer basis.
PSI's own wording, from the Mississippi bulletin: scenario items "contain more than four options and ONLY ONE BEST option shall be selected", and "each option is weighted as zero-point, one-point, or two-points based on the completeness and accuracy of the solution". Some of the wrong answers are not wrong. They are just less good.
This is why the score above draws no pass line, and why it could not draw one for a PSI broker candidate even if we knew your state. With 75 questions worth 80 points, a raw percentage of questions answered correctly is not the same quantity as the score PSI reports. Any site showing you a broker pass-line meter against a percentage is comparing two different things.
PSI also marks five subtopics BROKER ONLY in its current national outline. These appear on the broker exam and not on the salesperson one, which means none of them are in the bank above:
| Outline | Subtopic |
|---|---|
| VIII.A.4 | Property manager responsibility for maintenance, improvements, reporting and risk management |
| VIII.A.5 | Handling landlord and tenant funds: trust accounts, reports and disbursements |
| VIII.A.6 | Provisions of property management contracts |
| X.D.1 | Broker's supervisory responsibilities for licensees, teams, and unlicensed assistants and employees |
| X.D.2 | Broker relationship with licensees: employees or independent contractors, and the governing rules |
Structure, scoring and the BROKER ONLY list: PSI Maryland Real Estate Candidate Information Bulletin, verified 2026-07-31 and PSI Mississippi Real Estate Candidate Information Bulletin, verified 2026-07-31. Note that the two states use the same PSI broker exam and set different cut scores: Maryland requires 56 of 80 points, Mississippi 60. Passing scores are set by the state, not the provider, so "the broker exam needs 75%" is a generalization from one state.
Where the broker-only content actually lives
Mostly in the state portion, and in one state it takes over the whole paper. Florida writes its own exam, and the divergence between its two versions is the largest of any state we looked at. Both are 100 questions in three and a half hours, passing at 75 points. The content is barely recognizable as the same subject.
| Florida broker exam, top areas | Weight |
|---|---|
| Real Estate Brokerage Business | 43% |
| Closing Transactions | 12% |
| Contracts | 11% |
| Valuing Real Property | 9% |
| Federal Income Tax Laws | 5% |
| Investment | 4% |
That single 43% section is escrow management, office requirements, brokerage entity forms, recruitment and employment arrangements, compensation of sales associates, the policy and procedures manual, training and supervision, and FREC office audits from complaint through probable cause panel to final order. The Florida sales associate exam has no equivalent section at all, and instead spends about a fifth of the paper on property rights, titles, deeds and legal descriptions, none of which the broker exam names as a content area.
Florida DBPR, Candidate Information Booklet, Real Estate Broker Examination, verified 2026-07-31 and Florida DBPR, Candidate Information Booklet, Real Estate Sales Associate Examination, verified 2026-07-31.
The pattern repeats more modestly elsewhere. Pennsylvania adds a broker-only "Brokerage Management" section covering office requirements, inspections, funds and accounts, worth 5 of its 40 state items. Texas adds ten case-study items to the broker state portion, including items answered from TREC promulgated contracts, plus a section on enforcing compensation agreements that the sales agent outline does not contain. Maryland doubles the licensing-requirements section and adds "Examination of Records" as broker only.
Pennsylvania and Texas state portions: Pearson VUE #093901, verified 2026-07-31 and Pearson VUE, Texas Real Estate Candidate Handbook (#094400), verified 2026-07-31. California is the counter-example worth knowing: the DRE publishes the same seven areas at the same weights for both licenses, and expresses the difference purely as length and cut score, 150 questions at 70% for salesperson against 200 questions at 75% for broker (DRE, verified 2026-07-31).
The 24 concepts a broker exam tests that this bank does not
Each of these traces to a published broker content outline cited on this page, and each would be out of place on a salesperson exam. This is the study list. If you work through it against your own state's broker outline and the questions above, you have covered the ground.
Trust and escrow account administration
One of the two clusters that appears on every broker outline examined.
- Three-way trust account reconciliation: the bank balance, the broker’s book balance and the total of individual beneficiary ledgers, and working out which of the three is wrong when they disagree.
- Commingling against conversion: distinguishing the two acts and the different disciplinary consequences of each.
- Escrow dispute procedure: when a broker must notify the commission of conflicting demands, and choosing between an escrow disbursement order, mediation, arbitration, litigation and interpleader.
- Who may hold escrowed funds, and what changes when a title company or an attorney holds them instead of the broker.
- Property management trust accounting: security deposits against advance rent, owner disbursements and statements, and the required provisions of a management agreement.
Supervision of licensees and employment status
The other universal cluster. Almost none of this appears on a salesperson outline.
- The broker’s liability for the acts of sponsored licensees, including the limits of vicarious liability.
