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A BROKER'S ANSWER
How Much Do Real Estate Agents Actually Make in Louisiana?
The honest answer starts with a number nobody selling you a course wants to show you, and then explains why that number is not describing the job. I run a brokerage with more than a hundred agents and I teach the pre-license course, so I will give you both sides of it.
The number you will find anyway
Start with the ugly one
According to the National Association of REALTORS, agents with two years of experience or less had a median gross income of $8,000 last year. Median business expenses across all members were $9,530.
Read those two lines together. The typical brand new agent, nationally, spent more running the business than the business paid them.
I am a broker. I run a brokerage with more than a hundred agents across Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and I teach the pre-license course. I am not going to pretend that number does not exist. What I am going to do is show you what is inside it, because once you take it apart it stops describing the job and starts describing the room.
Where that number comes from
The figure everyone repeats is worse, and it is wrong
You have probably seen the claim that 70 percent of real estate agents sell nothing in a year. It gets repeated constantly. It traces back to an offhand comment by a Redfin executive at an industry conference, and it counts every active license registered in the MLS.
That includes referral only agents. It includes office administrators who keep a license on file. It includes people who got licensed, hung it with a broker, and never worked a single day.
Now here is NAR's own data. Same industry, different denominator. Among members who specialize in residential sales, the share reporting zero transactions was 5 percent. The median active professional closed 10 deals.
| Share of all active MLS licenses | 70% |
| Share of working residential REALTORS | 5% |
Same industry. Different question.
Seventy percent versus five percent. Nothing about the job changed between those two numbers. The only thing that changed is whether you count the people who showed up.
What the median measures
It is describing a room, not a job
Once you know that, the rest of the survey reads differently.
The median REALTOR works 35 hours a week. Not 60. Not 80. Thirty five. More than a quarter of members, 27 percent, have another source of income besides real estate. The median member is 57 years old with 13 years in the business.
That is not a profession full of people grinding. That is a profession with a very wide mix of people in it, from full time professionals to semi retired agents doing two deals a year for friends, to people who have not worked a lead since 2019 but keep the license active because it costs less than letting it lapse.
The median does not tell you what the work pays. It tells you what a room full of people who are barely in the room averages out to. If you removed everyone who does not treat this like a business, the number would not be a little better. It would be a different number entirely.
This is the part that matters if you are deciding.
You are not going to be a statistic. You are going to be one person who either treats this like a job or treats it like a hobby.
The median is a description of a group you have not joined yet. Whether you land near it or nowhere near it is mostly decided by what you do in your first ninety days.
From our own books
What it looks like when people actually work it
I can only speak for what I see at my own brokerage, so that is what I will give you.
More than 70 percent of our brand new agents close their first deal in under six months. Not their tenth. Their first. And that is the number that predicts everything else, because the agents who get one done early almost never stop.
That is one brokerage in Louisiana, not a state survey, and I would not present it as anything else. But it is the same industry, the same market, and the same license everybody else has. The difference is showing up.
What one closing pays
The Louisiana arithmetic, on one deal
Here is what a closing actually pays, using our real average rather than a national figure.
| Into a new agent's pocket, before capping | $5,355 |
| Into that same agent's pocket, after capping | $7,600 |
Those are commission figures. Taxes and your own business expenses come out of them.
Now run it against the national median for a first year agent, which was $8,000.
| Closings | Agent keeps |
|---|---|
| 2 deals | $10,710 |
| 4 deals | $21,420 |
| 6 deals | $32,130 |
| 8 deals | $46,150 |
| 10 deals | $61,350 |
The brokerage takes its 30 percent only until it has collected $15,000 in a year. That happens partway through your seventh closing. Every closing after it is yours, which is why the last two rows climb so much faster than the first three.
Two deals. That is all it takes to beat the number that scared you at the top of this page. Two deals in twelve months, in a market where more than seventy percent of our new agents get their first one inside six.
And ten deals, the figure NAR reports for an active professional, is $61,350 here. The reason it is not simply ten times the first row is the cap. Our brokerage stops taking its share once it has collected $15,000 from you in a year, and after that every dollar of the commission is yours. That is not a fortune. It is a real living, earned on your own schedule, with nothing above you taking a cut of it.
