How Do You Get Admitted to the California Bar?

Bar admission is administered by the State Bar of California's Office of Admissions, based at 180 Howard Street in San Francisco.

The California Supreme Court holds the ultimate authority to admit attorneys to the practice of law in California and to set the bar exam passing score.

Within the State Bar, the Committee of Bar Examiners makes bar-exam scoring and remedy decisions, subject to Supreme Court approval for some measures.

California gives its own two-day exam and is not a UBE jurisdiction: the State Bar does not accept legacy UBE scores, NextGen UBE scores or transferred MBE scores.

The exam runs twice a year, in February and July — the February 2027 exam is February 23–24, 2027 (fully in person) and the July 2027 exam is July 27–28, 2027.

For February 2027, day 1 is five one-hour essays plus one 90-minute Performance Test, and day 2 is the 200-question NCBE Multistate Bar Exam in two three-hour sessions.

For that administration, written answers are typed on applicants' own laptops in ExamSoft's Examplify software, with handwriting still allowed, and MBE answers are bubbled on a Scantron sheet in pencil.

Essay and Performance Test subjects are Business Associations, Civil Procedure, Community Property, Constitutional Law, Contracts, Criminal Law and Procedure, Evidence, Professional Responsibility, Real Property, Remedies, Torts, Trusts, and Wills and Succession.

The passing score is a total scale score of 1390 out of 2000, and applicants between 1350 and 1389 after the first read get a second read.

California does not require a J.D. from an ABA-approved law school to sit for the bar exam.

Legal education can instead come from a California-accredited school, a State Bar–registered unaccredited school or the Law Office Study Program, alongside the traditional ABA-approved route.

The First-Year Law Students' Examination (FYLSX) is required after the first year for students at State Bar–unaccredited registered law schools, Law Office Study students and students at accredited schools who lack two years of college work.

Students at ABA- or California-accredited schools who advance to their second year with at least 60 semester or 90 quarter units of undergraduate work are generally exempt from the FYLSX.

Every applicant must also register with the State Bar first and receive a positive moral character determination.

California requires a minimum scaled MPRE score of at least 86.

The Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination is a separate two-hour, 60-question multiple-choice exam, and MPRE scaled scores range from 50 to 150, with each jurisdiction setting its own passing score.

Every California applicant needs a positive moral character determination and must register with the State Bar first.

The moral character application fee is $900 for a general applicant and $1,054 for an attorney applicant under the State Bar's fee schedule, current as of October 2026.

Our research did not establish how the State Bar weighs an individual applicant's history in this review, so questions about a specific record belong with the State Bar's Office of Admissions.

No. California offers no reciprocity, no admission on motion and no UBE score transfer: the State Bar does not accept bar exam scores from another jurisdiction, so every attorney applicant must pass an exam.

The shorter option is the one-day Attorneys' Examination, open to lawyers whose license to practice law in another U.S. jurisdiction has been active and in good standing for at least four years immediately preceding the first day of the examination they applied for; it covers the essays and Performance Test without the multiple-choice MBE.

Outside full admission, an out-of-state attorney working for a qualifying institution in California may seek permission to practice in a limited capacity as Registered In-House Counsel without passing the California exam.

The exam application fee is $878 for a general applicant and $1,650 for an attorney applicant, plus a $153 laptop fee and late fees of $50, then $250 (State Bar fee schedule, current as of October 2026).

Applicants also pay $155 (general) or $310 (attorney) to register and $900 (general) or $1,054 (attorney) for the moral character application.

For the February 2027 exam, the application opened October 1, 2026, with a timely deadline of November 2, a $50 late fee from November 3 to 30, and a $250 late fee from December 1, 2026 to January 4, 2027, the final deadline.

Overall pass rates — all takers, not first-time only — were 30.8% in February 2026 (1,211 of 3,931), 54.8% in July 2025 (4,032 of 7,362) and 63.6% in February 2025 (2,472 of 3,886, after that administration's scoring adjustments).

July 2026 results are scheduled for release on November 6, 2026, and February 2027 results on April 30, 2027.

Beginning with the July 2028 exam, the State Bar will administer the NCBE NextGen UBE, and the July 2028 exam will consist only of the NextGen UBE, with no California component.

A separate California component is still being designed and will be administered no earlier than July 2029, with preliminary recommendations due to the Supreme Court in February 2027.

NextGen UBE takers in California must pay NCBE a technical fee, currently $145.

Because of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, the July 2028 exam will not be held in the greater Los Angeles area.

Yes — the Law Office Study Program lets an applicant qualify for the bar exam with four years of study in a law office or judge's chambers instead of law school.

The supervising attorney must have practiced at least five years in any U.S. jurisdiction and actively practiced law in California or taught in a California law school for the two years before supervising.

The student must study at least 72 hours per month, with at least 20 hours of direct supervision a month and a written exam monthly, and the program is a study program, not a work program — simply working in a law office does not count.

Law Office Study students must pass the FYLSX after one year; passing within the first three eligible administrations credits all study to that point, otherwise only one year counts.

The application is $933, filed at least 30 days before study starts, plus $556 per semi-annual report; the State Bar warns that pass rates are generally lower for Law Office Study students than for law school graduates.

A portfolio-based alternative circulated as a 2023 public-comment proposal, but our research did not confirm an adopted program — check with the State Bar.

The February 2025 exam was the first on the State Bar's new vendor platform, and the rollout went wrong: applicants reported Meazure Learning platform problems typing into the answer window, using backspace and delete, and cutting and pasting, and the State Bar Board of Trustees publicly apologized.

On May 2, 2025, the California Supreme Court ordered the State Bar to return to the NCBE MBE for multiple-choice questions starting with the July 2025 exam; the July 2025 exam returned to fully in-person testing.

The Committee of Bar Examiners applied scoring remedies: for February 2025 only, the higher of the first- and second-read scores counted, which added 230 passes, and the Supreme Court approved imputing Performance Test scores for all unsuccessful February 2025 takers; on October 10, 2025, the CBE determined that no additional scoring adjustments or remedies would be recommended.

First-time February 2025 takers who failed or withdrew could enter the Provisional Licensure Program beginning September 1, 2025, but that pathway sunset on December 31, 2025 and is not an open route for new graduates in 2026.

Applicants who withdrew from or were unsuccessful on the February 2025 exam received a full fee waiver for the July 2025 application.