Maryland Real Estate Pass Rate 2026: 29% National Portion

Maryland's official real estate salesperson pass rate is 28.7% on the national portion and 35.8% on the state portion. Both figures come from the Maryland Real Estate Commission's Student Success Rates by School spreadsheet, they cover test dates from January 1 through December 31, 2024, and they count attempts, not candidates. That last point is the one nearly every other page drops. The file's own header reads "School Summary First Time and Repeat Cumulative," so a candidate who failed the national portion three times before passing contributes four attempts to that 28.7%, not one. Maryland is one of only about ten state commissions that publish anything at all, which makes its numbers valuable and also makes them very easy to misquote.

Every official Maryland real estate pass rate

The Commission publishes one spreadsheet covering both license levels and both portions. Here is everything in it at the statewide level.

Exam and portion	Attempt basis	Tested	Passed	Pass rate	Period
Salesperson — National	First-time and repeat attempts, cumulative	7,306	2,099	28.7%	1/1/2024 – 12/31/2024
Salesperson — State	First-time and repeat attempts, cumulative	7,288	2,612	35.8%	1/1/2024 – 12/31/2024
Broker — National	First-time and repeat attempts, cumulative	246	122	49.6%	1/1/2024 – 12/31/2024
Broker — State	First-time and repeat attempts, cumulative	359	171	47.6%	1/1/2024 – 12/31/2024

Two things about currency. The file the Commission links today was last modified on its server in March 2025 and still reports the 2024 test year, so as of August 2026 there is no newer official Maryland figure to quote. And the Commission attaches its own caveat to the data: it is "provided for informational purposes only," it is not an endorsement of any school, and while the Commission believes it accurate it "makes no guarantee as to its accuracy."

What this number does and does not count

Four limits are built into the way Maryland reports, and each one changes what the percentage means.

• It counts sittings, not people. "First Time and Repeat Cumulative" means every attempt in 2024 is a row in the denominator. There were 7,306 national-portion attempts; there is no way to recover from this file how many distinct candidates that represents, and therefore no way to state a candidate-level Maryland pass rate.
• Retakes are in the denominator, and they drag it down. Repeat test-takers pass at lower rates than first-timers everywhere the split is published. An all-attempts rate is therefore structurally lower than a first-attempt rate for the same exam and the same population.
• It is portion-level, not exam-level. Maryland scores the two portions separately and publishes them separately. There is no official figure for "candidates who passed the whole exam," and you cannot get one by multiplying 28.7% by 35.8%, because the same people sit both and their results are correlated.
• One row is not a school. The Commission lists an entry called COMMISSION WAIVER alongside the schools: 823 state-portion attempts passing at 54.3%, but only 38 national-portion attempts. Subtract that row from the published totals and the school-attributed rates work out to 33.5% on the state portion and 28.6% on the national portion. That is our arithmetic on the Commission's rows, not a figure the Commission publishes.

This is also why we are not going to rank Maryland against another state on this page. Some commissions publish first-attempt candidate rates, some publish all attempts, and some publish first-time and repeat separately. Setting Maryland's 28.7% next to a first-attempt number from somewhere else is not a comparison of difficulty; it is a comparison of two different measurements that happen to share a percent sign.

What the Maryland salesperson exam actually looks like

The Commission is explicit that the salesperson examination "consist[s] of two parts: a national portion and a state portion," and that candidates "must pass each portion of the examination with a grade of at least 70%." The portions are scored independently, which is why the pass-rate file has two totals rather than one.

Portion	Scored questions	Needed to pass	Margin for error
National	80	56 correct (70%)	24 questions
State	30	21 correct (70%)	9 questions
Total	110	Both portions independently	—

PSI Examination Services administers the exam for the Commission. The standard fee is $44.00, paid to PSI rather than to the state, and the exam is delivered by computer with a two-hour session. Testing runs Monday through Friday at PSI centers in Baltimore, College Park, Crofton, Hagerstown and Lanham, plus Brainseed Testing Services. A passing score on one portion stays valid until the deadline tied to your course completion date, and once you have passed both you must apply for licensure within one year or the score expires.

What the portion split says about what to study

Here is the finding that the two-number structure actually gives you, and that a single blended figure would hide: in Maryland the national portion is the harder one. It passed at 28.7% against the state portion's 35.8% — and the gap survives the cleanup, at 28.6% versus 33.5% once the Commission-waiver row is removed from both. That runs against the common assumption that the state-law section is where Maryland candidates come unstuck.

The practical reading is that most Maryland failures are failures of general real estate principles — agency, contracts, financing, valuation, property ownership, the federal fair housing framework — rather than failures to memorize Maryland statute. If you are budgeting preparation time on the theory that the state portion is the trap, the published data says you have it backwards.

That said, the state portion punishes you faster. Thirty scored questions with 21 needed means each item is worth 3.3 percentage points of that portion and nine misses ends it. On the national portion a single question moves you 1.25 points and you have 24 to spare. The state portion is the shorter, denser bank; the national portion is the one more people are failing. Both statements are true and they call for different habits — precision on the state material, coverage on the national.

The school-level table underneath the totals is worth a careful look and a careful caveat. Among the largest providers on the national portion, The CE Shop recorded 2,508 attempts at 41.9%, Colibri 576 at 27.3%, Long and Foster 535 at 28.8%, and Tristar Academy 521 at 13.1%. That is a spread of nearly 29 points across four providers in the same year on the same exam. But these are attempt-based rates too, so a provider whose students retake more often looks worse for that reason alone, and the Commission explicitly disclaims any endorsement. Treat the table as a prompt for questions to ask a school, not as a ranking.

The bottom line

Maryland's published rates for 2024 are 28.7% of national-portion attempts and 35.8% of state-portion attempts, counting first-time and repeat sittings together. Those are per-attempt rates, not the share of people who eventually get licensed, and they should never be set beside another state's first-attempt figure. Within Maryland the comparison that does hold is the one between the two portions, and it points at the national material: roughly seven in ten national-portion attempts in 2024 did not clear 56 of 80. You need 70% on each portion, separately, and $44 buys you one try at that.

Since the binding number is 56 correct out of 80 on national material, the useful next move is finding out where you currently land against it rather than reading more about it. Work through a free Maryland Real Estate Salesperson practice exam and see which side of 70% you come out on before PSI charges you to find out.