Before you sign with a team
What if you join a team at another brokerage?
Almost every new agent gets offered a spot on a team, and almost nobody does the arithmetic before they sign. So here it is, with a structure you will actually run into.
Say the brokerage advertises an 80/20 split, which sounds generous. The team you are joining takes 50 percent. There is a $250 transaction fee and a $15 risk management fee. The brokerage split, the team split and both fees all come off the top. Whatever survives that is yours.
Same house as before. $255,000, and $7,650 of commission on your side of the deal.
| Commission on your side | $7,650.00 |
| Brokerage takes 20 percent | -$1,530.00 |
| Team takes 50 percent | -$3,825.00 |
| Transaction fee | -$250.00 |
| Risk management fee | -$15.00 |
| Into your pocket | $2,030.00 |
Both percentages are taken against the full $7,650, not stacked one after the other.
Twenty six percent. On a brokerage split advertised as eighty.
Now run the same deal at that same brokerage without the team, so the only thing changing is the team layer.
| Closings | No team | On the team |
|---|---|---|
| 2 deals | $11,710 | $4,060 |
| 4 deals | $23,420 | $8,120 |
| 8 deals | $46,840 | $16,240 |
| 10 deals | $58,550 | $20,300 |
Nearly three times the difference. To take home what a solo agent makes on ten deals, a team agent at that structure needs about twenty nine.
This is the number nobody shows you when they recruit you.
The split on the recruiting flyer is the least important figure in the whole arrangement. Eighty twenty sounds better than seventy thirty, and it can pay you far less once a team split and per file fees sit on top of it.
Ask for the whole stack before you sign anything. The brokerage split. Any team split. Every per transaction fee. Whether there is a cap and what it is. Then do this arithmetic on your own paper, on a real sale price for your market, and see what actually lands in your account.
None of which means teams are a bad deal. Read that table again and the obvious conclusion is to never join one, and that is the wrong conclusion.
A team is buying half your commission and paying you in leads, training, and somebody experienced to call when a deal goes sideways at nine at night. You are not choosing between $5,855 and $2,030 on the same closing. You are choosing between closings you would not have had and closings you have to go find yourself. A brand new agent who closes ten team fed deals takes home $20,300. A brand new agent alone who closes two takes home far less than that. In year one the team wins, and it is not close.
The mistake is not joining a team. The mistake is staying on one after you have outgrown it. The moment you are generating your own business, that 50 percent stops buying you anything and starts costing you half your income. Plenty of agents never notice, because the checks keep coming and the split is easy to stop thinking about.
About a fifth of REALTORS work on a team, and the typical team has four members. It is a normal and often smart way to start. Just know the whole stack before you sign, and know when you have outgrown it.
And ask what the 50 percent is actually buying. Some teams hand you real leads, real coaching and real support. Some take half your money and give you a logo. Those look identical on paper.
The 1099 side
What a W-2 cannot do
This is the part almost nobody explains before you get licensed, and it is worth more than most new agents realize.
As an agent you are a 1099 independent contractor. You are not an employee. You are a business. That changes the arithmetic in ways a salary never can.
You deduct what it costs to do the work. Mileage on every showing, every listing appointment, every trip to a closing. Your MLS fees and board dues. Errors and omissions insurance. Signs, photography, mailers, your website, your CRM. Your phone. Your continuing education, every year, for as long as you hold the license.
You deduct the space you work from. If you have a dedicated home office, part of your housing cost becomes a business expense. A salaried employee working from the same desk deducts nothing.
You deduct your own health insurance. Self employed people can deduct their health insurance premiums. That is a line a W-2 employee simply does not have access to.
You choose your own retirement plan. A SEP-IRA or a Solo 401k lets a self employed person put away far more per year than a standard workplace 401k allows. Nobody is capping you at whatever your employer decided to offer.
And you deduct the cost of getting better. Designation courses, certifications, conferences, coaching. The money you spend improving at this comes off the top.
One honest caveat on taxes.
