Delaware Real Estate Salesperson Exam Study Guide

The Delaware salesperson exam is a two-part test administered by Pearson VUE on behalf of the Delaware Real Estate Commission, and you get four hours total to finish both parts.

• Exam fee: $88, paid by card or voucher when you reserve your seat.
• Time limit: 4 hours for the combined national and state portions.
• Passing score: a scaled score of 70 on a 0-100 scale for each portion.
• National portion: 80 scored items plus 5 unscored pretest items.
• State portion: 40 scored items plus 10 unscored pretest items.
• Minimum age to sit: 18 years old.
• Pre-licensing education: a 99-hour Delaware salesperson pre-licensing course must be completed first.

The pretest items are mixed in with scored questions and you cannot tell them apart, so every question deserves your full attention even though a handful won't count toward your score. Because each portion is scored on its own, it helps to think of this as sitting two separate exams back to back inside one four-hour window rather than one long test.

The 80-item national/general portion is drawn from content that mirrors salesperson licensing exams across the country. It is organized into eight content domains, each weighted by item count:

• Real Estate Contracts and Agency: 16 items
• Real Property Characteristics, Legal Descriptions, and Property Use: 11 items
• Property Value and Appraisal: 11 items
• Real Estate Practice: 10 items
• Forms of Ownership, Transfer, and Recording of Title: 9 items
• Property Disclosures and Environmental Issues: 9 items
• Financing and Settlement: 7 items
• Real Estate Math Calculations: 7 items

Contracts and agency carries the heaviest weight, so understanding listing agreements, buyer representation, and fiduciary duties pays off across many questions. Math items are fewer in count but often take longer to work through, so budget your time accordingly rather than treating every item as equal in effort.

Where the national portion tests general real estate knowledge, the 40-item Delaware state portion tests the state-specific rules that govern how you practice in Delaware. It breaks down into four domains:

• Statutory Requirements Governing the Activities of Licensees: 17 items
• Additional State Topics: 16 items
• Duties and Powers of the Real Estate Commission: 4 items
• Licensing Requirements: 3 items

Statutory requirements and additional state topics together make up the large majority of the state portion, so this is where memorizing Delaware-specific licensee obligations pays off most. The Commission's duties and powers, and the licensing requirements domain, are smaller in item count but still worth a clean pass through your notes since a handful of missed items there can matter when the passing bar is a scaled 70.

Treat the state portion as its own study track — it does not overlap meaningfully with generic national real estate concepts, so generic study material alone will not prepare you for it.

Each portion of the exam is scored separately against the same passing standard: a scaled score of 70 on a 0-100 scale. If you fail, you only need to retake the portion you failed, as long as you do so within one year of completing your pre-licensing education. There is a mandatory 24-hour wait before you can book a reexamination reservation, and reservations generally need to be made at least 24 hours before your desired test date.

• Retake limit before you must repeat pre-licensing coursework: 3 attempts to pass both portions.
• Application submission window: you have 6 months to submit your licensing application once you begin the process.
• New licensees must complete 12 hours of required new-salesperson course modules within 90 days of license issuance.

Because the failed-portion-only retake rule only applies within that one-year window, it is worth scheduling your first attempt with enough runway to retake a single portion if needed, rather than cutting it close to the deadline.

With two scored portions and a fixed four-hour window, the most efficient study plan mirrors the item weighting rather than treating every topic equally. On the national side, spend the most time on Contracts and Agency, Property Characteristics, and Appraisal, since those three domains alone account for the largest share of the 80 scored items. On the state side, prioritize Statutory Requirements and Additional State Topics before circling back to the smaller Commission-powers and licensing-requirements domains.

• Work through practice questions organized by domain so you can see where your accuracy is weakest.
• Keep a running list of terms and formulas that trip you up, and review that list daily instead of re-reading full chapters.
• Save real estate math for dedicated timed drills — these questions typically require more calculation steps per item than knowledge-recall questions.
• Revisit Delaware-specific statutory rules close to your test date, since state-law details are the easiest to blur with generic national rules under time pressure.

A plan built around weighting, rather than page count, makes the limited study time before your reservation go further.

You have four hours to answer both portions combined — 85 national items (80 scored plus 5 pretest) and 50 state items (40 scored plus 10 pretest) — which works out to under two minutes per question on average across all 135 items if you split time evenly — though in practice most candidates move faster through knowledge-recall items and slower through math and legal-description items. Do a full run-through first, flag anything uncertain, and come back to flagged items with whatever time remains rather than getting stuck early and running out of time for later sections.

• Take a full-length timed practice test under real time constraints, not just topic quizzes, so you build a feel for pacing across both portions.
• Review every missed practice question by domain, not just by right or wrong, so you know exactly where to focus final review.
• Get comfortable with the computer-based test format ahead of time so navigating between questions and flagging items isn't something you're learning for the first time on test day.
• Plan to arrive with time to spare — a rushed check-in adds stress you don't need going into a four-hour exam.