Practice tests for all 50 states and DC

The test changes when you cross a state line

There is no national permit test. Fifty one agencies write fifty one exams, and the paper you sit is set by whichever office issues your permit. Of the formats we could confirm on an agency page, in its manual, or in the state rule that fixes the number, the shortest is Pennsylvania at 18 questions and the longest is 50, which Florida, New Jersey, Utah and Wisconsin all use. Most of them set the bar at 80 percent, which makes the percentage the least useful number on the page. What decides the day is how many you are allowed to get wrong, and the same 80 percent buys a different margin depending on the length of the paper. Eighty percent of Florida's 50 questions leaves room for ten mistakes. Eighty percent of Alaska's 20 leaves room for four. The two tightest margins we have confirmed allow three mistakes apiece: Maryland asks for 22 of 25, and Pennsylvania asks for 15 of 18 on the shortest paper in the country. Find your own number on the passing score table before you book, see every jurisdiction at once on the test format table, and if the arithmetic is what you came for, the guide on how many you can miss works it through state by state.

What you actually get when you pick a state

Picking a state loads 14 tests built from that state's own bank, which is the national road rules plus the questions written from that state's code. The first group is five practice tests that share no questions with each other, plus a marathon over the whole bank that brings anything you miss back later in the same run until you get it right. The second group is the two areas that fail the most people: a ten question sign warm up, then every sign question in the bank, then right of way on its own, then a set made only of the questions rated hard. The third group is the rules that carry a penalty, including a laws and limits test drawn only from your state's own code, where the answers cite the statute rather than a general rule. The fourth is the exam simulator, which runs at your state's question count and pass mark and gives no feedback until the end. Each state also has a written test page for how the scoring works and a road test page for what comes after.

The rule hiding inside the road sign questions

Three jurisdictions publish a second bar inside the sign questions, and it is the one people fail without seeing it coming. Virginia is the hard version. Ten sign questions come first, every one has to be right, and a single wrong answer ends the attempt before the thirty general questions count for anything. North Carolina scores its sign examination on its own and asks a regular Class C applicant to identify nine of twelve, while Class A and Class B applicants have to get every sign they are shown. New York is the mild version: four sign questions, at least two correct, scored alongside everything else. No other agency publishes how much of its paper is signs, so elsewhere the exam simulator falls back to a share of three in ten, and says plainly that the share is ours and not the agency's. If you have twenty minutes before your appointment, spend them on signs. Start with the sign warm up on your state page, then work through the sign library one shape at a time.

Why some states say the format is not confirmed

The 34 confirmed jurisdictions have a question count and a pass mark that somebody read on the licensing agency's own page, in its manual, or in the state rule that sets them, with the date of that reading printed beside the fact. The others do not publish one figure or the other. North Carolina is the clean example: the state rule fixes the pass mark at 80 percent and sets out the separate sign examination, and neither that rule, nor the driver handbook, nor the NCDMV test pages say how many questions the exam has. Counts for those states circulate on test preparation sites, and we could not find an official page that states them. Those states still get the full set of practice tests, because the driving rules are published even where the format is not, but their pages carry a note naming which official pages and rule books were read and what each one did and did not say. The national tables never leave a cell blank for them either, because an empty cell reads as a zero: the cell says the agency does not publish the figure and links to the note. The methodology page sets out the whole bar.

Adults, transfers and people who already drive

Two of the confirmed formats publish a separate adult version. California runs 36 questions with 30 correct to pass for applicants who are 18 or older, against 46 questions and 38 correct for everybody else. Utah publishes a 25 question open book version, 20 correct to pass, for people previously licensed somewhere else, against its usual 50. Everywhere else an adult sits the same paper as a sixteen year old. What changes with age is the process around the test: how long the permit has to be held, how many supervised hours have to be logged, and whether any of that falls away past a certain birthday. Arriving with a license from another state, or applying without a Social Security number, are process questions rather than test questions, and there is a guide for moving in with an out of state license and one for applying without an SSN.

Everything else that moves at the state line

The exam is one of several things each state settles for itself, and each of them is a table here with all fifty one jurisdictions as rows and a named source and a date on every row: how long the permit lasts before it expires, the youngest age you can apply and how long you hold the permit before the road test, the supervised hours and how many of them must be at night, what the permit and the license cost, and how long you wait after a failed attempt before you can try again.