What you can genuinely get free
Pre-licensing education is never free — your state requires an approved paid course. Exam practice largely is, and the most valuable free resource is the one almost nobody reads: your state’s own candidate handbook.
Start with the candidate handbook
Every state’s testing vendor publishes one, free, and it is the only document that tells you exactly what you face: the number of scored questions, the time limit, the passing score, what identification is accepted, what you may bring, and the retake rules. Almost everything published elsewhere about your exam is a summary of this document, often an out-of-date one.
Texas’s September 2026 handbook, for instance, states the sales exam is 125 items in 240 minutes, that you need 56 of 85 on the national portion and 28 of 50 on the state portion, that pretest questions are mixed in unmarked, and that three failures trigger a further 30 to 60 hours of education. None of that is guesswork and all of it is free.
Find it by searching for your state plus “real estate candidate handbook” on the vendor’s site — Pearson VUE or PSI — or via your state commission’s exam page.
Free practice questions
| Source | What you get | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| PrepAgent | A free practice question bank | Owned by AceableAgent; expect upsell |
| AceableAgent | Free state practice tests | Some offers are email-gated |
| Colibri | Free practice exam | Only ten questions, and registration required |
Verified on each provider’s own site, September 2026.
Be realistic about what these are for. A free sample is a marketing instrument sized to demonstrate quality and then stop. Ten questions will not prepare you for a 125-item exam, and the provider knows that. They are useful for judging whether you like the interface before paying.
We could not confirm that Kaplan publishes any free practice exam, so do not assume it does.
Free things that are actually free
Fee schedules, application forms, rule changes and often the statute itself. This is the authoritative source for everything about your own license, and it is the one we used to write these pages.
Roughly two-thirds of your exam covers principles that apply in every state. Free material aimed at any state is useful for that portion, though never for the state-law portion.
Texas and Colorado publish how each school's students perform. It is free, independent, and the only real quality signal in this market.
Real estate principles textbooks date slowly for the national portion. State law changes; fundamentals do not.
Common questions
Can I pass using only free resources?
You cannot get licensed on them, because the state mandates an approved paid pre-licensing course. Whether you need paid exam prep on top is a separate question, and for many candidates the answer is no.
Are free practice questions representative?
Rarely of the state-law portion, which is where most candidates struggle and which differs entirely between states. Free material skews towards national-portion fundamentals because that content is reusable everywhere.
Is a free trial worth taking?
Yes, as an interface test. Some providers offer one. Use it to find out whether you can tolerate the platform for the number of hours your state requires — which in Texas is 180.