Real Estate License Portability by State
A client calls about a property one state over. Can you work that deal on the license you already hold? The industry sorts states into three categories to answer this, and when we checked those categories against the statutes, a third of them were wrong.
The labels are an industry convention, not law
Cooperative, physical location and turf are categories the trade uses. No statute uses them. They are a useful shorthand right up to the point where the label and the statute disagree, and the published lists are copied between sites rather than re-derived, so an error made once survives for years.
We re-derived 27 states directly from statute. The scorecard is not reassuring.
A third of the states we re-derived carried no industry label in the first place, so the circulating lists are incomplete as well as unreliable.
The corrections
- Called cooperative, actually closedFlorida, South Carolina and Colorado are turf or near turf on their own statutes. If you planned a deal in one of these on the strength of a cooperative label, that is the error that costs the most.
- Called turf, actually open for commercialMissouri, Kentucky and New Mexico all run a genuine cooperative route on commercial property. The label told people not to bother asking.
- Called physical location, actually closer to turfArkansas has no cooperation mechanism of any kind and no commercial carve out.
- Correctly labeledNew Jersey, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Connecticut, Montana and Utah. The label held up when we read the statute.
- True only in a slice, and the wrong slice is the dangerous oneDelaware, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Kansas are each called cooperative. Delaware is buyer side only and never on predominantly residential property. Nevada is a $150 single transaction certificate serving only buyers who are not Nevada residents. Oregon is nonresidential only and an Oregon licensee must physically accompany every showing. Kansas and Idaho are commercial only.
Every state, and what it actually allows
The short answer below is the one written by whoever read that state's statute, quoted as they wrote it. Each state links to its full page, where the agreement, filing, fee and enforcement detail lives.
| State | Can you work a deal there without its license | Commission share or referral |
|---|---|---|
| Alabama | Only if you are a licensed principal broker elsewhere. | Probably not as a bare fee |
| Alaska | The money may cross the border, the work may not. | Yes |
| Arizona | Only through a written cooperation agreement with an Arizona broker, signed before any work, with every Arizona negotiation running through that broker, who assumes responsibility. | Yes |
| Arkansas | No. | Probably |
| California | No. | Yes |
| Colorado | No. | Yes |
| Connecticut | On commercial property, yes. | Yes |
| Delaware | In one slice, yes. | Yes |
| District of Columbia | No. | Yes |
| Florida | No. | Yes |
| Georgia | Yes. | Yes |
| Hawaii | Hawaii is a verified physical location state, which is one of the few places the industry's long-standing label holds up. | Yes |
| Idaho | Commercial only, and there the answer is a clean yes. | Yes |
| Illinois | No. | Yes |
| Indiana | Commercial yes, residential no. | Yes |
| Iowa | No. | Yes |
| Kansas | For COMMERCIAL, yes. | Yes |
| Kentucky | Commercial yes, residential no, so the turf label on national lists is wrong here. | Yes |
| Louisiana | Yes, and unusually broadly. | Yes |
| Maine | Yes for a deal you work entirely from outside Maine. | Yes |
| Maryland | Commercial only. | Yes |
| Massachusetts | No. | Yes |
| Michigan | Only from outside Michigan. | Yes |
| Minnesota | No. | Yes |
| Mississippi | Yes. | Yes |
| Missouri | For COMMERCIAL, yes, and Missouri is genuinely cooperative despite the turf-state label on industry lists. | Yes |
| Montana | No, and Montana forecloses it in the statute rather than leaving it to inference. | Yes |
| Nebraska | No. | Yes |
| Nevada | Yes, but only in one narrow lane. | Yes |
| New Hampshire | For COMMERCIAL, yes, a real door. | Yes |
| New Jersey | No. | Yes |
| New Mexico | Yes for commercial, no for residential. | Yes |
| New York | No. | Yes |
| North Carolina | Residential, no; NC draws the line at physical presence and has no cooperative deal mechanism, and whether a fully remote out-of-state licensee can handle an NC deal is confirming, so treat anything beyond a referral as needing a license. | Yes |
| North Dakota | No, and not remotely either. | Yes |
| Ohio | Commercial only. | Yes |
| Oklahoma | Not inside Oklahoma. | Not clearly |
| Oregon | Only for nonresidential property, and never alone. | Yes |
| Pennsylvania | No. | Yes in practice |
| Rhode Island | Yes, and Rhode Island is unusually generous here. | Yes |
| South Carolina | Treat South Carolina as a turf state. | Yes |
| South Dakota | No, and not remotely either. | Yes |
| Tennessee | No. | Yes |
| Texas | One deal works only through a co-brokerage with a Texas broker, who may share the earned commission with you. | Yes |
| Utah | No. | Yes |
| Vermont | No, and Vermont says it plainer than any other state. | Yes |
| Virginia | For commercial property only, yes. | Yes |
| Washington | Commercial only. | Yes |
| West Virginia | No, and West Virginia closes the usual workaround by name. | Probably yes |
| Wisconsin | Yes, and unusually the cooperative statute covers residential as well as commercial. | Yes |
| Wyoming | No, not one act performed inside Wyoming. | Yes |
What the three categories mean
Cooperative. You may physically work a deal in the state under a written agreement with a broker licensed there, who supervises and usually holds the money. Often commercial only, and often one transaction at a time.
Physical location. You may be paid for the deal, sometimes a full negotiated split rather than a capped referral fee, but only if you do the work from outside the state's borders. Entering to show or negotiate breaks it.
Turf. No licensed activity on that state's property by anyone it has not licensed, agreement or no agreement. The only routes are a referral to a local licensee or getting the license.
West Virginia closes the usual workaround by name. Its statute requires a license "even if the person or entity is licensed in another state and is affiliated or otherwise associated with a licensed real estate broker in this state." That is the most explicit anti cooperation sentence we found anywhere.
The question nobody has answered
Physical location states are defined by geography, and remote work is exactly where geography stops being obvious. If you negotiate a Hawaii deal entirely by phone and email from Ohio, have you conducted negotiations in Hawaii?
Only two states answer it. North Dakota and South Dakota both deem electronic communication to be activity in the state, which welds the remote route shut on purpose. They are a matched pair and the only two we found that do it.
None of the physical location states carries such a clause. So in every one of them, whether a purely remote negotiation counts as being in the state is unsettled. That is the single most valuable unanswered question in this layer, and the honest answer is that we do not know. Where your plan depends on it, call the commission before the deal rather than after.
Keep going
- The real estate planner, which builds a transfer plan across the states you pick.
- Errors and omissions insurance, and the 15 states that make it mandatory.
- All four professions we cover.