Getting a real estate licence is not one process. It is fifty processes that happen to share a shape, and at E-Commerce Paradise I would rather give you the shape plus two fully worked state examples than a national average that is wrong everywhere. The steps come in the same order almost everywhere. The hours, the fees, the exam vendor and the broker rules change at every state line, and they change over time, which is why the last line of this article is the same as the first: confirm everything with your own state real estate commission before you spend money.
To keep it concrete I have costed two states end to end from the regulators’ own fee schedules this session. Texas, where the Texas Real Estate Commission publishes both a fee schedule and, unusually, a provider level exam pass rate file. And California, where the Department of Real Estate publishes a clean fee table. Between them they cover the two most common shapes of state process, and the numbers are real rather than illustrative.
What follows is the order of operations: eligibility, required hours, choosing an approved provider, the exam, fingerprinting and background check, the application, finding a sponsoring broker, and then the post-licensing or first renewal requirement that catches people out about a year later.
Step two is the one that costs money, so start with your state
Required hours run from 40 in Michigan to 180 in Texas, and AceableAgent entry pricing runs from $149 in Virginia to $949 in Ohio across the 17 states it covers. Outside those states you need a different provider, and this page names them. No course guarantees a licence.
Step 1: Check eligibility before you buy anything
Every state sets a minimum age, and eighteen is the common one. Minnesota’s published requirements, for example, state that “You must be at least 18 years old”, alongside the education and broker association requirements. Some states set nineteen or twenty one for a broker rather than a salesperson licence.
Beyond age, states screen on legal presence, honesty and criminal history. Nobody publishes a simple pass or fail rule here, because the review is discretionary. Minnesota’s own summary is representative: you answer questions about criminal history and “any disclosures are reviewed case-by-case”.
This matters more than people expect, because the money leaves your account at step two and the background review happens at step five. If you have anything in your history that might be an issue, most commissions offer a preliminary determination process. Texas calls it a Request a Fitness Determination and lists it in its licensing forms. Use it before you buy a course, not after.
Step 2: Find out how many hours your state requires
This is the single biggest variable in the whole process, and it is the reason national cost articles are useless. Here are the required pre-licensing hours as published on the state pages I pulled this session, each one named with its state because an hours figure with no state attached means nothing.
| State | Required pre-licensing hours | Approving body named on the course page |
|---|---|---|
| Michigan | 40 | LARA |
| Virginia | 60 | DPOR |
| Florida | 63 | Florida course approval |
| Georgia | 75 | GREC |
| Pennsylvania | 75 | DOS |
| North Carolina | 75 | NCREC |
| New York | 77 | NYDOS |
| Tennessee | 90 | Tennessee Real Estate Commission |
| Washington | 90 | WA DOL |
| South Carolina | 90 | SC LLR |
| Minnesota | 90 | Minnesota Department of Commerce |
| Arizona | 90 plus a separate 6 hour contract class | ADRE |
| Ohio | 100 | OH SBCCS |
| Utah | 120 | UT DRE |
| California | 135 | DRE |
| Colorado | 168 | Colorado state page |
| Texas | 180 | TREC |
Some states do not have one number. Illinois has three licence paths with different hour requirements: a Residential Leasing Agent at 15 hours, a Broker at 75 hours, and a Managing Broker at 45 additional hours on top of at least two years of experience as an Illinois Broker. Choosing the wrong path is an expensive mistake in a state like that.
Two states show how the hours interact with the format. California’s 135 hours arrive as three 45 hour courses, which is why California providers describe the requirement as three courses rather than one. Arizona requires 90 hours of pre-licensing education plus a separate 6 hour Contract Writing Class, which is why providers quote 96 hours in total and why a course advertising 90 hours only is not the whole requirement.
Step 3: Choose a provider your state has actually approved
An approved provider list is not a formality. Course completion certificates from an unapproved school will not be accepted, and you will have paid for nothing. Every state commission publishes an approved provider list or an approved course search, and that list beats any marketing page including this one.
The coverage picture, counted from each provider’s own pre-licensing menu this session, is uneven in ways most rankings do not mention. The CE Shop lists forty nine states plus Washington D.C., with Wyoming the only gap. Colibri lists forty states plus the District of Columbia. Kaplan lists forty states plus D.C. AceableAgent lists seventeen states.
