Louisiana Real Estate Broker Exam Study Guide (2026)

What the Louisiana state portion actually is

Start with a warning that saves some candidates their fee. Louisiana migrated from PSI to Pearson VUE. The PSI bulletin that still circulates in study groups and on résumé-padding blog posts is obsolete, and its content outline is not the one your exam is built from. The current document is Pearson VUE content outline #091901, revision 04/2025, whose state outline is effective September 1, 2021, with candidate handbook #091900 alongside it.

The structure, from the handbook:

Two things about this exam that are unusual, and that you should know before you study

First: there is no separate broker outline. Broker and salesperson candidates in Louisiana sit the identical 55-item state examination. #091901 prints one state outline, not two. The two licenses differ on this paper in exactly one respect — the cut score. That is unlike Virginia, Ohio, Texas and South Carolina, all of which publish different item counts for the broker form. It also means that any Louisiana state-portion study material aimed at salespersons is aimed at your exam too; what makes a broker edition worth buying is the depth, the supervision material in area III, and the four-year/150-hour licensure path — not a different set of topics.

Second: the passing standard is a scaled score, and it is not a percentage. For brokers the cut score is a scaled score of 75 out of 100 on each portion (70 for salespersons). Handbook #091900 says in terms that the scaled score "is neither the number of questions you answered correctly nor the percentage of questions you answered correctly."

That sentence matters and almost every competitor gets it wrong. A scaled score is a transformation of your raw score onto a common 0–100 reporting scale, so that forms of differing difficulty can be compared fairly: a candidate who sits a slightly harder form needs fewer raw points for the same scaled 75 than a candidate who sits an easier one. You cannot work backwards from "75" to "I need 41 of 55 right." Anyone who prints "75%" for Louisiana has either not read the handbook or has decided a clean-looking number is worth more than an accurate one. Study to be comfortably above the line, not to a raw target that does not exist.

The published areas — and why they are ranges

Louisiana publishes item counts as ranges, not as fixed numbers. Here is what #091901 actually prints, with the numbers this chapter uses for weighting:

The single numbers in the third column are midpoints of the published bands. They are an editorial choice, not a published figure, and you should not repeat them to anyone as though Pearson VUE printed them. They are honest ones: the midpoints 5 / 8 / 14 / 14 / 14 sum to exactly 55, which is the published total. As percentages of 55 they are 9.09 / 14.55 / 25.45 / 25.45 / 25.45, and those cannot be written as integers summing to 100 without breaking the tie between the three identical 13–15 bands. The declared weights of 10 / 15 / 25 / 25 / 25 therefore absorb the whole +0.9-point rounding error into the smallest area, so that areas III, IV and V stay equal — which is how the published outline has them.

Read the bottom three rows again. Areas III, IV and V are each a quarter of the state exam. Nothing else on it comes close.

What no chapter can promise you about area IV

Area IV lists 49 numbered sub-items across eight lettered headings — property classification, immovables, movables, legal descriptions, ownership, servitudes, usufruct, habitation, right of use, building restrictions, co-ownership, community property, separate property, partnerships and corporations, condominiums, donations, successions, the surviving spouse's usufruct, expropriation, possession, acquisitive prescription, fifteen separate obligations-and-contracts topics, five on sales, four on privileges and mortgages, and four on leases. The exam gives that heading 13 to 15 items.

No bank and no chapter can cover it exhaustively, and any that claims to is padding. What this chapter does instead is teach the sub-items the exam actually reaches at that item count: component parts; usufruct; habitation against the right of use; predial servitudes; building restrictions; the community property presumption and the concurrence rule for community immovables; the surviving spouse's usufruct with intestacy; acquisitive prescription; lesion beyond moiety; the authentic act; redhibition; bond for deed; and reconduction. Privileges and mortgages (heading G) are not covered here, and neither are legal descriptions or movables within heading A. That is a deliberate allocation, stated so you can see it, rather than a gap you discover in the exam room.

The same discipline applies elsewhere. At 4–6 items, area I's investigations, hearings and appeals subtopic (heading C) is not separately covered. At 13–15 items, area III's broker/salesperson relationship (B) and property management (L) are not.

Governing law. #091901 carries no reference or statute list of its own — unlike South Carolina's PSI bulletin, it simply ends at the content outline. The authorities this chapter is built on are therefore named here rather than borrowed from a vendor list: the Louisiana Real Estate License Law, R.S. 37:1430–1469; the Louisiana law of agency in real estate transactions, R.S. 9:3891–3899; the Louisiana Civil Code, Books II and III; the Louisiana Residential Property Disclosure Act, R.S. 9:3196–3200; the bond-for-deed statute at R.S. 9:2941–2948; the lessee's-deposit statute at R.S. 9:3251–3254; and the commission's rules at LAC 46:LXVII.

The headline: half of this exam is civil law, and the national chapters are common law

Louisiana is the only civil-law jurisdiction in the United States. Its private law descends from the Napoleonic tradition, and the exam uses that tradition's vocabulary throughout: immovables rather than real property, usufruct rather than life estate, predial servitudes rather than easements, ownership in indivision rather than tenancy in common.

Areas IV and V together are half the state exam. That means a study guide written from common-law sources is not merely mis-weighted for Louisiana — it is substantively wrong for half the paper. Everything in the national portion of this book about estates, easements, concurrent ownership, contract formation, marketable title and the transfer of ownership is correct for the national exam and must be set aside for area IV.

The most dangerous move here is the one that feels most helpful: telling yourself "usufruct is just Louisiana's word for a life estate." It is not, and the exam is built out of exactly those non-equivalences. Learn the translation and the place where the translation fails.