Pass Rates
How to Find Your State's Real Estate Exam Pass Rate
Publication practices change when agencies change vendors, reporting software or leadership. Anything you find should be dated, and anything undated should be treated as unverified until you locate the original release.
Nobody compiles licensing exam results nationally. Each jurisdiction decides on its own whether to release anything, how often, and in how much detail, so locating a figure for your state is a records-retrieval task rather than a lookup.
This page is the retrieval procedure: who holds the data, the order to search in, how to tell a usable report from a recycled one, and what to do when your jurisdiction publishes nothing at all.
Who Holds the Data in the First Place
Two organizations touch every result. The testing vendor under contract to your jurisdiction administers the examination and scores it, so the vendor generates the underlying counts. The licensing agency, usually a real estate commission, board, bureau or a division inside a larger department of state or commerce, receives those counts and decides what, if anything, becomes public.
That division of labor explains most of what you will run into. Vendors rarely publish jurisdiction-level statistics on their own websites, because the data belongs to the contracting agency. Agencies publish on their own schedule, in whatever format their reporting system produces, and some do not publish at all. Neither party is withholding anything; there is simply no obligation to release a number unless state law or agency policy creates one.
A third source exists in a handful of states: education-provider reporting. Where a commission tracks outcomes by approved school, the release is organized around the provider rather than the jurisdiction, and a statewide figure may never appear anywhere in it even though every underlying candidate is counted.
Search in This Order
Working from the authoritative source outward saves time and keeps you from citing a blog that cited a blog. Stop as soon as you reach a dated document published by the agency itself.
Your licensing agency's own site, in the section for statistics, reports, publications or board meeting materials. Examination statistics are frequently buried in a monthly or quarterly operations report rather than given a page of their own.
The agency's newsletter or bulletin archive. Commissions that do not maintain a statistics page often print results in a recurring member or licensee bulletin, which makes the figure dated and attributable.
Minutes and packets from commission or board meetings. Where examination performance is reported to the board as a standing agenda item, the packet attachment is usually the earliest and most detailed version of the number.
The current candidate handbook from the exam vendor your jurisdiction uses. Handbooks seldom carry pass rates, but they define the question counts, portion structure and scoring rules you will need to interpret any figure you do find.
Annual reports filed by the agency's parent department. A commission inside a larger department may have its examination activity summarized there rather than on its own site.
A public records request, as a last step, when the agency clearly holds the data and has not released it.
Four Forms the Figure Arrives In
One statewide number
A single result covering all candidates in a reporting window. The most common published form and the least informative, because it tells you nothing about which portion candidates lost or whether repeat attempts are mixed in.
Broken out by portion
Separate results for the general and state portions. Far more useful, since it shows where candidates in your jurisdiction actually lose the sitting, which is the part you can act on.
Broken out by attempt
First-time candidates reported apart from repeat candidates. Where this exists, the gap between the two groups is the single most instructive thing in the report.
Reported by school
Outcomes listed for each approved education provider instead of for the jurisdiction. Useful when choosing a provider, but a statewide total may have to be assembled from the rows, and the report may warn you not to do that.
Check the Fine Print Before You Trust the Number
A published figure is only meaningful alongside the definitions printed around it. Before you use one, establish five things: the window it covers, whether it counts candidates or examination administrations, whether repeat attempts are included, whether the result refers to a single portion or the combined sitting, and which license track it describes. If a footnote or methodology note does not answer these, the report is not self-explanatory and you should treat it accordingly.
Two distinctions cause the most misreading. The first is candidates versus administrations. A candidate who sits three times contributes one candidate but three administrations, so the same underlying performance produces two different figures depending on which unit is counted. The second is portion versus sitting. A jurisdiction reporting portion-level results can show one portion going well and the other going badly, which no combined figure will ever reveal.
Also check the track. Salesperson and broker candidates are different populations sitting different examinations, and a report that merges them describes neither group well. If you are pursuing the broker license, a combined figure dominated by entry-level candidates is not about you.
Finally, look at the publication date rather than the page's copyright line. Agency sites routinely carry a current year in the footer while hosting a report several cycles old. Where the figure appears in a meeting packet or bulletin, the date of that document is the date of the data.
When Your Jurisdiction Publishes Nothing
Silence is common and is not evidence of a bad result. Many agencies simply never built a public reporting habit, and the contract with the vendor may not require one.
You have two legitimate options. Ask the agency directly, by email or through its public information contact, whether examination statistics are compiled and available; a surprising number will answer with an attachment. Failing that, every state has a public records statute, and examination counts held by an agency are ordinarily records subject to it. Requests should name a specific period and the breakdown you want, because a vague request is easier to deny or to answer uselessly. Response times, fees and exemptions are set by that statute, so read it before you file.
What you should not do is substitute a number from somewhere else. Figures compiled by course providers, aggregator sites and forum posts are frequently undated, frequently national in scope, and frequently traceable back to a single old release that has been copied sideways for years. A citation chain that ends at another summary is not a source.
In the meantime, the number that actually predicts your outcome is one you can generate today. A full-length practice examination taken cold, at your jurisdiction's question count and time limit, tells you more about your position than any aggregate about strangers. RE License Prep starts every candidate with a free diagnostic for exactly that reason, then tracks whether repeat attempts hold up through the PassPulse Score.
Questions About Sourcing Exam Results
Can I get the figure from the testing vendor directly?
Ordinarily no. The vendor administers the examination under contract and the statistics belong to the contracting agency, so vendors route these requests back to the jurisdiction. The vendor's candidate handbook is still worth downloading, because it defines the structure and scoring rules you need in order to read any figure correctly.
How current is a published result likely to be?
It depends entirely on the reporting cycle the agency chose. Some release on a monthly operations schedule, some annually, some only when a board asks for it. Look for the period covered rather than the date you happened to download the file, and expect a lag between the end of that period and publication.
Why do two sites quote different figures for the same state?
Almost always because they are quoting different periods, different license tracks, different attempt populations or different counting units, and neither site says which. Occasionally one of them is simply out of date. Trace both back to an original agency document; if only one of them traces, use that one.
Is a school-level report useful to me?
It is useful for choosing an education provider and for little else. Cohort sizes vary enormously between schools, so a small provider's result swings on a handful of candidates. Read the methodology note before drawing any conclusion, and do not add the rows together to manufacture a statewide figure unless the report says that is valid.
Should any of this change how I study?
Only in one respect. If your jurisdiction publishes portion-level results and they show candidates losing the sitting on the state portion, that is a direct instruction to treat state license law as its own subject rather than as a chapter at the back of a national course. Otherwise, the report describes a population and your preparation plan should come from your own diagnostic.