- Supervision of unlicensed assistants and teams: which acts are permitted, and which convert into unlicensed practice the broker answers for.
- Employee against independent contractor classification of sales associates: the IRS statutory non-employee test, what the written agreement must say, and the tax consequence of getting it wrong.
- The written office policy and procedures manual: what it must contain, and how it functions as evidence of supervision in a disciplinary proceeding.
- License verification and sponsorship transfer before an associate performs a licensed act.
- Compensation of sales associates: splits, caps, desk fees, referral fees, and the rule against paying an unlicensed person.
Running the firm
Business administration content with no salesperson counterpart.
- Brokerage entity forms, and registration against licensure: sole proprietorship, partnership, LLP, corporation, LLC, and trade name rules.
- Principal office and branch office requirements: entrance signage, ADA obligations, registering a branch, and operating from home.
- Surviving a commission office audit: which records must be produced, retention periods, electronic recordkeeping, and disposition of records when a brokerage closes.
- Advertising compliance from the supervising side: blind advertisements, team names, advertising in the broker’s name, and the duty to approve every associate’s advertising including social media.
- Brokerage start-up and operating budgets: capital costs, projected income and expenses, and cash against accrual accounting.
Investment, valuation and tax math
Where the arithmetic gets harder rather than more plentiful.
- Setting rents from a market analysis and building a property management budget, rather than quoting a listed rent.
- Income capitalization: deriving net operating income from a rent roll and operating statement, selecting a capitalization rate, and solving for value, NOI or rate given the other two.
- Gross rent multiplier against gross income multiplier: which uses gross rent, which uses effective gross income, and when each is appropriate.
- Investment return analysis: equity build-up, leverage, cash flow before tax, and cash-on-cash return.
- Federal income tax on real estate: adjusted basis, capital gain, depreciation and cost recovery, the principal residence gain exclusion, and deferring gain through a like-kind exchange.
Transactions and enforcement
Read at broker depth, from documents rather than definitions.
- Reading and reconciling a full Closing Disclosure: which page a figure belongs on, whether it is a debit or a credit and to which party, including prorated rents on leases with different due dates.
- Antitrust exposure at firm level: price fixing on commission rates between competing brokerages, market allocation, group boycott, and the penalties.
- Enforcing a commission claim, including procuring cause and the statutory lien available to a broker on commercial property.
Two of those clusters appear on every broker outline we examined, in every state, under every provider: trust and escrow account administration and supervision of licensees. If your study time is short, those two are where it goes. They are also the two that carry the heaviest disciplinary consequences in practice, which is presumably why every regulator tests them.
In 9 states, the broker exam is the entry-level exam
This is the most useful navigation on the page, and a large fraction of people searching for a broker practice exam are in the wrong place because of it. Of the 50 states in our dataset, 9 issue no salesperson license at all. The entry-level credential is itself called a broker license of one kind or another: associate broker, provisional broker, affiliate broker, broker associate.
If you are about to sit your first licensing exam in one of these states, you are not sitting the broker exam this page describes. You are sitting the entry-level exam, and the salesperson-level national material is exactly the right material. Colorado's own regulator says so, in a notice about PSI's content outlines: "results for the State of Colorado are reflected in the ‘Salesperson’ examination, and not the ‘Broker’ examination" ( Colorado DRE, verified 2026-07-31).
- free Colorado practice exam
- free Illinois practice exam
- free Indiana practice exam
- free New Mexico practice exam
- free North Carolina practice exam
- free Oregon practice exam
- free South Dakota practice exam
- free Tennessee practice exam
- free Washington practice exam
Each of those states does still have a senior tier with its own exam, variously called managing broker, principal broker, employing broker or qualifying broker. That is the exam the broker-only content on this page describes. The word to watch is associate broker, which means opposite things depending on where you are: in Colorado it is the entry credential, while in Maryland and Alabama it is an upper tier held by an experienced licensee who is not the qualifying broker.
Broker exams are not much harder to pass
The usual framing is that the broker exam is the difficult one. The published data does not support that, at least not by the margin people expect. Only two state regulators publish a regular pass-rate series broken down by license type, and both show a gap of a few points rather than a chasm.
| Where | Measure | Broker | Salesperson |
|---|---|---|---|
| Florida, January 2024 | First-time takers | 51% | 52% |
| Florida, January 2024 | All attempts | 41% | 45% |
| California, fiscal year to May 2026 | All attempts | 47% | 53% |
Florida: Florida DBPR / FREAB, Exam Performance Summary Binder, April 2024, verified 2026-07-31, using the combined test-center and online-proctored table. California: California DRE, RE 149 Comparative Production Statistics, May 2026, verified 2026-07-31. The California figure is the share of examinations administered that were passed, not a first-attempt rate: a candidate who fails twice and passes on the third attempt contributes three administrations and one pass. The two are not comparable and are labeled separately above for that reason.
