MLO licensing
51 jurisdictions
What it takes to get a mortgage loan officer license, state by state
Every loan officer in the country takes the same 20 hours of federally required coursework. Then 33 of 51 jurisdictions want hours on their own law as well, and providers do not always sell you both. Pick your state and see the real requirement, the full fee stack, and what each approved course charges.
01
Two layers
The part nobody explains: your coursework has two layers
Layer one, everywhere
20 hours
The federal SAFE Act sets a floor of 20 hours of pre-licensing education: federal law, ethics, non-traditional mortgage lending, and electives. It is identical in all 51 jurisdictions. SAFE is the Secure and Fair Enforcement for Mortgage Licensing Act.
Layer two, your state
33 jurisdictions
require some of your hours to cover their own mortgage law. In most of them those hours come out of the 20 rather than being added to it, so the total stays 20 but a generic course no longer covers it. In 9 the total genuinely goes higher, as far as 30.
This matters because of what it does to price. Providers sell the national course and a state law course as separate products, and the cheapest thing on their pricing page is often one of the two rather than both. Buy the wrong one and you have paid for hours that do not add up to a license. Every comparison table here marks whether a package covers the national hours, the state hours, or both, and the cheapest-course pages rank on the lowest price that actually satisfies the requirement rather than the lowest price on the page.
02
How to
How to get licensed
- 01
Find out what your state requires. Not every state runs one regulator. In 5 of them, two separate agencies license loan originators and issue different licenses with different coursework, so the first question is which one covers the lending your employer does.
- 02
Take the hours from an approved provider. Only providers approved by the Nationwide Multistate Licensing System, usually written NMLS, can deliver hours that count. Every one of the 5 providers compared here is listed with the NMLS approval number we checked it against.
- 03
Pass one national exam. The SAFE Mortgage Loan Originator Test with Uniform State Content, 75 percent to pass. Every state and territory has adopted it, so unlike real estate there is no second state exam waiting for you.
- 04
Apply, and pay for more than the course. A background check, a credit report, NMLS processing, and your state's own license fee all sit on top of tuition. Each state's cost page adds them up, and says which figures we have not yet confirmed at source instead of guessing at them.
03
Sources
Where these numbers come from
Hour requirements are read from the state-specific education table NMLS publishes, and every requirement on the site shows the date it was last checked with a link to the source it was read from. Where a fee or a bond rule has not been confirmed against the regulator's own material, the page says so rather than printing a number you might budget against. More about where this data comes from.