There is a deduction for self employed people, often called the qualified business income deduction, that can be worth up to twenty percent of business income. Its rules have been in flux and I am not going to publish a figure that might be wrong by the time you read this.
Ask a CPA. Ask before you get licensed, not in April. Almost every agent I know who struggled financially in year one struggled because nobody told them how any of this worked.
The honest part
The salty side, because you should hear it from a broker
Everything above is real. So is this.
You pay both halves of Social Security and Medicare. That is self employment tax, 15.3 percent, on top of income tax. When you had a job, your employer quietly paid half of that for you. Now you pay all of it.
Nobody withholds anything. You send the IRS estimated payments four times a year, and if you do not set that money aside as it comes in, you will spend it. This is the single most common way new agents get hurt.
There is no unemployment, no paid leave, no sick days. If you take a week off, you do not get paid for that week. If a deal falls apart, nobody covers it.
The money is lumpy. You might close three deals in March and none in April and two in May. Your bills do not work that way. You have to budget across months rather than paycheck to paycheck, and that is a genuinely different skill.
You fund the business. Board dues, MLS access, errors and omissions insurance, your own marketing. All of it goes out before anything comes in. Plan for a few months of expenses with no income behind them.
None of that is a reason not to do this. It is a reason to walk in with your eyes open, which is more than most people get.
Who it suits
The people I watch succeed have one thing in common
They have very little in common on paper. Different ages, different backgrounds, some came from sales and plenty did not. What they share is that they treat it like a business from week one. They work it on a schedule. They answer the phone. They follow up when nothing is happening.
The people who struggle almost always made the same decision, usually without noticing. They got licensed, hung it somewhere, and waited for something to happen.
If you want a salary and a schedule somebody else sets, this is the wrong job and there is no shame in that. If you want the ceiling off and you are willing to build something with no one standing over you, the numbers at the top of this page are not describing you. They are describing the people who quit.
If you are thinking about it
Ninety hours is the whole barrier to entry
Louisiana requires 90 hours of approved pre-license education before you can sit the state exam. That is it. Every school in the state teaches the same required hours under the same Commission approval.
If you want to see what the course costs, what the exam looks like, or what happens after you pass, we have written all of that out plainly. And if you would rather just ask a broker directly, call 337-522-3334 and you will get the instructor.
National figures are from the National Association of REALTORS 2026 Member Profile, reporting 2025 data. The 70 percent claim is traced to remarks by a Redfin executive at an industry conference and counts all active MLS registered licenses, including referral only agents and administrators. Brokerage figures, including the share of new agents closing within six months and the $255,000 average sale price, are from Dream Home Realty and are not a statewide survey. Self employment tax of 15.3 percent is the combined Social Security and Medicare rate. Team figures use an illustrative structure and are not drawn from any particular brokerage.
Common questions
What people ask before they commit
Straight answers on pay, timing and splits. If your situation is different, call (337) 522-3334 and we will run your numbers with you.
How much does a real estate agent make per sale in Louisiana?
At Excel's average closing price of $255,000, a new agent takes home about $5,355 before capping and about $7,650 after. The difference is the brokerage split, which stops once you have paid your cap for the year.
How long before a new agent closes their first deal?
Over 70% of brand new agents at Dream Home Realty close their first deal in under six months. That is faster than the industry talks about, and it depends far more on consistent prospecting than on the market.
What does a team split actually cost you?
A 50% team split is very common and comes off the top of the same commission the brokerage is already splitting. On a $7,650 commission, the team takes half and the brokerage takes its share of the whole, not the remainder. Add a transaction fee and a risk management fee and the take-home drops sharply. This is why the brokerage and team you choose matters more than the commission rate you are quoted.
How much of a commission does the brokerage keep?
It depends on the split and the cap. At a 70/30 split with a $15,000 cap, the brokerage takes 30% only until you have paid in $15,000 for the year. After that you keep the full commission minus fees. Many brokerages have enormous mentor fees and team splits.
Do real estate agents get paid during the first few months?
Not usually. You are paid when a sale closes and funds, which is typically 30 to 45 days after you get a property under contract. So even a fast start means eight to ten weeks between your first client and your first check. Plan for three to six months of living expenses before you rely on this income.