How many real estate agents are there in each state?

There are three numbers people quote, and they measure three different things.

Realtor membership. The National Association of Realtors reports its membership every month, and in recent years it has been around one and a half million. That is the most quoted figure, but it only counts members of NAR. Many licensed agents never join, and some members are appraisers, property managers or other professionals who do not sell homes.

Total licensees. Every state licenses its own salespersons and brokers, and adding up the regulators' counts gives a much larger number. California's Department of Real Estate alone lists about 422,000 licensees in its public file. This total includes people who are licensed but not active in sales, which is why it runs well above NAR membership.

Active licensees. The useful number for outreach is narrower: licenses that are active right now, held by individuals rather than companies, deduplicated so that an agent with two license records is counted once in each state they are licensed in. That is how our files are counted.

There is no single federal register of real estate agents, so any national total is a sum of 51 state counts, each published in its own format and on its own schedule. When you see a national figure, ask which of these three it is.

Agent counts follow population, housing turnover and how easy each state makes licensing. A few patterns hold every year.

• California, Florida and Texas are in a league of their own. Each has hundreds of thousands of licensees, and together they hold a large share of all US agents. Florida in particular has more licensees per resident than almost anywhere, driven by second homes, retirees and an active resale market.
• The next tier is the big population states with busy housing markets: New York, Georgia, North Carolina, Illinois, Arizona, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, Virginia and Michigan. North Carolina's commission, for example, licenses about 115,000 people.
• The smallest files are states like Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North and South Dakota and DC, where a whole state can have only a few thousand active agents.

That spread is why we price state files by size. A file for a small state starts at a lower price than a file for California, and if you need many of the large states the USA bundle quickly becomes the better buy.

Raw counts tell you where most agents are. Agents per resident tells you how competitive each market is, and it is the more useful number if you sell to agents.

States with many agents per resident tend to have a lot of part-time and newer agents. For a lender or a coach that is an opportunity: newer agents are still choosing partners and looking for training. For a brokerage recruiter it means the pool is large but uneven, so filtering by years licensed matters more.

States with fewer agents per resident tend to have more established, full-time agents. Outreach there is more about relationships than volume. A home inspector in a small state might know a good share of the local agents personally within a year.

To work this out for your own market, divide the agent count for a county by its population from the Census Bureau. Every row in our files carries the county and its five-digit FIPS code, so the join to Census data takes a minute in a spreadsheet.

We publish the count for each state when that state's file launches. Counts come from the state's own licensing records after inactive licenses and duplicates are removed, so they are smaller than the raw totals some regulators publish and larger than NAR membership in the same state.

States launch one at a time, as each one passes our quality checks for verified emails and phones. Until a state has launched, this page does not show a number for it, because we would rather show nothing than a figure we have not checked. Each state's own page shows its count, its fill rates for email and phone, and how many agents were licensed in the last 12 months, all from the current edition. You can also join the waitlist on any state page to hear the day it opens.

Each edition of a state file is built from that state's licensing records, and the count is simply the number of rows in the finished file. The steps are the same in every state:

1. Start from the regulator's records. Every licensee the state publishes, from its bulk download, purchased list or lookup, depending on what the state offers. Our sources pages list the regulator and access method for each state.
2. Keep active individual licenses. Inactive, expired, suspended and company licenses are left out. Salespersons, associate brokers and brokers are all included, and the License type column tells them apart.
3. Remove duplicates. One person can appear more than once in a state's records, for example when a salesperson later becomes a broker. We keep one row per person per state.
4. Remove people who opted out. Anyone who asked us to leave them out is suppressed before the file is published, so the count is never inflated by people you should not contact.

An agent licensed in two states appears in both state files, because they can do business in both. The USA bundle therefore holds a few more rows than there are individual people, which is what you want if you are reaching agents by the state they work in.

Counts change every month. New agents are licensed, others let their licenses lapse, and agents move between states. Each monthly edition reflects that, and the change from one edition to the next is shown on every state page once it launches.

A state count is the top of your funnel, not the answer. Work down from it before you budget a campaign.

Start with the agents who fit your offer. A lender might keep only salespersons and associate brokers in its lending counties. A recruiter might keep agents licensed one to five years outside their own brokerage. A title company might keep brokers and team leads. Filtering on county, license type and years licensed usually cuts a state count to a fraction, and that fraction is your real market.

Then look at reachability. Each state page shows what share of rows has a verified email and what share has a phone, because those rates differ a lot between states. Multiply your filtered count by the email rate to see how many agents you can actually email.

Finally, set expectations by channel. Email reaches the most agents for the least effort, and a manual follow-up call to the ones who opened lifts replies. A campaign to a few thousand well-chosen agents, repeated monthly with new licensees, often beats one blast to a whole state.