Back in 2016, we published a state-by-state analysis of bar exam pass rates built on 2006–2015 data. A decade later, almost everything about that picture has changed: the states at the top and bottom have traded places, California tore its exam down and rebuilt it mid-year, and the Multistate Bar Exam itself is being retired in favor of the NextGen bar exam, which is administered for the first time this month. So we went back to the primary sources and rebuilt the whole analysis with the latest numbers.
In 2025, 67,442 people sat for a bar exam somewhere in the United States and 42,496 passed, an overall pass rate of 63%, the highest in the past decade. First-time takers passed at 76%; repeaters at 34%. Every figure in this post comes from the National Conference of Bar Examiners' official 2025 statistics (published spring 2026) or from the named state authority, and the full dataset is available as a downloadable CSV.
Bar exam pass rates by state: the 2025 map
Utah had the highest overall pass rate of any state in 2025: 82% (349 of 424 takers). (Two tiny territory cohorts technically did better: the Northern Mariana Islands and Palau passed every taker they examined, 3 and 2 respectively.) Minnesota (77%), Kansas (75%), Montana (74%), and Idaho (74%) round out the top five. At the other end, Alabama posted the lowest pass rate of any state: 44%, with Vermont (49%) and Connecticut (51%) just above it. Among all 56 reporting jurisdictions, only Puerto Rico (48%) was lower.
Readers of our 2016 analysis will notice a stunning reversal: back then, the District of Columbia had the nation's lowest pass rate (42% in 2015). In 2025, DC passed 71% of its 2,905 takers, comfortably above the national average. The DC exam did not get easier so much as its taker pool changed: DC adopted the Uniform Bar Examination in 2016, and its July sitting is now dominated by first-time takers, 83% of whom passed in 2025.
First-time pass rates: the fairer measure
Overall pass rates mix two very different populations: fresh law school graduates and people retaking the exam, who pass at far lower rates (76% vs. 34% nationally in 2025). A state with a large repeater pool will look "harder" than its exam actually is. Here is the same map limited to first-time takers, from NCBE's first-timer and repeater breakdown.
On this measure, Minnesota leads all states at 87%, followed by Utah (86%) and Kansas (84%). The hardest states for a first-time taker in 2025 were Vermont (58%), Connecticut (63%), and New Hampshire (65%). Note how the map flattens: most of the country sits between 70% and 87% for first-timers. For a first-time taker from an ABA-accredited school, the modern bar exam is more passable than the overall numbers suggest, in nearly every state.
The ten highest and ten lowest pass rates of 2025
A few things stand out. California, the perennial cellar-dweller of bar exam statistics and the bottom-two state in every year of our ten-year dataset until now, is no longer near last place; its unusual 2025 is covered below. And New York, which produces more bar passers than any state, sits mid-pack: 61% overall on 14,021 takers, by far the country's largest pool.
Volume and failure counts tell their own story. New York (8,559), California (6,504), Texas (2,853), Florida (2,364), District of Columbia (2,069) produced the most successful examinees in 2025. In our 2016 analysis, California's roughly 7,300 failed examinees in 2015 nearly matched New York's entire passing class; in 2025 the tables turned, and New York had the most failed attempts in the country (5,462), ahead of California (4,744).
Which state has the hardest bar exam?
Pass rates alone cannot answer that question, because a pass rate confounds three things: how high the state sets its passing score, who is taking the exam, and how those takers perform. Two better signals:
- The cut score. In 2025, 41 jurisdictions administered the Uniform Bar Examination, graded on a common 400-point scale, and the only difference between them was the minimum passing score: 260 in the most permissive group (Alabama, Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah, Washington), 264 in Indiana, 266 in a twelve-jurisdiction group that includes New York and DC, 268 in Michigan, and 270 in the strictest nineteen, which include Texas, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. On identical exams, the same performance can pass in Minneapolis and fail in Boston.
- Taker mix. Alabama's last-place 44% overall rate comes with the highest repeater share of any state (47% of its 2025 takers were repeating); its first-timers passed at a respectable 70%. Judged by cut score, Alabama's 260 is actually among the most permissive thresholds in the country.
By the cut-score yardstick, the "hardest" bar exams of 2025 were the 270-score UBE states, plus California, which kept its famously high standard on a non-UBE exam. The old intuition that California and DC are where bar careers go to die is simply out of date: DC now clears 70% overall, and California's story in 2025 was chaos of an entirely different kind.
A decade of change, 2016–2025
The national trend is quietly optimistic: 2025's 63% overall pass rate is the best of the decade, and the 76% first-timer rate ties 2020 for the best in the series. The July 2025 national MBE mean of 142.4 was the highest for any full-scale July administration in the NCBE's ten-year series (the anomalous, pandemic-shrunk July 2020 sitting scored higher with barely an eighth of the usual examinees). February tells the opposite story: the February 2025 MBE mean of 130.8 was the lowest February mean in the series.
