Repeat test-takers drag down bar pass rates for February exam
For the February 2026 bar exam, only 17 of the 45 jurisdictions that have reported their figures saw more than half of their candidates pass, according to the latest statistics collected by the National Conference of Bar Examiners.
This February, a total of 18,063 candidates took the bar across all jurisdictions, according to the NCBE, and 71% were repeat test-takers.
The bar exam is given twice per year, and typically, the February administration attracts more candidates who have previously attempted and failed the exam and are more likely to fail again, according to Bob Schwartz, the managing director of psychometrics for the NCBE.
“As a result, February pass rates have consistently been lower across jurisdictions,” Schwartz told the ABA Journal, noting that ABA data shows that 92.15% of 2023 law graduates who took a bar exam passed within two years of graduation.
“This suggests that while pass rates for an individual administration may fluctuate, most bar exam takers do eventually pass the exam,” he adds.
But the low pass rates raises some eyebrows.
“This is a problem,” says Sean Silverman of Silverman Bar Exam & LSAT Tutoring. “A test can either be a minimum competency test, or it can be a test that more than half the people taking it do not pass. For it to be both of those things is highly questionable.”
According to the NCBE data, 21 states posted pass rates higher than the February 2025 exam. Meanwhile, five states—Alaska at 48%, Indiana at 47%, Louisiana at 56%, Missouri at 51% and Tennessee at 44%—maintained the same percentages as last year, while the remaining 19 had decreases.
California, which had a disastrous February 2025 launch of its proprietary hybrid exam, went back to the NCBE’s Multistate Bar Examination. According to the State Bar of California, 3,931 people completed the February 2026 exam, and 1,211 passed. That’s 31%, which is a big decrease from the 64% who passed in February 2025.
Because of the failed February 2025 administration, the California Supreme Court offered scoring adjustment to offset the troubles those candidates faced, such as technical and proctoring issues.
The state supreme court later ordered the return of an in-person exam and the use of the MBE. The state supreme court must decide by July which exam the state will use once the Uniform Bar Examination and its components are sunsetted in February 2028.
New Hampshire had the lowest pass percentage for the February 2026 bar exam, at 25%. In New York, where 3,855 test-takers braved a snowstorm to get to the February 2026 exam, 41% passed, up from 39% a year before. In Rhode Island, where the blizzard prompted Rhode Island Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul A. Suttell to postpone the bar exam by one day, 58% passed, which is up four percentage points from a year earlier. Wyoming passed 30% of its candidates.
In other states testing large numbers of candidates, Florida went down to 44% for the February 2026 exam, from 46% a year earlier, and Illinois moved up one percentage point to 41% for the February 2026 exam. The District of Columbia decreased to 41% for the February 2026 exam, from 43% for the February 2025 exam. Meanwhile, Mississippi had the biggest jump, from 47% last year to 73% this year, which was also the highest pass rate of any state. Other top performers included Utah, with 69%, South Carolina, with 66%, and Virginia, with 63%.
The national mean score for the February 2026 MBE inched up to 131.2—up 0.4 points compared to last year’s mean of 130.8—helped by the return of Californians’ scores from this year’s exam to the national pool, according to the NCBE.
Starting in July, 10 jurisdictions will move to the NCBE-produced NextGen UBE. To date, 50 jurisdictions have committed to moving to the new exam focused more on lawyering skills than memorization.
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