Minnesota Real Estate Broker Exam Study Guide (2026)

This chapter covers Minnesota law only. Agency theory, federal fair housing, RESPA and TILA, financing, valuation and the arithmetic are in the national portion you have just read. What follows is the 60 scored items that only a Minnesota candidate sits — in the order PSI prints its areas, and sized to what each area is actually worth.

1. What the Minnesota state portion actually is

Minnesota's examination is delivered by PSI, not Pearson VUE, under candidate information bulletin 10954, published as a live PSI endpoint and delivered "in cooperation with the Minnesota Department of Commerce." The copy this chapter is built from is a 17-page PDF created 2025-09-02. The practice examination PSI points candidates to sits at test-takers.psiexams.com/mnre, and duplicate score reports come from scorereport@psionline.com. If a study guide tells you Minnesota real estate is a Pearson VUE exam, it is describing a different state or an older arrangement.

The broker paper, as the bulletin's EXAMINATION SUMMARY TABLE prints it:

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

First, the general portion is 75 items worth 80 points. The bulletin explains why in a single line: "Note: General broker exams include questions that are scored up to two points." Five points of the national paper come from items scored double. The Minnesota state portion has no double scoring at all — 60 items, 60 points, one point each. Every state question is worth exactly what every other state question is worth, which has a practical consequence: there is no item on the Minnesota paper worth spending four minutes on. Ninety minutes across sixty items is ninety seconds each, and that is the pace to rehearse.

Second, the pass standard is two standards, not one. Minn. Stat. 82.59, subd. 6 fixes a passing grade for both the salesperson's and the broker's examination at "a score of 75 percent or higher on the uniform portion and a score of 75 percent or higher on the state portion," and the PSI bulletin repeats the 75 percent requirement. The portions are scored separately, which is what lets a candidate who passes one retake only the other — and which also means a strong national result cannot carry a weak Minnesota result. Forty-five correct out of sixty is the state line. Study accordingly.

The arithmetic in PSI's Minnesota outline does not close, and you need to know why

Here is the Minnesota broker state content outline as the bulletin prints it, with the item counts that appear beside each area:

The broker column sums to 50 against a declared 60. The salesperson column sums to 40 against a declared 50. Both tiers are short by exactly ten.

This is not a misreading of a two-column page. The outline page was extracted twice — once with a layout-preserving pass over the whole document, once in raw reading order over the single page carrying the state outline — and the two agree. There is no fifth area. The Minnesota outline runs from the heading "MINNESOTA STATE CONTENT OUTLINE" through exactly four areas to their last line, "2. Liens: Liens; Labor, Material Ch. 514," at which point the next license's heading begins. Nothing was lost in a column break.

Nor did the counts wander in from a third tier. Each area prints both tiers inline — "Real Estate Brokerage License Law (Salesperson 20, Broker 25)" — so there is no third column the numbers could have come from. And the declared totals are printed twice, in two languages: the English EXAMINATION SUMMARY TABLE on page 11 gives Broker State 60 items and Salesperson State 50 items, and the Spanish TABLA RESUMEN DEL EXAMEN on page 15 repeats "Corredor / Del estado / 60" and "Vendedor / Del estado / 50."

The decisive evidence that this is PSI's defect and not a house convention sits on the same page of the same document. The bulletin also carries an outline for the Minnesota Abstracter examination, and that outline's per-area counts sum exactly: 10 + 15 + 20 + 5 = 50, against a declared 50. PSI's arithmetic closes for the third license in the file and fails for both real-estate tiers.

What this means for you, stated plainly: 25, 10, 9 and 6 are relative weights. They are not published item counts, and this book never presents them as such. Nothing in this chapter, in the practice bank behind it, or in any PrepPass copy about Minnesota tells you that License Law "is 25 questions." What the four figures reliably give you is the proportion — half the paper is License Law, a fifth is Interests in Real Property, a bit under a fifth is Conveyance, and an eighth is Financial Instruments. That proportion is what this chapter is sized to, and what your study time should be sized to.

There is a second, quieter consequence worth naming, because it will show up if you compare any Minnesota practice set to the outline. Exact proportional coverage is arithmetically impossible at 60 questions. The shares that come out of 25/10/9/6 are 50, 20, 18 and 12 percent. Eighteen percent of 60 is 10.8. Twelve percent of 60 is 7.2. Neither is a whole number of questions, so no 60-item set can match the outline exactly; a set would have to be 50 or 100 items long for the fractions to resolve. The distribution used behind this book — 30 / 12 / 11 / 7 — is the provably closest fit at sixty, and it is still not perfect. That is not sloppiness in the practice set. It is the same defect, one step downstream: the outline's shares do not divide the total it declares.

