Tennessee Real Estate Broker Exam Study Guide (2026)

What the Tennessee portion actually is

The Tennessee broker examination is delivered by PSI. The figures below are read out of PSI bulletin 511, revision date 1 July 2025 — the current Tennessee Real Estate Commission candidate information bulletin.

	Items	Points	Time	Pass
Broker — national portion	75	scored to 80	150 minutes	60 (75%)
Broker — Tennessee state portion	50	50	90 minutes	38 (75%)

Two things in that table are worth a second look before you go further.

First, the national row really does say 75 items scored to 80 points. That is not a transcription slip. The two numbers are different because the national portion is scored on a points basis rather than a raw item count, and the pass mark of 60 is 75 percent of the 80 points, not of the 75 items. You cannot convert it into "get 56 questions right" and be confident.

Second, the state row is clean: 50 items, 50 points, pass 38. One item, one point. Thirty-eight of fifty is the number to carry into the room. You can miss twelve.

The other tier is a trap you can walk into without noticing. Tennessee licenses in two stages — affiliate broker first, broker second — and PSI publishes both examinations in the same bulletin. The Affiliate Broker examination is 80 national items and 40 state items, and it passes at 70 percent, which is 56 and 28. If you are reading a table that says 40 state items, or a pass mark of 28, or 70 percent, you are looking at the wrong tier. The broker state portion is 50 items at 75 percent.

The area table, in both columns

Tennessee's is the cleanest state outline in this program. PSI prints exact item counts, not ranges, and it prints both tiers side by side on every heading — "Duties and Powers of Real Estate Commission (Affiliate Broker - 4 Items, Broker - 6 Items)" and so on down the page. There is nothing to derive and nothing to estimate. Every number below is a number PSI printed. The Affiliate Broker column totals 40 and the Broker column totals 50, which is the arithmetic check that tells you which column you are reading.

Area	Broker items	Affiliate items	Broker share
Duties and Powers of Real Estate Commission	6	4	12%
Licensing Requirements	5	4	10%
Advertising and Marketing	7	7	14%
Broker/Affiliate Relationships	6	5	12%
Handling of Documents and Record Keeping	6	4	12%
Handling of Trust/Escrow Funds	7	4	14%
Other Improper Activities and Consumer Protection	3	3	6%
Agency and Disclosure Issues	7	6	14%
Special Areas of Practice	3	3	6%
Total	50	40

Read down the two columns and you can see exactly what Tennessee thinks a broker is. Six of the ten extra items go to money and paper: Trust/Escrow rises from four items to seven — a 75 percent increase, the largest jump in the outline — and Handling of Documents and Record Keeping rises from four to six. Duties and Powers rises from four to six, Broker/Affiliate Relationships from five to six, Licensing Requirements from four to five, and Agency and Disclosure from six to seven.

Three areas are identical in both columns: Advertising and Marketing at seven, Other Improper Activities at three, and Special Areas of Practice at three. Those are the areas where Tennessee expects the same knowledge of everybody who holds a license.

The practical instruction is blunt. If you are revising from affiliate broker material you used two or three years ago, the material is weakest exactly where the broker exam is heaviest. Trust and escrow plus records together are 13 of your 50 items, 26 percent, against 8 of 40 — 20 percent — on the exam you already passed. Advertising and Marketing, Trust/Escrow and Agency are the three joint-largest areas at seven items apiece; between them they are 21 items, 42 percent of the state portion. This chapter is sized to those proportions rather than to how interesting the topics are.

What PSI publishes as your reference list, and why it is not enough

For the broker state portion PSI publishes exactly one reference. On page 10 of bulletin 511, under "STATE PORTION OF THE EXAMINATION", it prints: Tennessee Real Estate Broker's Licensing Act of 1973, T.C.A. 62-13-312(B)1-21, with a link.

The provision it names is current. Tenn. Code Ann. § 62-13-312(b) still runs (b)(1) through (b)(21), and none of the twenty-one subdivisions is repealed. But the reference has two defects that you should know about before you rely on it.

