Tennessee Real Estate Pass Rate 2026: 43% National

Tennessee is one of the few states whose real estate commission publishes exam results at all, and the headline number is 42.67% — the share of national-portion sittings for the affiliate broker exam that ended in a pass. It comes from the Tennessee Real Estate Commission's 2025 PSI Examination Report, covering January 1 through December 31, 2025 and last updated January 6, 2026: 9,197 national-portion attempts, 3,924 of them passing. It counts attempts, not people, and every category in the report is explicitly labeled "Includes First-Time and Repeat Examinees." The same report puts the Tennessee state portion at 71.53% — 5,033 passes out of 7,036 attempts, same year, same attempt basis. Both figures are honestly "the Tennessee real estate pass rate." They sit roughly 29 points apart, and that gap is the most useful thing on this page.

Every official Tennessee real estate pass rate for 2025

These six rows are everything TREC published for the 2025 calendar year. There is no combined "passed the exam" rate and no first-attempt-only breakout, so any page quoting a single Tennessee number has either picked one portion or invented one.

Exam and portion	Attempt basis	Tested	Passed	Pass rate	Period
Affiliate broker — national portion	All examinees (first-time and repeat combined)	9,197	3,924	42.67%	Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025
Affiliate broker — state portion	All examinees (first-time and repeat combined)	7,036	5,033	71.53%	Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025
Broker — national portion	All examinees (first-time and repeat combined)	665	412	61.95%	Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025
Broker — state portion	All examinees (first-time and repeat combined)	741	596	80.43%	Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025
Acquisition agent	All examinees (first-time and repeat combined)	400	231	57.75%	Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025
Timeshare salesperson	All examinees (first-time and repeat combined)	646	426	65.94%	Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025

TREC compiles the report by real estate school, so the statewide totals above are the column sums across every provider that sent candidates to PSI that year.

What this number does and does not count

Attempt basis is where almost every competing page goes wrong, so here is exactly what 42.67% is measuring.

• It counts sittings, not candidates. A candidate who fails the national portion twice and passes on the third try contributes three attempts and one pass. The denominator is exam events.
• Retakes are included. TREC labels every category "Includes First-Time and Repeat Examinees." Because repeat sittings pull a rate down, this figure is structurally lower than a first-attempt-only rate would be. Tennessee does not publish a first-attempt-only rate, so nobody can honestly quote one for this state.
• It is portion-specific. 42.67% is the national portion alone. It says nothing about the Tennessee state portion, which passed at 71.53% in the same year.
• The two portions have different denominators — 9,197 national sittings against 7,036 state sittings. That is only possible because the sections are registered, scored, and retaken separately. TREC's own rule: "The passing score for one section of an examination is valid for two (2) retakes of the failed section or one year, whichever comes first." Candidates can book a national-only or state-only appointment, so the two columns describe overlapping but genuinely different populations.

One consequence worth stating plainly: you cannot multiply the two rates together. 42.67% × 71.53% is about 31%, and that number means nothing. The denominators are different sets of sittings rather than one cohort measured twice, and a candidate who fails the national portion once and passes it on a retake still gets licensed — they simply appear twice in the national column. TREC does not publish a candidate-level "eventually licensed" rate, and no arithmetic on the published table produces one.

The same caution applies across state lines. Some commissions publish first-attempt-only rates, some publish all attempts, some split first-time and repeat into separate rows, and most split national from state. A neighboring state's published 60% may not be measuring anything Tennessee measures. Comparisons inside the TREC report are fair, because every row shares one period and one attempt basis — which is why the broker line below is useful evidence and an out-of-state figure usually is not.

The Tennessee affiliate broker exam: format, scoring, and fee

Tennessee calls its entry-level license the affiliate broker — the equivalent of what most states call a salesperson license. The exam is delivered by PSI in two independently scored sections:

• National portion: 80 scored questions, and you need 56 correct to pass — 70%. The section-only appointment allows 160 minutes.
• State portion: 40 scored questions, and you need 28 correct to pass — 70%. The section-only appointment allows 80 minutes.
• Fee: $63 for both portions. TREC lists $37 for the national section alone and $26 for the state section alone.
• Both must be passed. A pass on one section is banked, but only for two retakes of the failed section or one year, whichever comes first. Miss that window and the banked pass expires and both sections must be taken again.

The 70% bar is identical on both sections, but the margin is not. On the national portion you can miss 24 questions; on the state portion you can miss only 12, and each item is worth 2.5 percentage points against 1.25 nationally. The shorter section is less forgiving per question even though far more people pass it.

What the 29-point split says about where to study

Restate the table as failure rates and the direction becomes obvious. In 2025, 57.33% of national-portion sittings failed (5,273 of 9,197) against 28.47% of state-portion sittings (2,003 of 7,036). Tennessee candidates fail the national portion at just over twice the rate they fail the Tennessee-specific one.

The sitting counts point the same way. The national column recorded 2,161 more attempts than the state column in the same year. Since the sections are booked and retaken independently, a national column that much larger is what you would expect when one section is generating most of the repeat business.

This matters because a low state-portion rate and a low national-portion rate would call for opposite study plans. If Tennessee license law were the choke point, prep would mean TREC rules, agency disclosure requirements, and Title 62 of the Tennessee Code. It is not the choke point. The failures are concentrated in the general real estate content shared with every other state — agency relationships, contracts, financing, valuation and appraisal, property ownership and interests, transfer of title, fair housing, and real estate math.

The broker line corroborates it. Tennessee's broker exam ran 61.95% national against 80.43% state in the same report, on the same attempt basis — an 18.5-point gap pointing the same direction at a more experienced candidate pool. The pattern is not an artifact of one exam or one year's cohort.

There is a cost dimension too. The national section is both the harder one and the more expensive one to repeat at $37 against $26, and each failure burns one of the two retakes your banked state-portion pass will survive. Candidates who treat the national portion as the easy half — on the theory that they will just learn "the Tennessee stuff" — are optimizing against the wrong section.

The bottom line

Tennessee affiliate broker candidates passed the national portion at 42.67% and the Tennessee state portion at 71.53% during calendar year 2025, with first-time and repeat sittings pooled in both figures. Neither number alone is "the" pass rate, neither is a first-attempt rate, and the two cannot be combined into one. The actionable finding is the split: roughly three in five national-portion sittings fail while roughly seven in ten state-portion sittings pass, so general real estate principles — not Tennessee license law — is where the exam is actually won or lost. Both figures were verified against the TREC report on August 16, 2026; if TREC posts a 2026 report, the period covered will change and these rates will move with it.

Because the published data points squarely at the national portion, the cheapest useful diagnostic is a timed run at general real estate principles before you book the $63 appointment. Our free Tennessee Real Estate Affiliate Broker practice exam covers both portions so you can see which side of the 29-point gap you are standing on.

Official numbers that matter more than an estimated pass rate

The figures below come from the official source documents linked in the table. They are included so you can make study and registration decisions from published requirements rather than an unsupported estimate.

Published detail	Value	Official source
The passing score for one section of an examination is valid for two (2) retakes of the failed section or one year, whichever comes first.	2 retakes or 1 year	Tennessee Real Estate Commission (TREC)
Complete sixty (60) hours of real estate education in real estate principles/fundamentals before taking the examination.	60 hours	Tennessee Real Estate Commission (TREC)
Individuals seeking an affiliate broker license must complete a total of 90 hours of real estate education.	90 hours	Tennessee Real Estate Commission (TREC)
56 (70%)	56 of 80 (70%) points	Tennessee Real Estate Commission (TREC)
28 (70%)	28 of 40 (70%) points	Tennessee Real Estate Commission (TREC)