Texas sales agent licence: hours, exam, fees and the first renewal

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Kooky

Builder of Shaka, the payment router that pays every agent their commission on closing date.

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No federal body licenses the people who sell homes in the United States. Each state writes its own conditions, and Texas, through the Texas Real Estate Commission, sets out a path with 180 classroom hours at the start and a second block of study that falls due before the licence is renewed for the first time. The commission, known by its initials TREC, publishes each stage on its own page: one for becoming a sales agent, one for renewing, one for brokers and a schedule of fees.

This guide follows those pages in the order a candidate meets them. It covers who may apply, the six courses required before the application, the portal and the one-year clock that starts when the application is filed, fingerprints and the background check, the exam, the broker sponsorship that turns an inactive licence into an active one, the fees as the commission publishes them, the education due at the first renewal and at each later one, what happens when a licence expires, and what the commission asks of a sales agent who wants a broker licence. Every rule here is a Texas rule. Where the commission's pages are silent, the guide says so instead of filling the gap.

Texas Real Estate Commission, sales agent page and fee schedule labelled as effective 15 December 2025.

Who may apply in Texas

The commission's sales agent page lists three general conditions. An applicant must be a citizen of the United States or a lawfully admitted alien. An applicant must be 18 years of age or older. And an applicant must meet what the commission calls its standards for honesty, trustworthiness and integrity.

The first two are matters of record. The third is a judgement the commission makes, and its page points to a way of asking the question early: a candidate may request a Fitness Determination before applying. The fee schedule prices that request at US$50.00 plus a US$2.00 Texas Online Fee, US$52.00 in all, and says only online payment is accepted. The logic of the order is plain from the figures that follow. The education takes 180 classroom hours and the application costs US$205, so a candidate with a doubt about the third condition can have it examined for US$52 before committing to the rest. How the commission weighs a particular history depends on the case, and the pages read for this guide do not set out the criteria.

The sales agent page lists no residency condition. The commission's broker page adds a statement that reaches beyond brokers: Texas has no reciprocity with any other state, and all Texas requirements must be met. A licence held elsewhere does not replace the Texas path.

Six courses and 180 classroom hours

The qualifying education is the longest part of the route. According to the commission, a candidate completes 180 classroom hours, made of six courses of 30 hours each:

• Principles of Real Estate I
• Principles of Real Estate II
• Law of Agency
• Law of Contracts
• Promulgated Contract Forms
• Real Estate Finance

The list shows where Texas puts the weight. Three of the six courses, 90 of the 180 hours, deal with agency, contracts and the contract forms themselves. The contract forms have a full 30-hour course of their own, Promulgated Contract Forms.

The courses are taken with a provider chosen from the commission's approved list of qualifying education providers. The commission does not publish tuition on the pages read here: the price of the courses is set by each provider and is separate from every fee quoted in this guide.

College study does not automatically stand in for the six courses. The commission says college coursework generally does not count unless it covers these specific courses, and that a transcript may be submitted for evaluation. The outcome depends on what the transcript shows.

One instruction governs the timing: all the education is finished before the application is made. The completion certificates are uploaded with the application, not sent later.

The application and the one-year clock

The application is made online, and the fee is paid at the same moment, through the commission's licensing system, which it calls the REALM Portal.

The commission attaches two warnings to this step. The first is that an application cannot be changed once its status reads "Submitted", so the course documents have to be uploaded before that point. The second is the clock. The sales agent page states that a candidate has one year from the date the application is filed to meet all the licence requirements. Everything that follows, the fingerprints, the background check and both parts of the exam, has to fit inside that year.

Because the education is complete before filing, the clock measures only the commission's review, the fingerprint appointment, any investigation and the exam. A candidate who fails a part of the exam and has to return to the classroom, as described below, spends part of the same year doing so. The sales agent page does not say what happens to an application that reaches the end of the year unfinished. The commission's broker page, describing its own exam, says both parts must be passed before the application expires, which indicates that an application has an end date.

Fingerprints and the background check

Fingerprints are required by law, the commission says, and they must be on file with the Texas Department of Public Safety. A candidate who has already been fingerprinted for another purpose does not skip the step: fingerprints taken for other agencies are not accepted.

The timing is controlled by the status of the application. The email inviting the candidate to schedule fingerprints arrives after the status changes from "Submitted" to "In Review". The fee schedule sets the fingerprint fee at US$37.00, paid to the fingerprinting vendor, IDEMIA, and due when the applicant has not previously been fingerprinted for the commission. The broker page mentions that an applicant living outside the service area of that vendor's network may request a commission-specific "Hard Card" instead.