One thing PSI gets unusually right

Set against all of that, Minnesota's bulletin does something no other vendor document in this program does. It cites the actual statutes. Twenty-eight citations to the Minnesota Statutes are embedded directly in the content outline — chapter and section, subtopic by subtopic. Most states' bulletins publish a bare topic list and a reading list of national textbooks, leaving a candidate to guess which state law is behind each line. Minnesota hands you the map.

All twenty-eight were checked against the current Minnesota Statutes on revisor.mn.gov. Nothing on the list is repealed. In a program where one neighboring state's outline cites roughly thirty regulations that no longer exist, that is genuinely rare and worth saying out loud. Three of the twenty-eight carry labels that are loose or stale, and PSI leaves out seven live provisions that the outline's own subtopics test — all of which is set out in section 6 below. But the citations themselves are live law, and you can study straight off them.

2. Real Estate Brokerage License Law (about half the state portion)

PSI's nine printed subtopics: 1. Definitions Ch. 82.55 · 2. Licensing Ch. 82.57–82.63 · 3. Trust accounts Ch. 82.75 · 4. Standards of Conduct Ch. 82.72–82.73 · 5. Commissioner's authority Ch. 45.011–45.43 · 6. Real Estate Education, Research, and Recovery Fund Ch. 82.86 · 7. Agency Disclosure Requirements Ch. 82.67 · 8. Other Disclosure Requirements Ch. 82.68 · 9. Compensation Ch. 82.70.

Nine subtopics, half the paper. On the proportions above, roughly one item in two that you answer on the Minnesota portion comes from chapter 82. If you have limited time, this section is where it goes.

And within the half, the nine subtopics are not equal. PSI publishes no per-subtopic weights — remember that its per-area figures do not even sum — so nobody can honestly tell you what each subtopic is worth in items. What can be said is which subtopics carry the most independently examinable rules, and that ranking is not the order PSI prints them in. Licensing (82.57–82.63) and trust accounts (82.75) between them hold more discrete, numbered, testable rules than the other seven put together: deadlines counted in days, hour counts, year counts, and a closed list of four events. Agency disclosure (82.67) comes next, because Minnesota's four-option form is unusual enough that the exam can come at it from four directions. Definitions (82.55) produces short, high-confidence items and is the cheapest studying you will do all week. The recovery fund (82.86) is essentially two dollar figures and one gate. Records and standards of conduct (82.72–82.73) is two retention periods and one supervision sentence. Commissioner's authority (45.011–45.43) and compensation (82.70) are about one rule apiece. Other disclosures (82.68) is one list of what is not material, plus one duty to speak.

Allocate your time inside this area the way the rules are distributed, and licensing plus trust accounts take roughly a third of it, with the remaining seven subtopics dividing the rest.

Definitions: the four that decide questions

Chapter 82's definitions section, Minn. Stat. 82.55, is cited as a subtopic in its own right, which tells you the exam asks definitional questions directly rather than only using the definitions to build scenarios. Four of them do most of the work.

"Primary broker" (82.55, subd. 15). The primary broker is the broker on whose behalf salespersons are licensed to act under section 82.63, subdivision 4. Where the brokerage is a corporation, partnership or limited liability company, the primary broker is each officer or partner individually licensed to act as broker for that entity. Notice what the definition does not turn on: production, seniority, ownership percentage, or whether the person happens to run the office day to day. It turns on licensure — whose license the firm's salespeople hang under. This matters because the primary broker is the person chapter 82 holds responsible when supervision fails, and a firm cannot move that responsibility by giving somebody a title.

"Dual agency" (82.55, subd. 6). A dual agency is a situation in which a licensee owes a duty to more than one party to the transaction, and Minnesota names two establishing circumstances: one licensee representing both the buyer and the seller, and two or more licensees licensed to the same broker each representing a party. The second half is the one candidates miss. Two agents at the same firm on opposite sides of one deal is a dual agency in Minnesota by operation of the definition — it does not matter that the two have never spoken, sit in different branch offices, or dislike each other. Two agents at unrelated firms is an ordinary cooperative sale and no dual agency at all.

"Trust account" (82.55, subd. 25). Minnesota builds three requirements into the definition itself: the account is maintained to segregate trust funds from other funds; it must be an interest-bearing account paying the highest current passbook savings account rate; and it must not allow the financial institution a right of setoff against money the licensee owes that institution. That last clause is the one nobody expects and the one that occasionally shows up: a broker cannot hold client money at an institution that could sweep it to cover the brokerage's own overdrawn operating account.

The five-transaction presumption (82.55, subd. 19, clause (g)). A person is presumed to be engaged in the business of selling real estate, and therefore inside the broker definition and needing a license, if the person engages as principal in five or more transactions during any 12-month period — unless the person is represented by a licensed real estate broker or salesperson. The general rule everywhere is that you need a license to deal for another; this clause is Minnesota's answer to the person who deals for their own account at volume. Five in twelve months, and the safe harbor is hiring a licensee.

