Tennessee Real Estate Cheat Sheet.
The night-before summary, built like the exam.

The numbers to remember

• Full exam fee: $63.00 (both sections in one sitting).
• National-only retake: $37.00 (160 minutes).
• State-only retake: $26.00 (80 minutes).
• National passing score: 56 of 80 (70%).
• State passing score: 28 of 40 (70%).
• Minimum age: 18. High school graduation proof required.
• Pre-license education: 90 total hours — 60 hours of principles/fundamentals plus a 30-hour Course for New Affiliates.
• Initial application fee: $91. License renewal: $75 every 2 years. Affiliate-to-broker upgrade fee: $91.
• A passing section score stays valid for 2 retakes or 1 year, whichever comes first; after a second fail, wait 30 days to retake; reschedule notice needed 2 days ahead.
• Exam administered by PSI; the Tennessee Real Estate Commission was created in 1951.

Content domains and weights

• Advertising and Marketing — 7 items
• Agency and Disclosure Issues — 6 items
• Broker/Affiliate Relationships — 5 items
• Handling of Documents and Record Keeping — 4 items
• Duties and Powers of the Real Estate Commission — 4 items
• Licensing Requirements — 4 items
• Handling of Trust/Escrow Funds — 4 items

High-yield review areas

• Advertising and marketing rules carry the single largest item count — review disclosure language and prohibited claims closely.
• Agency and disclosure issues are the second-heaviest domain; know the duties owed to clients versus customers.
• Broker/affiliate relationships questions test supervision boundaries between a broker and an affiliate broker.
• Trust/escrow handling and document record-keeping are lower-count but high-consequence topics — a single procedural error here is easy to miss under time pressure.

Top traps

• Forgetting the exam is graded as two independent sections — a strong national score does not offset a weak state score, and vice versa.
• Confusing the 60-hour principles requirement (finished before the exam) with the separate 30-hour New Affiliates course (tied to the application).
• Losing track of retake timing — missing the 2-retakes-or-1-year window on a passed section means retaking it from scratch.
• Skipping the 2-day advance notice rule when trying to reschedule an exam date.
• Treating the affiliate broker and broker blueprints as identical — the domain names match, but the broker exam allocates more items to several of the same topics, reflecting its added supervisory scope.
• Overlooking that the national section runs 160 minutes while the state section runs only 80 minutes — pace each section on its own clock rather than splitting time evenly.