NMC CBT Practice Questions: Free Question Bank for 2026

The CBT tests two things: whether your clinical knowledge maps onto UK practice, and whether you can do drug calculations quickly and accurately under time pressure. Most people who fail don’t fail on nursing knowledge. They fail on UK-specific conventions, or they run out of time on numeracy.

This question bank works through the exam one topic at a time. Each chapter gives you the facts the exam draws on, the distractor patterns it uses, and five practice questions with full explanations. Work through a chapter on a break; the whole of Part A takes most people a week of short sessions.

If you haven’t read about the exam itself yet (format, booking, fees, resits), start with the CBT structure chapter of our NMC Revalidation Guide, then come back here to practise.

The NMC CBT at a glance

• What it is: Part 1 of the NMC Test of Competence, sat by internationally trained nurses at a Pearson VUE test centre.
• Format: two sections in one 4-hour sitting, Part A numeracy (15 questions) and Part B clinical (105+ questions across the seven Future Nurse platforms).
• Cost: £83 per attempt.
• Passing: Part A and Part B are passed separately, so failing one means resitting only that part. The pass mark is set by standard-setting and varies slightly between test versions.
• Attempts: three within six months of your first sitting; after three fails, a six-month wait before reapplying.

Source: NMC — Test of competence.

The full outline

All 75 chapters are live: Part A numeracy (15 chapters) and all seven clinical platforms, B1 to B7 (60 chapters), with 375 practice questions and worked answers. Use the interactive 8-Part outline further down this page to open any chapter. It also shows your saved quiz progress, so you can see at a glance which topics still need work.

How to use the bank

Do the questions before reading the notes, at least once. Getting a question wrong and reading the explanation teaches you more than reading notes ever will, and it shows you which chapters actually need your time. Your quiz scores save in your browser, so you can come back and see which topics are still red.

New to the terminology? The NMC and CBT glossary defines every clinical tool, professional standard and UK law the exam uses, from NEWS2 and the GCS to the Mental Capacity Act and the Sepsis Six, each linked to the chapter that covers it.

Two companion resources sit in the main guide: drug calculation formulas for the method behind every Part A chapter, and worked numeracy examples if you want to watch calculations done step by step before testing yourself.