Where it bites. An investor buys, rehabs and resells six houses in a calendar year in their own name, unrepresented, and takes the view that an owner selling their own property never needs a license. In Minnesota that view is wrong at the fifth transaction. The general "owner selling their own property" principle you learned in the national portion is real, but Minnesota puts a count on it.

One more definition worth pinning, because another chapter borrows it. Section 82.55, subd. 26 is the "trust funds" definition — the money received in a fiduciary capacity that chapter 82 requires a broker to segregate. It matters outside chapter 82 because section 504B.178, subd. 2 carves residential security deposits out of it by name (see section 3 below). When you meet a question about whether a property manager holding tenant deposits is holding chapter 82 trust funds, the answer runs through that cross-reference, not through general fiduciary principles.

A note on how these definitions are tested. Minnesota's definitional items tend to be clean — a stem asking what a term means, four short options, one of which restates the statute. They are also the fastest points on the paper. When you are working the ninety-second average, definitional items are where you bank the time you will spend on the trust-account and foreclosure scenarios later.

Licensing: the broker gate, and the numbers on it

Experience — three years within five. Minn. Stat. 82.59, subd. 4(b) requires every application for the broker examination to be accompanied by proof of "a minimum of three years of actual experience within the previous five-year period prior to application as a licensed real estate salesperson," in Minnesota or in another state with comparable requirements — or that the applicant is otherwise or similarly qualified in the commissioner's opinion by reason of education or practical experience. Two numbers, and both matter: three years of experience, inside a five-year lookback. A person who sold actively from 2014 to 2018 and then left the business cannot walk back in on that record in 2026.

The waiver, and its three named categories. Section 82.59, subd. 5(b) lets the commissioner waive the experience requirement for exactly three kinds of applicant:

1. an individual with a degree in real estate from an accredited college or university;
2. a licensed practicing attorney whose practice involves real estate law; and
3. a public officer whose official duties involve real estate law or real estate transactions.

That is the whole list, and a waiver provision is read to its terms. A home inspector with a decade in residential construction, a certified residential appraiser, a title company officer, a mortgage loan originator, a licensed contractor — every one of them works in real estate every day, and none of them is on the list. Paragraph (e) then puts a clock on the waiver: it lapses if the applicant fails to complete the broker's examination within one year of the date the waiver was granted. A waiver is not a permanent credential; it is a one-year window.

Education — 30 hours, three of them fair housing. Section 82.59, subd. 8(b) requires a broker applicant to complete a commissioner-approved course of 30 hours of instruction, of which three hours must be training in state and federal fair housing laws, regulations and rules, completed within 12 months prior to the date of application. Keep this apart from the salesperson track: the 90-hour figure some candidates carry describes the salesperson prelicense sequence, and the 60-hour course with two hours of agency training is the salesperson's second course under paragraph (a) of the same subdivision. The broker course is 30 hours with a three-hour fair housing component, and it goes stale after a year.

One broker at a time. Section 82.63, subd. 4 requires a salesperson to be licensed to act on behalf of a licensed broker and provides that a salesperson may not be licensed to act on behalf of more than one broker in this state during the same period of time. Both brokers consenting does not create an exception; per-transaction disclosure does not create one either. The limit is a condition of licensure, not a private arrangement between firms. The rule candidates sometimes confuse it with is subd. 2, which lets a broker hold an additional broker's license for an affiliated business entity — that provision governs brokers, not salespersons.

Termination — ten days. Under section 82.63, subd. 6, when a salesperson terminates activity on behalf of a broker the salesperson's license becomes ineffective, and within ten days of the termination the broker must notify the commissioner in the form the commissioner prescribes. Two halves, and the first is easy to skip past: the license does not merely need paperwork, it stops working. A salesperson between firms is not licensed to do anything. The salesperson may apply to transfer to another broker at any point in the remainder of the license period.

The 45-day emergency permit. Section 82.63, subd. 12 lets the commissioner issue a 45-day temporary broker's permit on the death, incapacity or loss of license of a broker, to an individual with a minimum of three years of actual experience as a licensed salesperson who is otherwise reasonably qualified. It is renewed once on a showing of a good faith effort to obtain a broker's license and that an extension will not harm the public interest. This exists so that a brokerage whose broker dies on a Tuesday can still close Friday's files; it is not a substitute route to licensure, and the ordinary license term (24 months under subd. 5) is not what it runs for.

Continuing education — 30 hours per 24 months, front-loaded. Section 82.61(a) requires 30 hours of approved continuing education during the initial license period and during each succeeding 24-month license period, and at least 15 of the 30 must be completed during the first 12 months. The section also requires at least one hour each period on agency representation and disclosure and at least one hour on fair housing and other antidiscrimination law. The front-loading rule is the operative trap: a licensee who does zero in year one and thirty in year two has not complied even though the total is right.