What is on the New York
real estate broker exam?

The short version

Multiple choice, two and a half hours, and based on the full 152-hour curriculum rather than the broker course alone. That last point catches people out: the 152 hours are the 77-hour salesperson course plus the 75-hour broker course, so roughly half of what the broker exam can ask is salesperson material you last saw years ago.

The thirteen subjects

Two subjects are over a third of the paper

Advanced Fair Housing and Fair Lending is 19 questions and Agency Law for Brokers is 15. Add License Law and Supervision and Operating a Real Estate Office and you are at 57 of 110 before anything else is counted. A salesperson who expects a broader paper is preparing for the wrong exam.

The level is different, not just the difficulty

The broker syllabus says it plainly in its own preface: a broker's job is to run a brokerage so the principles taught in the salesperson course are actually carried out. So where the salesperson exam asks what a rule is, the broker exam asks what you must do when somebody working under you breaks it. Same subject heading, different question.

Fair housing at this level is about supervision

Nineteen questions is the largest block on the paper, and very little of it is the definition of a protected class. It is what the firm is liable for, what your standard operating procedures have to say, what happens when an agent steers a client and you did not know. That is a management subject wearing a fair housing heading.

A broker pass expires

The Department publishes something for the broker exam that it does not for the salesperson exam: a passed result is only valid for two years. Pass and then take three years to file, and you sit it again.

Practicing it

Our three broker forms are 110 questions each, weighted from the 75-hour broker syllabus. Because the real exam draws on all 152 hours, a broker form on its own covers about half of what you can be asked; sitting one broker form and one salesperson form gives you 220 questions of which half are salesperson material, which is within a point of the real split. Our broker forms run the full two and a half hours the state allows, so the pacing matches the real paper.

Ten real questions are free on the samples page. If you are sitting the broker exam, pair one of our broker forms with a salesperson form to cover both halves of the 152 hours — both are on the real estate page.