New Jersey Real Estate Email Signature Rules — Rewritten 20 January 2026
New Jersey’s advertising rule changed on 20 January 2026, and it contains a provision aimed squarely at signature blocks: if your advertisement shows your email address, it must also carry your brokerage office’s telephone number. Several long-standing requirements were quietly deleted at the same time.
Step by step
Use the name you are licensed under
N.J.A.C. 11:5-6.1(b): the advertisement of a salesperson or broker-salesperson “shall include the name in which they are licensed and the regular business name of their affiliated broker.” “Regular business name” is defined as the name the licensee has on record with the Commission.
Add your broker's regular business name — more prominently than your own
(b)1: where an advertisement contains the name of a salesperson or broker-salesperson, the affiliated broker’s regular business name “shall be displayed in a more prominent manner than the name of the salesperson or broker-salesperson.”
Include your brokerage office's telephone number
The provision that catches signature blocks. (d): “An advertisement containing a telephone number, email address, or website of an individual salesperson or broker-salesperson or a team of such licensees, shall also include the telephone number of the licensed brokerage office from which the advertising licensee(s) operate.” Since a signature almost always shows an email address, this bites.
Never reference a home office
(d)1: an advertisement “shall only represent that the business of a licensee is conducted at a licensed main office or branch office… and shall not reference a home office.”
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(c) requires the advertisement to indicate, after the licensee’s regular business name, that they are engaged in the brokerage business. Permitted: “Realtor”, “Realtist”, “real estate broker”, “broker”, “real estate agency”. Prohibited when used alone: “realty”, “real estate”, “land sales”, “land investments”.
Skip the license number
Verified across every subsection of the current rule: New Jersey requires names, not numbers. There is no licence-number requirement in the advertising rule.
Salesperson? Do not imply you are a broker-salesperson
(b) is explicit: “A salesperson may not indicate in an advertisement or otherwise that they are licensed as a broker-salesperson.” And a salesperson (referral) must add “Services limited to referring prospects to broker” on all advertisements except business cards.
Quoting a commission rate? Use the exact new wording
(q), and the wording changed in January 2026. If the advertisement references a commission rate or compensation amount, it must clearly and conspicuously include: “In New Jersey, broker compensation is fully negotiable and not set by law.”
What changed on 20 January 2026
The amendment deleted several requirements that are still quoted everywhere. If your signature was built to the old rule, some of it is now unnecessary:
- “The broker’s name must appear in larger print.” The words “appear in larger print or” were deleted. The surviving standard is only “displayed in a more prominent manner” — qualitative, with no size ratio anywhere in the rule.
- “All phone numbers must be labelled ‘home’, ‘res.’ or ‘cell’.” Deleted. The old subsection required it; the current one does not.
- “Your licence type must appear in all advertising.” Now business cards only — “The business card of a licensee shall clearly indicate the type of license they hold.” The sentence that extended this to advertising generally was deleted, as was the list of prescribed terms.
- “In New Jersey commissions are negotiable.” Superseded wording. See (q) above for the current text.
- Website rule softened from “wording as large as the predominant size wording on the webpage” to “in a size consistent with the rest of the page”.
Also worth knowing: a proposal in the same rulemaking that would have required a supervising broker to be physically present at the main office was proposed and expressly not adopted. It is not law.
Email is named in the rule's own scope
No inference required here. N.J.A.C. 11:5-6.1(a) states that the rule’s requirements apply to “all of advertising, including printed publications, radio or television broadcasts, electronic media, including email and the Internet, business stationery, business cards, business and legal forms and documents, signs, and billboards.”
Put the pieces together and a compliant New Jersey signature carries: your name as licensed, your broker’s regular business name displayed more prominently, a brokerage-business indicator, and — because the signature shows your email address — the licensed brokerage office’s telephone number. Not your home office, and not only your mobile.
New Jersey has no team rules — and the Commission has said so
The word “team” appears in the advertising rule in exactly three places, and only to extend the broker-identification and phone-number duties to “a team of such licensees”. There is no definition of a team, no naming restriction and no registration requirement.
The Commission put it on the record in a 2024 adoption, noting that the New Jersey Real Estate License Act “does not include a single reference to real estate ‘teams’ or other non-broker licensee groups.” In the same adoption it held that a team may not register a single entity to receive commission income.
So a New Jersey team name is governed indirectly — by the requirement that the broker’s licensed name appear more prominently, by the prohibition on logos or trade names implying common ownership, and by the general bar on anything false, misleading or deceptive.
Where to check, and where not to
Cornell’s Legal Information Institute is stale for this section — at the time of writing it still shows the pre-2026 commission wording, and its history note stops at the August 2024 amendment with no trace of the January 2026 one.
New Jersey’s Department of Banking and Insurance does not host the codified chapter itself, which is part of why stale copies circulate so freely. The New Jersey Register adoption documents on the State’s own site are the best free primary source.
One diary note: the chapter carries an expiration date of 24 January 2030. New Jersey rules lapse unless readopted, so this is a citation with a horizon.
State law vs. the NAR Code
New Jersey’s rule is enforced by the Real Estate Commission against your licence. NAR’s Code is a membership contract enforced by associations. Note one crossover that confuses people: New Jersey’s rule permits “Realtor” as one way to show you are engaged in the brokerage business — that is state law referring to the term, not New Jersey adopting NAR’s rules.
Sources: N.J.A.C. 11:5-6.1 (Advertising rules), as amended eff. 20 Jan. 2026 (R.2026 d.020, 58 N.J.R. 804; proposed 57 N.J.R. 1075(a)); N.J.A.C. 11:5-1.3, 11:5-3.16, 11:5-9.14; N.J.S.A. 45:15-1 et seq.; P.L. 2024 c.32; NJREC adoption of 19 Aug. 2024 (56 N.J.R. 1720(a)); DOBI Bulletin 24-11; NAR 2026 Code of Ethics. Verified against the New Jersey Register adoption documents published by the State, September 2026.
What does your state actually require?
Pick a state. Every answer is taken from the current rule text and checked against that state’s own statute and regulations — not from a template, and not from the regulator’s summary of its own rules, which is wrong in twenty-six jurisdictions.
Brokerage office number included, automatically
New Jersey wants your brokerage office’s phone number wherever your email address appears, and your broker’s name more prominent than your own. Autograph builds that once, installs it into Apple Mail in one click, and sets up your iPhone by QR code so the phone version keeps it all.
Download Autograph free See the templatesCommon questions
Does my New Jersey email signature need my brokerage's phone number?
Almost certainly yes. The rule says an advertisement containing a telephone number, email address or website of an individual licensee “shall also include the telephone number of the licensed brokerage office from which the advertising licensee(s) operate.” A signature block showing your email address triggers it — and you may not reference a home office.
Does the broker's name have to be in larger print than mine?
Not any more. The words “appear in larger print or” were deleted effective 20 January 2026. What survives is that the broker’s regular business name must be “displayed in a more prominent manner” than yours — a qualitative standard with no size ratio specified anywhere in the rule.
Do I still have to label my phone numbers as home or cell?
No. That requirement was deleted in the January 2026 amendment. It is still widely quoted, including by sources that have not picked up the change.
Does New Jersey require my license number in advertising?
No. The advertising rule requires names — your licensed name and your broker’s regular business name — and contains no licence-number requirement in any subsection.
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