The fingerprints feed a criminal background check. Two sentences on the sales agent page sum up what is at stake. An investigation can delay the process. And no licence is issued unless the background check is passed. This is the point at which an early Fitness Determination shows its purpose: it moves the question of character to the front of the route, before the hours and the fees.

The exam: a state part and a national part

The exam is delivered by a testing company, PearsonVUE, not by the commission. After the commission has reviewed the candidate's education, it sends an email with instructions for scheduling what its page calls the state and national exams. The fee schedule lists a Real Estate Sales Examination Fee of US$43.00, paid to the exam provider.

The commission's sales agent page gives one rule on failure: a candidate who fails either exam three times must complete additional education before testing again. The page does not say how many hours that means or which courses satisfy it.

Several details that a candidate would want appear on the commission's broker page and not on the sales agent page, so they are given here with that caveat. For the broker exam, the commission says the exam has a State section and a National section, that both must be passed before the application expires, and that a passing result on each section is valid for one year. It adds that an applicant may be exempt from the National section when holding an active licence in a state that takes part in the national exam accreditation of a body it names as ARELLO. Whether each of those points applies in the same terms to the sales exam is not stated on the pages read for this guide. The fee schedule also does not say whether the US$43 is charged once or at each sitting.

An inactive licence until a broker sponsors it

Passing the exam does not, by itself, allow anyone to work. The commission's wording is precise: once the requirements are met, the candidate receives an inactive licence. To become active and practise real estate, the sales agent must be sponsored by a broker.

The sponsorship is a request made in the same portal as the application. Either the sales agent or the sponsoring broker may submit it. Until it is in place, the rule is absolute as the commission states it: a sales agent must be sponsored by a licensed broker to perform any real estate services.

The link runs both ways for as long as the agent holds the licence. A commission article on licence expiry explains that when a broker's own licence goes inactive, the sales agents that broker sponsors are set to inactive as well. A sales agent's right to work therefore rests on two licences, the agent's and the broker's.

What the published fees add up to

The commission's fee schedule, which its broker page cites as the schedule effective 15 December 2025, breaks each licence fee into components and gives a total. The totals are the figures a candidate pays, and they are the ones used below.

A worked example shows the minimum outlay in fees. Assume a first-time candidate who has never been fingerprinted for the commission, does not request a Fitness Determination and pays the examination fee once. The application is US$205, the fingerprints US$37 and the exam US$43, which makes US$285 before the licence is issued. Add the first renewal two years later at US$110 and the published fees for the first licence and its first renewal come to US$395. A candidate who also requests a Fitness Determination adds US$52, for US$447. None of these totals includes tuition for the 180 hours before the licence or for the further education due before the first renewal.

The late renewal lines show the price of missing the date. The on-time renewal is US$110. Renewed late within 90 days it is US$143, which is US$33 more; the schedule labels that US$33 as the late fee. Beyond 90 days it is US$176, with two late fees of US$33, or US$66 more than an on-time renewal. As the section on expiry explains, the fee is the smaller part of the cost of renewing late.

The first renewal: 270 hours and two legal updates

A Texas licence is renewed every two years, according to the commission's renewal page, and the commission sends a renewal notice about 90 days before the expiry date. The first renewal is unlike the ones that follow. It carries what the commission calls Sales Apprentice Education, shortened to SAE.

By the first renewal, the commission says, a sales agent must have completed a total of 270 hours of qualifying real estate courses, together with two courses that carry the commission's name: TREC Legal Update I, four hours, and TREC Legal Update II, four hours. The 270 hours are a running total. With 180 hours completed before the licence, 90 further hours of qualifying courses remain to be done during the first two years. At the 30-hour length used for the six entry courses, that is the equivalent of three more courses; the renewal page does not name which ones. The commission's broker page lists the elective qualifying courses it approves: Real Estate Appraisal, Real Estate Law, Real Estate Marketing, Real Estate Math, Residential Property Management, Real Estate Investments and Residential Inspections for Real Estate Agents. The renewal page does not say whether the eight legal update hours sit inside the 270 or on top of them.

Two practical rules come with the first renewal. The completion documents for the SAE courses are sent to the commission by email at least 10 days before renewing. And a course cannot be counted twice: the commission does not grant credit for a course that is substantially similar to one for which credit was given within the previous two years.

The commission also offers a way of checking progress. Its Renewal Education Information tool, reached from the licence holder search on its site, shows whether the required non-elective education is complete, the total education hours recorded for the renewal cycle and the courses credited towards renewal. The commission says the tool is available for sales agents and brokers who are within 90 days of their expiry date.

Later renewals: 18 hours every two years

From the second renewal onwards the load is lighter. To renew an active licence, the commission's renewal page asks for 18 hours of approved continuing education, or CE, in each two-year term. Eight of those hours are the two commission legal update courses, Legal Update I and Legal Update II. The other 10 are elective CE.