Price varies far more by state than by brand, which is why you should price your own state rather than trusting a headline. In California the cheapest full requirement I found was $139 for all 135 hours. In Ohio the cheapest for 100 hours was $799, from Kaplan. Same country, same qualification category, six times the price.
| State | Hours | Entry tier price | Provider |
|---|---|---|---|
| California | 135 | $139 | The CE Shop |
| Virginia | 60 | $149 | AceableAgent |
| Michigan | 40 | $169 | AceableAgent |
| Texas | 180 | $449 | AceableAgent |
| Texas | 180 | $499 | Kaplan |
| Texas | 180 | $515 | The CE Shop |
| Ohio | 100 | $799 | Kaplan |
| Ohio | 100 | $949 | AceableAgent |
| Ohio | 100 | $1099 | The CE Shop |
Ohio is expensive because of a statute rather than a curriculum. Ohio Revised Code section 4735.09 requires the courses to be “successfully completed at an institution of higher education”, and section 4735.01 defines that to include an institution registered with the state board of career colleges and schools and approved to offer degree or certificate programs. Providers must hold that status to teach in Ohio, and the cost shows up in the sticker. My ranking of online real estate schools works through that example in full.
One more thing to check on a provider before you buy: whether it publishes a pass rate at all, and whether the number it publishes is what it appears to be. AceableAgent, for instance, publishes no pass rate. What it publishes is a readiness score: “Based on the PrepAgent proprietary exam readiness assessment of over 2000+ students from hundreds of pre-license providers, AceableAgent students scored an average of 74%, while other real estate school students scored an average of 64%.” PrepAgent is an Aceable brand and the assessment happens before any state exam, so that is not a pass rate and should never be read as one. I unpack what that course does and does not include in my full AceableAgent review.
Texas has the one thing this category almost never gives you
On the TREC provider file covering 12/1/2023 to 11/30/2025, AceableAgent recorded 8,516 Texas sales agent exams and 5,604 passes, a 65.81% rate against a 56.12% state field. The Texas Basic package is $449 for the required 180 hours. That is a course, not a licence, and the state fee stack adds $286.00 on top.
Step 4: Pass the licensing exam
Most states use a third party exam vendor, usually Pearson VUE or PSI, and the exam is normally split into a national portion and a state specific portion, each with its own passing score. Minnesota’s published structure is a useful template: 80 national questions in 2.5 hours and 40 state specific questions in 1.5 hours, with a stated requirement of 75 percent or higher on each section, at a $63 exam fee.
Exam fees are small relative to the course but they are per attempt, and they belong in the budget. In Texas the current fee schedule lists a Real Estate Sales Examination Fee of $43.00 paid to the exam provider and a Real Estate Broker Examination Fee of $39.00. In California the Department of Real Estate lists an original salesperson examination fee of $100 and a broker examination fee of $150, with a first rescheduled exam costing $40 for a salesperson and $45 for a broker.
Pass rates are worth knowing before you pick a provider, and Texas is the only state in this article that publishes them per school. The TREC provider passage rate file covering 12/1/2023 to 11/30/2025 puts the overall Texas sales agent pass rate at 56.12 percent across 29,980 exams. AceableAgent recorded 65.81 percent on 8,516 exams, Colibri 56.74 percent on 534, The CE Shop 56.45 percent on 1,077 and Kaplan 53.20 percent on 1,280. Roughly two in five candidates fail on the first attempt in Texas even at the strongest school, which is a useful expectation to carry into the exam room.
Some states require you to sit the school’s own final exam before the state exam. Minnesota’s published requirement is a 155 question course final with a 70 percent passing score, taken before the Pearson VUE exam. Ask about that before you assume the state exam is the only test.
Step 5: Fingerprinting and the background check
Almost every state requires fingerprints on file with a specific agency, and fingerprints you already submitted to a different agency usually do not count. Texas is explicit that your fingerprints must be “on file with the Texas Department of Public Safety” and that “Fingerprints on file for other agencies will not be accepted”.
Sequencing matters here and it trips people up. In Texas you do not schedule fingerprinting on your own initiative. TREC states that you receive an email to schedule fingerprints after your application status changes from “Submitted” to “In Review”, and asks applicants not to contact the agency chasing it. So the application comes first, then the fingerprints, then the background check.
Costs are modest and specific. The TREC fee schedule lists a Fingerprint Fee of $37.00 paid to IDEMIA if the applicant has not previously been fingerprinted for TREC. The California DRE notes that original licence or examination applicants who reside in California pay a $49 fingerprint processing fee directly to the live scan fingerprint service provider, and its fee table carries an asterisk rather than a figure because the money does not go to the department.
Step 6: File the application and pay the state
This is where the real cost of a licence stops being the course price. Below are two states costed end to end from the regulators’ own current fee schedules.
