Texas Real Estate License Renewal: CE & SAE Guide (2026)

Texas real estate license renewal runs on a two-year cycle, but the very first renewal works differently than every one after it. For a first-time renewal, TREC requires 98 total hours of education completed before the license expires: 90 hours of Sales Agent Apprentice Education (SAE) — which must include a 30-hour Real Estate Brokerage course — plus 4 hours of Legal Update I and 4 hours of Legal Update II, per Texas Occupations Code Section 1101.455. Every renewal after that drops to 18 hours of continuing education every two years: 4 hours Legal Update I, 4 hours Legal Update II, 3 hours Contract-Related coursework, and 7 hours of TREC-approved electives. The on-time renewal fee is $110 when filed online through TREC's portal, and as of January 1, 2026, every Texas broker must fold a 6-hour Broker Responsibility course into that 18-hour cycle, whether or not they sponsor other agents.

New sales agents don't renew under the standard 18-hour CE rule the first time. Instead, TREC requires 98 hours of Sales Agent Apprentice Education and Legal Update coursework before your license can be renewed at the end of its first two-year term — active or inactive status makes no difference. That's on top of the 180 hours of qualifying pre-license education you already completed, bringing your total classroom time to 278 hours by the end of year two. The 98 hours break down as 90 hours of SAE plus 4 hours of Legal Update I and 4 hours of Legal Update II. Since October 1, 2023, TREC has required that a 30-hour Real Estate Brokerage course be part of those 90 SAE hours — a change meant to expose brand-new agents to brokerage operations, trust funds, and supervision structures earlier in their career, rather than letting them learn those mechanics only from whatever their sponsoring broker happens to teach in-house. The remaining 60 SAE hours can come from TREC-approved elective coursework covering topics like risk management, contracts, or property management. There's no way to test out of SAE the way some states let experienced agents from other jurisdictions skip pre-license hours. Every first-time Texas sales agent owes the full 98 hours regardless of prior real estate experience elsewhere, and TREC's online license record shows your running hour count in real time so you can see exactly what's missing before you're staring down an expiration date. Miss the 98-hour requirement and TREC will not process your first license renewal, regardless of how clean your transaction history is — a lapsed renewal at this stage sends you straight into the late-renewal rules covered below, not a grace period unique to new agents.

Once you're past your first renewal, the requirement simplifies to 18 hours of continuing education every two years under 22 Texas Administrative Code Section 535.92. Those 18 hours are fixed in structure, not just a total: 4 hours of Legal Update I, 4 hours of Legal Update II, 3 hours of Contract-Related coursework, and 7 hours of electives covering topics like fair housing, property management, or technology in real estate. This same 4-4-3-7 structure applies to both sales agents and brokers, before the 2026 broker add-on described below. Legal Update I and II change content every renewal cycle to reflect new legislation and TREC rule changes, so a course you took two cycles ago won't satisfy this cycle's requirement even if the title looks identical — TREC assigns each cycle's Legal Update courses a new course number, and providers can't recycle an expired one. Contract-Related coursework has to specifically address contract law, forms, or addenda; a general marketing or technology elective won't satisfy that 3-hour bucket even if it happens to mention contracts in passing. You can complete the 18 hours anytime during your two-year period — TREC does not require even spacing across the cycle, so agents who front-load their CE in year one of a two-year term are just as compliant as those who cram it into the final month. But license maintenance and renewal rules require every hour to come from a TREC-approved provider and post to your license record before your expiration date, or it doesn't count toward your file no matter when you actually sat in the course.