There is no national broker pass rate.Neither PSI nor Pearson VUE publishes one, and we searched both providers' sites and their candidate handbooks. Anyone quoting a single national broker pass rate has made it up or has generalized from one state. Florida's own October 2025 report is a good illustration of why the caution matters: it prints two tables covering different delivery channels that it does not name, and they disagree on the broker first-attempt rate, giving 44% and 40% (FREAB, verified 2026-07-31). We publish the unambiguous January 2024 table above instead.
10 sample shared national questions, answered
Every question above with its correct answer and the reasoning behind it. Read the explanations for the ones you answered correctly too. A lucky guess and knowing the rule look identical on a score report. These are sample questions from our larger bank.
1. A vendee under a contract for deed should record the contract in the public records in order to:
Why: Recording puts the world on constructive notice and protects the equitable interest of the vendee against later purchasers and lienholders claiming through the vendor. Recording never moves legal title; only delivery of a deed accomplishes that.
2. Under a land contract, also called a contract for deed, during the payment period:
Why: The seller retains legal title as security and delivers the deed only when the price is paid, while the buyer takes possession and holds equitable title meanwhile. That split is what distinguishes a land contract from a mortgage, where the buyer takes legal title at closing.
3. An agent purchases a client's listed property through an entity the agent controls. What fact should be disclosed?
Why: An intermediary entity does not eliminate the agent's personal interest. The client needs disclosure to evaluate the conflict and proposed transaction.
4. A broker deposits an earnest-money check into the brokerage operating account, then two weeks later uses part of it to cover payroll. The second act constitutes:
Why: Depositing client funds into the operating account is commingling. Spending them escalates the offense to conversion, which is theft and typically costs the license.
5. Which of the following is NOT an appurtenance?
Why: An easement in gross benefits a person or company, not a parcel, so it has no dominant tenement and does not run with the land. The other three attach to the land itself.
6. Which statement describes title theory?
Why: Under title theory the lender takes legal title and the borrower keeps equitable title plus possession, regaining legal title at payoff. The description of a borrower holding legal title subject to a lien is lien theory.
7. If net operating income stays constant and the capitalization rate rises, property value:
Why: Cap rate is the divisor, so value moves inversely to it. Rising cap rates signal that buyers demand a higher return, which they get by paying less for the same income.
8. A Phase I assessment identifies a recognized environmental condition on the site. The logical next step is:
Why: When a Phase I identifies a recognized environmental condition, a Phase II assessment with sampling and testing is used to confirm whether contamination exists and how extensive it is.
9. A home sells for $285,000 with a 6% commission split evenly between the listing and selling brokerages. The listing brokerage receives:
Why: $285,000 × 0.06 = $17,100 total commission. Split evenly: $17,100 ÷ 2 = $8,550 to the listing brokerage.
10. Which deed offers the grantee the greatest protection?
Why: A general warranty deed warrants title against all defects for the property’s entire history. A special warranty covers only the grantor’s own period of ownership; a quitclaim warrants nothing at all.
Sources
Every figure on this page above the question bank comes from a published provider outline, candidate handbook or regulator report. Our own question bank supplies nothing here except the questions themselves. Two figures found during this research are deliberately absent: the Texas handbook's combined sales-agent item count, which does not reconcile with its own component figures and looks like an error in the source, and PSI's 2018 District of Columbia numbers, which are stale.
- Pearson VUE, Real Estate National/General Content Outlines (#093901). Verified 2026-07-31.
- PSI Maryland Real Estate Candidate Information Bulletin. Verified 2026-07-31.
- PSI Mississippi Real Estate Candidate Information Bulletin. Verified 2026-07-31.
- Colorado Division of Real Estate, division notification, 20 June 2023. Verified 2026-07-31.
- Florida DBPR, Candidate Information Booklet, Real Estate Broker Examination. Verified 2026-07-31.
- Florida DBPR, Candidate Information Booklet, Real Estate Sales Associate Examination. Verified 2026-07-31.
- Florida DBPR / FREAB, Exam Performance Summary Binder, April 2024. Verified 2026-07-31.
- Florida DBPR / FREAB, Exam Performance Summary, October 2025. Verified 2026-07-31.
- California DRE, RE 149 Comparative Production Statistics, May 2026. Verified 2026-07-31.
- California DRE, Taking the Exam. Verified 2026-07-31.
- Pearson VUE, Texas Real Estate Candidate Handbook (#094400). Verified 2026-07-31.
Where to go next
The shared national material is the part of the broker exam we can help with, so the best next steps are the ones that drill it harder.