Texas, worked from the TREC fee schedule
The TREC fee schedule effective 15 December 2025 breaks the sales agent original application into components rather than a single number, which is unusually transparent.
| Texas item | Amount | Paid to |
|---|---|---|
| Sales agent application fee | $150.00 | TREC |
| Texas Online Fee | $6.00 | TREC |
| Texas A and M Research Center | $40.00 | TREC |
| Real Estate Recovery Fee | $10.00 | TREC |
| Application total | $206.00 | TREC |
| Real Estate Sales Examination Fee | $43.00 | Exam provider |
| Fingerprint Fee | $37.00 | IDEMIA |
| Total beyond the course | $286.00 |
Add the cheapest Texas course I found at $449 for the required 180 hours and a Texas salesperson licence is about $735 before you have spoken to a single client. Note also that once your application is filed you have one year to meet the remaining requirements, so do not file it and then take a leisurely twelve months over the coursework.
California, worked from the DRE fee schedule
California packages the examination and licence application together on form RE 435, which makes the arithmetic simpler.
| California item | Amount | Paid to |
|---|---|---|
| Original salesperson examination fee | $100 | DRE |
| Salesperson licence fee | $350 | DRE |
| Total due to DRE with RE 435 | $450 | DRE |
| Fingerprint processing, in state residents | $49 | Live scan provider |
| Total beyond the course | $499 |
Add the cheapest California course I found at $139 for all 135 hours and the licence lands at around $638. The DRE also notes plainly that “Fees are nonrefundable per Business and Professions Code Section 10207”, so a change of mind after filing is expensive.
For Ohio I could not retrieve the current application fee or the exam fee from the Ohio Department of Commerce this session, because the relevant pages returned a portal error rather than content. Those two figures are Not published here rather than guessed, and the Ohio Division of Real Estate and Professional Licensing is where to get them.
Step 7: Find a sponsoring broker
In most states a salesperson licence is inactive until a licensed broker sponsors or associates with it. Minnesota’s published requirement states that “You must associate with a licensed Minnesota real estate broker to activate your license”, and Illinois requires sponsorship by a Managing Broker for both the Residential Leasing Agent and Broker licence types, with only Managing Brokers able to self sponsor.
Practically, this means the last step of the licensing process is a job search, and it is the step no course prepares you for. Start it while you are still doing the hours rather than after you pass, because a licence sitting inactive earns nothing.
What to ask a prospective broker: what the commission split is and how it changes with production, whether there is a monthly desk fee, who pays for lead generation and marketing, what errors and omissions insurance is provided, and what training a new licensee actually receives. The split matters less than it looks when there is a desk fee attached.
Step 8: Post-licensing and the first renewal
The requirement that catches people is the one about a year out. Several states require post-licensing education during your first licence period, which is separate from ordinary continuing education. Providers list it as its own product category, and the state count for it is much narrower than for pre-licensing.
The CE Shop’s Ohio packages, for example, include a “20-Hr. Ohio Post-Licensing Salesperson Course” valued on that page at $245, bundled into the higher tiers precisely because Ohio licensees need it. AceableAgent sells post-licensing in four states, being Florida, Georgia, Illinois and Texas, and continuing education in five, adding New York to that list.
That gap is worth planning for at purchase time. If you buy pre-licensing from a provider that does not sell continuing education in your state, you will be switching schools at renewal whatever you thought of the course. Twelve of the seventeen states AceableAgent covers for pre-licensing have no AceableAgent continuing education option, which is the kind of detail that never appears in a review. My guide to the alternatives covers who picks up the renewal cycle in each case.
None of this makes course completion equivalent to a licence, and none of it guarantees work. Requirements change, states amend their rules, and the version that binds you is the one your commission publishes on the day you apply.
Running the business behind the licence
Once the licence is active the process ends and the business begins, and the business is the hard part. Client acquisition is what separates agents who last from agents who renew once and quit.
If you are building something commercial alongside the licence, market selection comes first. My guide to profitable high ticket niches lays out the screen I use before committing.
Then the economics. Read how the high ticket model works so the margins make sense before any money moves.
Supply is where most people stall. My complete supplier sourcing guide is the step by step version.
Commission income normally wants a proper entity behind it, which my walkthrough of business formation covers without the legalese.
My own stack is short. Storefronts run on Shopify. Entity filings and registered agent service go through Bizee.
Liability cover comes from Hiscox, which matters more the moment you hold a professional licence. Bookkeeping runs on QuickBooks, which keeps course fees and commission income separable at tax time.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to get a real estate licence?