Starting January 1, 2026, every actively licensed Texas broker must complete a 6-hour Broker Responsibility course as part of their 18-hour CE cycle — not in addition to it. That means the 6 hours count against your 18-hour total, effectively narrowing your elective options to 1 hour instead of 7 for that cycle (18 total minus 4 Legal Update I, 4 Legal Update II, 3 Contract-Related, and 6 Broker Responsibility). A broker who has already scheduled a full slate of unrelated electives for their 2026 renewal will need to drop most of them to make room. The rule applies to every broker, including those who don't currently sponsor sales agents and run a one-person shop. TREC's rationale ties to broker responsibilities for supervision, trust account oversight, and advertising compliance — areas where TREC's enforcement actions and complaint filings have concentrated in recent renewal cycles, according to the commission's own disciplinary reports. Sales agents who've been designated a supervisor by their sponsoring broker also need the Broker Responsibility course, even though they aren't brokers themselves and otherwise follow the standard 18-hour sales agent structure. Brokers who let this slip won't discover the gap until TREC's course-approval system rejects a renewal application that's missing the required 6 hours — there's no manual override at the point of submission. Since the Broker Responsibility course is a new mandatory bucket rather than an elective swap-in, waiting until the last weeks of a renewal cycle to find a provider offering it during 2026's first year is the most common way brokers end up needing the CE deferral option described later in this guide.

The on-time renewal fee for a Texas sales agent license is $110 when filed online, per TREC's fee schedule effective December 15, 2025. Paper renewal applications carry an additional $20 surcharge, so filing through TREC's online portal at trec.texas.gov is both faster and cheaper — TREC processes online renewals in days, while paper submissions can take several weeks during peak filing periods. Your renewal deadline is your license's expiration date — exactly two years from your original issuance date or last renewal, not a fixed calendar date shared by all agents the way some states' license years work. TREC sends email reminders roughly 90 days out, but the statutory responsibility to track your own expiration date and CE completion sits with the license holder, not the commission; a returned or ignored email doesn't extend a deadline. The $110 (or $130 paper) renewal fee is separate from what you'll pay for the CE or SAE courses themselves. Course providers set their own pricing, and a full 98-hour SAE package commonly runs $250 to $500 depending on the provider and delivery format, while an 18-hour CE package for later renewals typically runs $80 to $150. Budgeting for both the state fee and the coursework separately avoids a surprise total at renewal time.

If your CE isn't finished when you submit your renewal, TREC lets you pay a $200 CE deferral fee to renew on active status anyway — that buys you an additional 60 days past your expiration date to finish the coursework while you keep working and earning commissions. The catch: you cannot combine a CE deferral with a late renewal. The deferral option only exists if you renew on time but haven't finished your hours yet; it's a bridge for agents who are close but not quite done, not a general grace period. Miss the expiration date entirely and the rules get less forgiving. Renew up to six months after expiration and TREC will renew your license, but only on inactive status — you cannot practice, list property, or receive commissions until you complete your outstanding CE and formally reactivate. An inactive license holder who closes a deal during that window is practicing without a license, which exposes both the agent and their sponsoring broker to TREC discipline. Wait longer than six months past expiration and the license lapses for good. At that point you must reinstate through TREC's requalification process rather than a simple late renewal, which can mean retaking current coursework and, depending on how long the license has been expired, sitting for the license exam again from scratch. Agents who let a license lapse this far essentially restart the licensing clock, which is a far more expensive outcome than the $200 deferral fee or a six-month inactive-status renewal.

The agents who get burned by renewal deadlines are almost never the ones who didn't know the rule — they're the ones who assumed a provider's course counted without checking TREC's course-approval list first. Before enrolling in any CE course, confirm the provider and course number show up as TREC-approved for the current cycle; Legal Update I and II especially get re-issued with new course numbers every renewal period, and an outdated course number won't post to your file even if you sat through every hour of it. TREC's own online license record — accessible through the My License Services portal — shows your current hour totals in real time, broken out by category, so there's no need to guess whether you've hit 3 Contract-Related hours or you're still short. Checking that record once a quarter, rather than once at the two-year mark, is the single biggest habit separating agents who renew smoothly from agents who end up paying the $200 deferral fee. If you're still weighing your first license cost and timeline before you're even licensed, it's worth mapping out the full 278-hour path — 180 pre-license plus 98 first-renewal — rather than treating it as two unrelated milestones; see our breakdown of how long the whole process actually takes. Day One tracks the same Legal Update and SAE topics inside its practice questions, so agents studying for their pre-license exam are already seeing the material that shows up again at renewal time.