One course applies to some agents only. The commission says a sales agent may also need to take the Broker Responsibility course, six hours, if the sponsoring broker has made that agent a supervisor. The course counts towards the 18 hours, so a supervising agent's term is made of eight hours of legal updates, six of broker responsibility and four of electives, which still adds to 18.

The deadlines are close together. CE is to be completed at least 10 days before the expiry date. A renewal made online is paid no later than the expiry date. A renewal sent by post uses the commission's Renewal Form for Real Estate Sales Agents and Brokers and carries an additional paper processing fee on top of the renewal fee; the amount of that fee is not given on the renewal page. A licence holder who has never submitted fingerprints for the commission with an application or an earlier renewal is fingerprinted at renewal for a criminal background check.

When the commission's records do not show the CE as complete at the moment of renewal, the page gives two choices. The first is to pay the CE Deferral Fee of US$200, which keeps the licence active for 60 more days after the expiry date so that the courses can be finished. The fee schedule adds what follows if they are not: the licence is placed in inactive status. In a worked example, an agent who renews on time but defers pays US$110 plus US$200, US$310 in all, against US$110 for an agent whose hours were recorded in time. The second choice is to renew inactive. The commission allows an inactive renewal without CE, on one condition that it states without qualification: a person whose licence is inactive cannot engage in real estate brokerage activity.

When a licence expires

The rules on expiry changed on 1 October 2023, according to a commission article explaining the change, which says it was adopted at the commission's meeting in May of that year. Since that date, an active licence that expires is set to inactive status as of the expiry date, and the licence holder's relationships with brokers or sales agents are terminated.

Before the change, the article explains, a broker could vouch for a licence holder's activity under an expired licence. The commission describes the amendment as removing that "lookback period" from Section 535.93 of its rules, headed Late Renewal Applications. The gap in active time now shows on the licence record.

What a licence holder can do after the expiry date depends on how long has passed, and the commission sets three periods.

A late renewal therefore does not restore the right to work. The licence comes back inactive, and returning to active status takes further steps: completing all the required CE and submitting a request to activate the licence. For a sales agent that means requesting sponsorship by a broker again through the commission's online system, since the earlier sponsorship ended on the expiry date. The fee schedule prices a sales agent's reinstatement application at US$190, which is US$80 more than the US$110 on-time renewal.

Stepping up to a broker licence

A broker licence removes the need for a sponsor, and the commission asks a great deal more for it. The general conditions are the same three as for a sales agent, and the same one-year clock runs from the date the application is filed. The differences are in experience and education.

On experience, the commission's broker page requires at least four years of active experience as a licensed sales agent or broker during the 60 months before the application is filed. The experience is measured in points and must total 720. It is documented on a form the commission calls Supplement A, the Qualifying Experience Report for a Broker License, with a transaction identification list for each transaction claimed. The window matters: four years inside 60 months leaves room for no more than one year without active experience, which is one more reason the expiry rules above carry weight for an agent with this ambition.

On education, the total is 900 classroom hours in two parts. The first is 270 hours of qualifying courses, which include seven mandatory 30-hour courses: the six required of a sales agent and a seventh, Real Estate Brokerage. That seventh course has to be completed no more than two years before the application date. The second part is 630 hours of related education, and it must include the six-hour Broker Responsibility Course.

Two credits reduce the 630 hours. A bachelor's degree or higher from an accredited college or university satisfies up to 300 of them. Experience beyond the minimum counts too: for every two points above 720, one classroom hour is credited, again up to 300 of the 630 hours. As a worked example, an applicant with 1,000 points has 280 points above the minimum and is credited with 140 hours. Reaching the 300-hour ceiling by experience alone takes 600 points above the minimum, a total of 1,320 points. The broker page does not say whether the degree credit and the experience credit may be added together.

The remaining steps mirror the sales agent route with different amounts. The fee schedule sets the individual broker's original application at US$305.00 and the Real Estate Broker Examination Fee at US$39.00, so a sales agent already fingerprinted for the commission pays US$344 in published fees, on the assumption of one examination fee. A broker's renewal is US$217.00, against US$110.00 for a sales agent. The exam is again delivered by PearsonVUE in a State section and a National section, and three failures lead back to additional education. The name on the application must match the applicant's government-issued photo identification. The page also notes that attorneys must first be licensed as sales agents before turning to the broker requirements, and that brokers licensed outside Texas apply on a paper form, not online.

In Texas the licence is the start of the classroom work, not the end of it: 180 hours open the door, 90 more keep it open, and a broker's licence asks for 900.

Kooky, from Shaka

Kooky edits Agents Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for real estate professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.

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