What is on the New York
real estate salesperson exam?

The short version

Multiple choice, based on the 77-hour qualifying course, and you get an hour and a half. Those three facts come from the Department of State. The number of questions does not: the Department has never published one. Schools, prep providers and people who have sat it all say 75, and our practice forms are built at that length.

The eleven subjects, and what each is worth

New York does not publish a question count, but it does publish the syllabus, subject by subject, with the hours each gets. That is the defensible part, and it is what the weighting below is built from. A subject that takes three times as long to teach carries roughly three times the questions.

Agency is the largest single block

Law of Agency is 10 of the 75, and it is the subject that produces the most confident wrong answers. Most of it is not difficult to understand; it is difficult to keep straight. Who owes a duty to whom, what a dual agent may and may not disclose, what a broker's agent actually is. Those distinctions decide the question, and they are easy to half-learn.

The math is smaller than people expect

Valuation and Math is 4 questions of 75. Candidates routinely spend a third of their study time on arithmetic that is worth about five percent of the paper. Commissions, proration and points are worth knowing cold because they are quick marks, not because there are many of them.

What the state will and will not tell you

Results come back as passed or failed. The Department says in so many words that you will not receive a numerical score, so you cannot learn how close you came, and it does not publish the mark that separates the two. The 70% everyone quotes comes from schools and from candidates rather than from New York, and we will not print it as though it were official.

Practicing it

Our three salesperson forms carry 75 questions each, weighted the way the syllabus is weighted, and timed at 90 minutes to match the hour and a half the state allows. Every wrong option explains itself, which on a rules exam matters more than the score: knowing that you chose the broker's agent answer because you were thinking of a subagent is the thing that stops it happening again.

Ten real questions are free on the samples page, no account and no card. Our three salesperson forms follow the table above question for question, at our real estate page.