The scope is wrong. Section 62-13-312(b) is the grounds-for-discipline list and nothing else. The outline PSI itself prints tests parts 1 through 4 of chapter 13 and the whole of Tennessee Real Estate Commission rule chapters 1260-01 and 1260-02. A candidate who read only § 62-13-312(b) would have no source at all for advertising (rule 1260-02-.12), for trust accounts (rule 1260-02-.09), or for agency (Tenn. Code Ann. §§ 62-13-401 to -408). Those three areas alone are 21 items — about 40 percent of the state portion. The single published reference covers well under half of what is tested.

The link and the name are wrong. The URL points at lawserver.com, a third-party aggregator that is JavaScript-gated, rather than at the Tennessee code. And the statute's own short title, set by § 62-13-101, is the "Tennessee Real Estate Broker License Act of 1973" — not "Broker's Licensing Act". A small thing, but it is the sort of small thing that sends a candidate searching for a statute under a name that does not exist.

There is a second reference block on the same bulletin page, and it is not yours. It lists the Official Manual of the Real Estate Commission, sections 62-13 and 66-32, rules section 1260-1, and the Tennessee Human Rights Act at section 4-21. That block sits under the heading "TIMESHARE SALESPERSON EXAMINATION", which is a different license and a different test. Do not read it as the broker reference list.

Everything else cited in this chapter — every Tenn. Code Ann. section beyond § 62-13-312(b), and every Tenn. Comp. R. & Regs. rule — is ours, read out of the current code and the current rule chapters, not published by PSI. The regulator throughout is the Tennessee Real Estate Commission (TREC), which sits inside the Department of Commerce and Insurance.

One thing to fix in your head before you read any further

Tennessee displaces the common law of agency. It does not supplement it.

Section 62-13-402(c) provides that the duties in §§ 62-13-403 and -404 supersede the fiduciary or common-law duties owed on 1 January 1996, and § 62-13-408 provides that part 4 of the license act supersedes the common law where the two are inconsistent.

The national portion of this book — and every national broker text — builds agency out of the common law: fiduciary duty, the undivided loyalty framework, knowledge imputed from agent to principal, and the doctrine that an agency can arise by conduct. In Tennessee that whole framework is switched off and replaced by statute. Where the national chapter and part 4 disagree, part 4 wins, and the state portion tests part 4.

This is not a technicality confined to one area. It changes the answer to questions in Agency and Disclosure (14% of the exam), and it is the reason two other rules further down read the way they do — the non-vicarious discipline rule in § 62-13-310(c), and the abolition of imputed knowledge inside designated agency in § 62-13-406(c). If you take one structural idea out of this chapter, take this one.

Duties and Powers of the Real Estate Commission (6 items, 12%)

Six items, and the outline's four lettered subtopics tell you where they land: the purpose of the Commission, the persons and disputes not within its jurisdiction, complaints and hearings, and disciplinary actions. The second of those four is the one candidates never revise and the exam likes.

Purpose of the Commission

The operative rule. Tenn. Code Ann. § 62-13-201 creates the Tennessee Real Estate Commission and gives it nine members appointed by the governor: seven who have been principally engaged as a licensed broker or affiliate broker in Tennessee for at least five years, and two who are not in the business. Three come from each grand division of the state, terms run five years, and no member may serve more than one full successive term. Section 62-13-203 gives the Commission power to do all things necessary and proper for carrying out the Real Estate Broker License Act, to promulgate rules under the Uniform Administrative Procedures Act, and to establish canons of ethics and minimum standards of practice.

What it means in practice. Tennessee's three grand divisions — East, Middle and West — are a constitutional feature of the state, and they are written into the composition of the board. The seven-to-two split gives the industry a working majority balanced by two public members, and the one-successive-term cap keeps any individual from becoming the Commission.

Where it bites. The Commission is inside the Department of Commerce and Insurance, in its division of regulatory boards. That is not organizational trivia: it is why § 62-13-312(d) speaks of the director of the division of regulatory boards — not the Commission — as the official who may walk into your office and examine your escrow records.