The two biggest gainers transformed themselves deliberately. California (+18 points) permanently lowered its notoriously high cut score from 1440 to 1390 in 2020, then had the score-adjusted 2025 described below. North Carolina (+18) administered its first UBE in February 2019, and its rate jumped the same year. The decliners are harder to pin to a single cause; Connecticut and Vermont (both −16 points) shed roughly a sixth of their pass rate over the decade.
California's 2025: the exam that broke, twice
No bar exam story in modern memory compares to California's 2025. A condensed, fully sourced timeline:
- February 2025. To cut costs, California dropped the MBE and debuted its own hybrid remote/in-person exam, with multiple-choice questions drafted by new vendors instead of NCBE. The administration was a disaster: platform crashes, lockouts, and proctoring failures, compounded by the later revelation, cited by the state Supreme Court, of the previously undisclosed use of artificial intelligence in drafting some questions.
- May 2025. The California Supreme Court approved score imputation and a lowered raw passing score (534) for February takers. The State Bar announced a 55.9% pass rate, at the time the highest spring rate since 1965.
- June 2025. The court approved additional remedies, including imputing performance-test scores for every unsuccessful February taker. In the final data California reported to NCBE, February's pass rate landed at 64% (2,472 of 3,886), roughly 300 more passers than first announced.
- July 2025. Under court order, the exam went back to in-person administration and back to the MBE. Results were almost eerily normal: a 54.8% pass rate, first-timers at 69.7%.
The upshot for the statistics: California's 58% overall rate for 2025 is by far its best year in our dataset, and its February administration out-passing its July (64% vs. 55%) inverts the usual pattern everywhere: nationally, July takers outperform February takers by a wide margin. Treat the 2025 California numbers as a one-off produced by remediation, not a new baseline.
Why February is always brutal
Nationally, 47% of February 2025 takers passed versus 69% in July. That 22-point gap is structural, not seasonal: February cohorts are dominated by repeat takers (61% of February takers nationally, versus 19% in July), and repeaters passed at just 34% in 2025. If you are choosing when to sit for the exam, the February discount is mostly an illusion about who is sitting next to you.
The NextGen era starts this month
This July marks the first administration of the NextGen bar exam, NCBE's replacement for the MBE/MEE/MPT format that has defined the test for decades. Six states (Connecticut, Idaho, Maryland, Missouri, Oregon, Washington) plus Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, and the Virgin Islands administer it in July 2026; nearly every other jurisdiction has announced an adoption date in 2027 or 2028.
As of July 2026, only five states (Arkansas, California, Louisiana, Montana, Nevada) plus Puerto Rico have not announced a NextGen adoption; Mississippi has committed without naming a date. Two practical notes for the transition years: NextGen scores use a new scale (announced minimum passing scores so far range from 610 to 620), so early NextGen pass rates will not be directly comparable to UBE-era numbers; and cut scores are already moving with the transition. NCBE notes, for example, that Washington's Supreme Court set the passing score for that state's final legacy-UBE administration, in February 2026, at 260.
Download the dataset
Everything in this post, plus the figures we did not chart, is in one CSV: per-jurisdiction taking/passing/pass-rate counts for February, July, and full-year 2025; first-timer and repeater splits; overall and first-time pass rates for every year 2016–2025; 2025 UBE minimum passing scores; and each jurisdiction's first NextGen administration.
