Occupation / job
Real Estate Brokers
Median annual pay. Half earn less than this.
Hourly at a standard 2,080-hour year. We do not yet have unpaid-time or cost data for this, so this is not an adjusted figure.
The middle half. A quarter earn below this range.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 · view
What this figure cannot tell you
It covers people EMPLOYED in this occupation. Anyone who trained for it and was never hired is not in the median above, and neither is anyone doing the work self-employed. No verified count of qualified people exists for this occupation, so this page shows none rather than an estimate. Why that matters · The occupations where we could source it
Who this suits
At $73,220 against a $50,020 midpoint, Real Estate Brokers pays $23,200 a year more than the typical American job — $11.15 an hour. Nothing pays that much more for free, and the thing it is paid for is what you should be reading about.
Employment stands at 46,100. Real Estate Brokers is common enough to be recruited for continuously and specific enough that the experience travels — the combination that makes changing employer a working pay rise.
These roles suit people who can generate their own pipeline, since nobody hands you one and the income follows directly from it.
How long it takes to become one of the 46,100 people doing this is not something we have a source for. BLS counts and pays them; it does not record how they got there, and we would rather say so than guess.
Who should not do this
A quarter earn under $46,480, a quarter over $103,360: $4,740 a month between them at a 2.2x ratio. Planning around the midpoint of a spread this wide is planning around a number very few people in Real Estate Brokers actually earn.
The bottom quarter of Real Estate Brokers earns under $46,480, which is within $3,540 of the $50,020 typical American job. An occupation whose 25th percentile is level with the national middle has an unusually forgiving downside.
Avoid it if you cannot fund the months before the pipeline produces anything.
There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 46,100 people employed as Real Estate Brokers; it did not count the people who trained for it and are doing something else, and a rate built without that denominator would be a number we made up.
What the spread tells you
From $46,480 to $103,360 at 2.2x: something inside this occupation sorts people a long way apart. Identifying what it is — sector, employer, credential — is worth more than any general advice about Real Estate Brokers.
Put in money rather than ratios: $46,480 at the 25th percentile, $73,220 at the midpoint, $103,360 at the 75th. $56,880 separates the quarter of Real Estate Brokers at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
The 75th percentile is $103,360. Reaching it from the $73,220 midpoint is $30,140 a year; reaching it from the $46,480 that the bottom quarter of Real Estate Brokers earn is $56,880.
$73,220 sits almost exactly in the middle of its own range — $26,740 above the bottom quarter, $30,140 below the top one. A symmetric distribution like this is the case where the median genuinely does describe the typical person.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $22.34 at the bottom quarter, $35.20 at the midpoint, $49.69 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.
What these figures are, and what they are not
Employers reported these wages for people already working as Real Estate Brokers. The self-employed are excluded, so $73,220 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Real Estate Brokers, the hourly figure is $73,220 over a 2,080-hour year — a unit conversion, not an adjustment.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else