The trap. Distractors offer the Tennessee Association of Realtors, the Secretary of State, and the Attorney General. The association is a private membership body whose rules bind only those who join, and it issues no license. The Secretary of State records business filings, so your firm's corporate registration lives there but your license does not. The Attorney General represents the state in litigation. Chapter 13 gives licensing power to none of them.

Persons and disputes not within Commission jurisdiction

The operative rule. Tenn. Comp. R. & Regs. 1260-02-.02(8) states flatly that the Commission will not intervene in the settlement of debts, loans, draws, or commission disputes between firms, brokers, and/or affiliates.

What it means in practice. A money quarrel between licensees is a civil matter — for the courts, or for whatever the firm's independent contractor agreement provides. The Commission's disciplinary jurisdiction under § 62-13-312 runs to misrepresentation, mishandling of trust money, failure to supervise and the rest of the twenty-one grounds. It does not run to who is owed what share of a commission.

Where it bites. Two licensees at the same firm fall out over a co-listing split after closing. Neither can improve their position by filing with the Commission, and a broker who threatens to do so is threatening something that will not happen.

The one place the Commission does referee between licensees. Rule 1260-01-.18 lets it refuse a firm name that is the same as, or confusingly similar to, an existing firm's, with an appeal to the executive director and then to the Commission, whose decision is final. That is the narrow exception; note how different it is in kind from a money dispute.

Complaints, notifications, hearings

The operative rule. Tenn. Code Ann. § 62-13-313(a)(1) requires the Commission, before refusing to issue a license or suspending or revoking one on a verified written complaint, to notify the accused in writing and enclose a copy of the complaint. Subdivision (a)(2) gives the accused ten days to file an answer, a copy of which is transmitted to the complainant. Only then does subdivision (a)(3) let the Commission decide, after investigation, that the matter should be set for hearing. Section 62-13-313(c) requires the affirmative vote of a majority of the commission to revoke or suspend.

The filing window. Section 62-13-313(e) sets when a complaint may be brought: two years from the violation, or the applicable criminal statute of limitations, or ten days after a criminal prosecution becomes final.

The trap on the vote. A majority of nine is five. Unanimity is not required and would make discipline nearly impossible; no two-thirds supermajority appears anywhere in chapter 13. And the executive director — who administers the office and decides firm-name appeals in the first instance — cannot revoke or suspend a license alone. Compare § 62-13-311, which sets a materially higher bar in a different situation: where a court has revoked a license as part of a judgment, reissuance requires the consenting vote of six commission members. Five to discipline, six to give it back.

The trap on the ten days. Ten days is the answer window. Sixty days is a different deadline entirely — § 62-13-312(f), reporting a criminal conviction — and candidates swap the two.

Disciplinary actions

The operative rule. Tenn. Code Ann. § 62-13-312(b) lists twenty-one grounds for refusing, suspending or revoking a license. Subsection (c) then adds a remedy that is distinctly Tennessee: the Commission may, in addition to or in lieu of any other lawful disciplinary action against a broker, order that the broker be downgraded to affiliate broker status.

Why that sanction exists. It is precisely calibrated. A downgraded licensee can still practice and still earn, but loses the authority to hold escrow money and to supervise others — which is exactly the authority a broker who has mishandled trust funds or failed to supervise should not have. The national manuscript's discipline chapter describes the usual ladder of reprimand, fine, suspension and revocation; Tennessee has a rung on it that most states do not.

The money. Rule 1260-02-.32(1) authorizes a civil penalty of $0 to $1,000 for each separate violation of a statute, rule or order pertaining to the Commission. Paragraph (2) applies the same range to an unlicensed person acting as a broker. Paragraph (3) is the one that matters: each day of a continued violation may constitute a separate violation. That is how a small daily figure becomes a large total. Paragraph (4) lists the factors weighed, including deterrence, severity, and the economic benefit gained by the violator.

The trap. Damages are awarded by courts, not by the Commission, and treble damages appear nowhere in chapter 13. The Commission cannot reassign a firm's listings, which are contracts between the firm and its clients. And retesting is a condition of reinstatement under the expired-license and revoked-license rules — not a disciplinary sanction available under § 62-13-312.