Download bar-exam-pass-rates-by-state.csv (56 jurisdictions + national totals, 40 columns)
Full 2025 table: every US jurisdiction (tap to expand)
| Jurisdiction | Took (2025) | Passed | Pass rate | First-timer rate | UBE cut score (2025) | First NextGen exam |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alabama | 875 | 387 | 44% | 70% | 260 | July 2028 |
| Alaska | 110 | 70 | 64% | 76% | 270 | July 2028 |
| Arizona | 769 | 497 | 65% | 76% | 270 | July 2027 |
| Arkansas | 333 | 217 | 65% | 77% | 270 | — |
| California | 11,248 | 6,504 | 58% | 69% | — | — |
| Colorado | 925 | 647 | 70% | 78% | 270 | July 2028 |
| Connecticut | 617 | 316 | 51% | 63% | 266 | July 2026 |
| Delaware | 306 | 204 | 67% | 80% | — | February 2028 |
| District of Columbia | 2,905 | 2,069 | 71% | 83% | 266 | February 2028 |
| Florida | 3,938 | 2,364 | 60% | 76% | — | July 2028 |
| Georgia | 1,475 | 943 | 64% | 79% | — | July 2028 |
| Hawaii | 270 | 184 | 68% | 77% | — | July 2028 |
| Idaho | 185 | 137 | 74% | 81% | 270 | July 2026 |
| Illinois | 3,022 | 1,985 | 66% | 80% | 266 | February 2028 |
| Indiana | 623 | 406 | 65% | 80% | 264 | July 2028 |
| Iowa | 231 | 160 | 69% | 78% | 266 | July 2027 |
| Kansas | 234 | 176 | 75% | 84% | 266 | July 2028 |
| Kentucky | 433 | 307 | 71% | 79% | 266 | July 2027 |
| Louisiana | 720 | 498 | 69% | 79% | — | — |
| Maine | 206 | 131 | 64% | 71% | 270 | July 2028 |
| Maryland | 1,163 | 657 | 56% | 72% | 266 | July 2026 |
| Massachusetts | 2,022 | 1,380 | 68% | 83% | 270 | July 2028 |
| Michigan | 1,072 | 611 | 57% | 71% | 268 | July 2028 |
| Minnesota | 763 | 589 | 77% | 87% | 260 | July 2027 |
| Mississippi | 175 | 127 | 73% | 82% | — | TBA |
| Missouri | 820 | 599 | 73% | 83% | 260 | July 2026 |
| Montana | 129 | 96 | 74% | 83% | 266 | — |
| Nebraska | 251 | 179 | 71% | 78% | 270 | July 2027 |
| Nevada | 514 | 285 | 55% | 67% | — | — |
| New Hampshire | 134 | 74 | 55% | 65% | 270 | July 2028 |
| New Jersey | 1,379 | 763 | 55% | 71% | 266 | July 2028 |
| New Mexico | 288 | 167 | 58% | 78% | 260 | July 2027 |
| New York | 14,021 | 8,559 | 61% | 75% | 266 | July 2028 |
| North Carolina | 1,199 | 834 | 70% | 82% | 270 | July 2028 |
| North Dakota | 85 | 50 | 59% | 71% | 260 | July 2027 |
| Ohio | 1,312 | 840 | 64% | 78% | 270 | July 2028 |
| Oklahoma | 477 | 329 | 69% | 79% | 260 | July 2027 |
| Oregon | 492 | 335 | 68% | 76% | 270 | July 2026 |
| Pennsylvania | 1,998 | 1,361 | 68% | 80% | 270 | July 2028 |
| Rhode Island | 124 | 84 | 68% | 73% | 270 | July 2028 |
| South Carolina | 646 | 455 | 70% | 81% | 266 | July 2028 |
| South Dakota | 98 | 66 | 67% | 79% | — | July 2027 |
| Tennessee | 954 | 628 | 66% | 78% | 270 | July 2027 |
| Texas | 4,187 | 2,853 | 68% | 80% | 270 | July 2028 |
| Utah | 424 | 349 | 82% | 86% | 260 | July 2028 |
| Vermont | 88 | 43 | 49% | 58% | 270 | July 2027 |
| Virginia | 818 | 601 | 73% | 81% | — | July 2028 |
| Washington | 1,093 | 693 | 63% | 77% | 260 | July 2026 |
| West Virginia | 148 | 105 | 71% | 80% | 270 | July 2027 |
| Wisconsin | 186 | 109 | 59% | 81% | — | July 2028 |
| Wyoming | 66 | 40 | 61% | 70% | 270 | July 2027 |
| Guam | 12 | 7 | 58% | 100% | — | July 2026 |
| Northern Mariana Islands | 3 | 3 | 100% | 100% | — | July 2026 |
| Palau | 2 | 2 | 100% | 100% | — | July 2026 |
| Puerto Rico | 862 | 413 | 48% | 54% | — | — |
| Virgin Islands | 12 | 8 | 67% | 80% | 266 | July 2026 |
| All jurisdictions | 67,442 | 42,496 | 63% | 76% |
About the data. Pass-rate, taker, and first-timer figures are the official statistics jurisdictions report to the National Conference of Bar Examiners, published in The Bar Examiner (Spring 2026): persons taking and passing, first-timers and repeaters, and the ten-year summary (PDF). MBE means are from NCBE's MBE statistics; UBE cut scores from NCBE's UBE pages; NextGen adoption dates from NCBE's decisions-by-jurisdiction tracker as of July 1, 2026. California's 2025 timeline is sourced to the State Bar of California and the California Supreme Court; we spot-verified NCBE's state figures against primary state announcements, including New York's BOLE release and California's July results, and they match exactly. Percentages are as published by NCBE; rankings use exact passer/taker counts before rounding. "Passed" means passed the exam, which is not identical to "admitted to the bar." Puerto Rico's exams are administered in March and September but reported by NCBE under February/July.
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