It depends on your state’s hour requirement and how fast you study. Michigan requires 40 hours and Texas requires 180, so the coursework alone can be a week or several months. AceableAgent’s Illinois page gives a realistic shape for a mid range state: Broker candidates typically need two to four months for coursework, with total time to licensure closer to three to six months once exam scheduling is factored in. Add the application review, fingerprinting and broker search on top.
How much does a real estate licence cost in total?
Course plus state fees. In Texas, the cheapest course I found was $449 for 180 hours and the state stack is $286.00, made up of a $206.00 application total, a $43.00 exam fee and a $37.00 fingerprint fee, for roughly $735. In California, $139 for 135 hours plus $450 due to the DRE and a $49 fingerprint fee is roughly $638. In Ohio the course alone starts at $799 and I could not retrieve the current state fees this session.
Do I have to take the course in person?
In most states no. Online delivery is widely accepted, and several states name it explicitly in statute. Ohio Revised Code 4735.09 permits the required courses to be completed “by either classroom instruction or distance education”, provided the school qualifies as an institution of higher education under the statutory definition. Check your own commission’s approved provider list, since approval is per provider and per course rather than blanket.
What happens if I fail the exam?
You retake it and pay the exam fee again. In California a first rescheduled salesperson exam is $40 and a re-examination is $100. Some schools attach guarantees, but read them closely. AceableAgent’s Ace or Don’t Pay Guarantee promises a refund only “if you don’t pass the licensing exam after three attempts”, with the caveat that “State laws and regulations may prohibit some students from qualifying”. Colibri’s Texas guarantee requires passing on the first try within 30 days, so it cannot help a repeat candidate.
Do I need a sponsoring broker before I apply?
Usually not before applying, but almost always before the licence becomes active. Minnesota requires association with a licensed broker to activate. Illinois requires sponsorship by a Managing Broker for leasing agents and brokers alike. Treat the broker conversation as part of the licensing process rather than something that comes afterwards.
Does finishing the course mean I am licensed?
No. Course completion is one requirement among several that typically include a passing exam score, an application with fees, fingerprinting, a background check and in many states a sponsoring broker. No school in this article guarantees licensure or employment, and every guarantee I read carries state law exclusions. Your own state real estate commission publishes the only requirement list that binds you, and it can change between the day you enrol and the day you apply.
Bottom Line
The order is the same nearly everywhere. Check eligibility, complete the required hours with an approved provider, pass the exam, get fingerprinted, file the application, find a sponsoring broker, then handle post-licensing at your first renewal. What changes is every number in that sentence.
Two worked examples are worth more than any average. A Texas salesperson licence is roughly $735 all in on the cheapest course I found, being $449 for 180 hours plus $206.00 in application fees, $43.00 for the exam and $37.00 for fingerprints. A California salesperson licence is roughly $638, being $139 for 135 hours plus $450 to the DRE and $49 for live scan. An Ohio licence starts at $799 for the course alone before any state fee, because Ohio requires the education to come from an institution of higher education rather than an ordinary approved school.
Do the coverage check before the price check, buy from a provider your commission has approved, budget the fee stack alongside the course, and start the broker conversation early. And confirm every figure on this page against your own state real estate commission before you act on it, because these are state regulated requirements that change, completing a course is not the same as holding a licence, and nothing here guarantees you a licence or a job.
Start with the hours your state actually requires
Virginia is 60 hours from $149, Florida 63 from $179, California 135 from $199, Texas 180 from $449 on AceableAgent state pages this session. Ohio is $949 and Kaplan was cheaper there. In the 33 states this school does not cover, buy from a provider your commission has approved.
If the business you are building alongside the licence is an online store rather than a brokerage, my team runs a complete done for you high ticket dropshipping business build and launch service covering the storefront, supplier relationships and launch systems.
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Trevor Fenner is an ecommerce entrepreneur and the founder of Ecommerce Paradise, a platform focused on helping entrepreneurs build and scale profitable high-ticket ecommerce and dropshipping businesses. With over a decade of hands-on experience, Trevor specializes in high-ticket dropshipping strategy, niche and product selection, supplier recruiting and onboarding, Google & Bing Shopping ads, ecommerce SEO, and systems-driven automation and scaling. Through Ecommerce Paradise, he provides free education via in-depth guides like How to Start High-Ticket Dropshipping, advanced training through the High-Ticket Dropshipping Masterclass, and fully done-for-you turnkey ecommerce services for entrepreneurs who want a faster, more hands-off path to growth. Trevor is known for emphasizing sustainable, real-world ecommerce models over hype-driven tactics, helping store owners build scalable, sellable, and location-independent brands.
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