You can take a bar exam practice test from three kinds of source: NCBE, which coordinates the UBE and sells official practice material for both the legacy UBE and the NextGen UBE; state boards themselves — the State Bar of California, for one, posts past exam questions and selected answers free; and commercial prep companies that sell question banks.
Which materials to buy depends on which exam your jurisdiction gives and when you sit.
Where can you take an official bar exam practice test?
Official practice material comes from the bodies behind the exam.
NCBE — the National Conference of Bar Examiners, which coordinates the Uniform Bar Examination out of the MEE, two MPT tasks and the MBE — sells study aids through its own store, and the State Bar of California, for one, releases past questions of its own.
Which set you need depends on which exam you will sit: the legacy UBE will be administered through February 2028, the NextGen UBE was first given in July 2026 in ten jurisdictions, and between July 2026 and July 2028 most jurisdictions move to the NextGen.
If you are not sure which generation your jurisdiction gives, the bar exam overview explains both formats.
On NCBE's store, the legacy-exam study aids listed in October 2026 were the MBE Complete Practice Exam at $100, the MBE Complete Bundle at $200, MBE Practice Questions 1–3 at $50 each, and MEE and MPT practice bundles at $50 each.
The NextGen side sells access to all available NextGen study aids for $325, with sourcebooks at $45 each.
State-released material is the second official source.
The State Bar of California posts past exam questions and selected answers free on its website.
Check the admissions pages of the bar admission authority in your own jurisdiction to see what it publishes.
Prices and formats change — verify before you buy
Which practice tests are free?
From NCBE, the free starting point is the NextGen side: NCBE posts free NextGen sample questions on its study-aids page.
The NextGen sourcebooks cost $45 each, but NCBE notes you may already have free access through your school's law library via West Academic — worth checking before you pay for anything.
From the state side, the State Bar of California posts past exam questions and selected answers free on its website — real exam questions paired with selected answers.
What your own board publishes is a separate question: check the site of the bar admission authority in your jurisdiction.
Two things are worth knowing.
NCBE does not release the constructed-response questions from the July 2026 NextGen administration, so no released NextGen essays from that administration exist on NCBE's side.
And the legacy-exam study aids we found NCBE listing in October 2026 all carried a price — check NCBE's legacy study-aids page yourself for anything free.
Start free, then go full-length
Which paid question banks are worth it?
On the official side, the money buys official practice at listed prices: $100 for the MBE Complete Practice Exam, $200 for the MBE Complete Bundle — 500 unique multiple-choice MBE questions with detailed explanations — $50 each for the three MBE Practice Questions sets, and $50 each for the MEE and MPT practice bundles.
On the NextGen side, $325 unlocks all available NextGen study aids, against $45 per sourcebook bought alone.
Their distinguishing feature is who makes them: these come from NCBE, which coordinates the UBE.
Commercial bar-prep companies also sell question banks.
Two cautions come straight from the record: our research found no independent source that compares the companies' pass-rate claims, and vendors' list prices were not collected — so treat pass-rate marketing as marketing, and check current prices with each vendor yourself.
So which are worth it?
The honest answer the record supports: the official NCBE materials come from the UBE's own coordinator, and every commercial bank is a judgment call you have to make from what you can inspect.
Match whichever bank you pick to your exam generation — legacy or NextGen — and to the component you need most work on: MBE-style multiple choice, essays, or performance tasks.
How many practice questions should you do?
Our research did not confirm an official number.
No primary source we checked sets a recommended study-hour total or a standard study schedule from NCBE or a bar examiner, and we did not confirm a recommended practice-question count from either — check with NCBE or the bar admission authority in your jurisdiction before treating any count as official.
What is published is the size of each exam, and that is what you size a rehearsal to.
The MBE is a six-hour, 200-question exam, of which 175 are scored and 25 are unscored pretest questions, split into two 3-hour sessions of 100 questions each.
The NextGen UBE mixes 120 standalone multiple-choice questions, six integrated question sets and three performance tasks into 9 hours of testing.
The practical read: short sets are for learning the law and the question style; a full-length run under exam timing is for rehearsal.
A complete timed run tests pacing and stamina that targeted drilling never touches, so treat one as a milestone on the calendar rather than an optional extra — and make it match the real counts above, not a shortened version.
How to simulate the real exam
Match the real structure first.
The legacy UBE runs 12 hours over two days: six 30-minute MEE essays and two 90-minute MPT tasks on the Tuesday, then the MBE's 200 questions in two 3-hour sessions on the last Wednesday.
The NextGen UBE runs 9 hours over a day and a half, also on the Tuesday and the last Wednesday of February and July.
Rehearsing "one section at a time" is useful, but neither format actually works that way on exam day.
Then match the pace and the medium.
NCBE's expected pacing on the NextGen is about 1.8 minutes per standalone multiple-choice question, 24 minutes per integrated question set, and 60 minutes per performance task.
The NextGen is taken on the examinee's own laptop at in-person proctored testing sites using NCBE's secure testing browser — not at commercial test centers — so do your typed practice on the laptop you will actually bring.
The details differ by component and by jurisdiction.
MBE questions have four answer choices and no penalty for a wrong answer, so leaving blanks is a guaranteed miss — in practice as on exam day, answer everything.
The MPT is a skills test rather than a test of substantive knowledge, so rehearse it against the clock with the task materials in front of you, not from an outline.
And exam-day conditions are set jurisdiction by jurisdiction: in California, for example, the written portion is typed on the applicant's own laptop or handwritten, while the MBE is answered on paper Scantron sheets with no laptops.
Check your exam authority's exam-environment page before you decide how to rehearse.
Career information, not legal advice. Study-aid prices, exam formats and released materials change — confirm current details with NCBE and with the bar admission authority in your jurisdiction.