Praxis Core Pass Rate 2026: Why There Isn't One

There is no national Praxis Core pass rate, and there cannot be one. ETS does not set the passing score for the Core Academic Skills for Educators tests — each state does, and those bars do not agree. On ETS's own passing-score tool, the Mathematics (5733) qualifying score runs from 130 in Mississippi to 150 in eighteen of the twenty-four jurisdictions that publish one. A candidate who scores 144 has passed in Kentucky and Nevada and failed in New Jersey, on the same test, on the same day. Any single percentage sold as "the Praxis Core pass rate" has quietly picked one state's bar and discarded every other one.

How the Praxis Core is really scored

The Core Combined test (5752) is not one test. It is three separately scored subtests — Reading (5713), Writing (5723), and Mathematics (5733) — that you may schedule in a single session for $150 rather than $90 each. Each subtest carries its own scaled score and is judged against its own state cut. Nothing is averaged across the three.

A Praxis score is a scaled score, not a percentage. This is where most of the pages ranking for this query fall apart. ETS reports Praxis results on a 100–200 scale, and for all three Core subtests the score interval is 2 — meaning only 51 scores exist on the entire scale. The ETS Technical Manual describes exactly how that scale is built: the raw score you would expect from random guessing is fixed at the scale minimum of 100, any raw score at or above 95 percent of test length is set to the maximum of 200, and raw scores in between are converted linearly. Every subsequent test form is then equated, so that a given scaled score represents the same level of achievement on every form even though the raw-to-scaled conversion differs from form to form.

Three consequences follow, and all of them break the percentage conversion. The scale floor is guessing, not zero. The scale ceiling is reached below a perfect paper. And the number of raw points behind any scaled score changes from one form to the next. Rendering a 156 as "78%" is not a rounding problem; it is a category error, and it will mislead you about how far from your state's cut you actually are.

Subtest	Testing time	Questions	Score scale	State qualifying scores	Most common cut
Reading (5713)	85 minutes	56	100–200, interval 2	142–156	156 (22 of 25)
Writing (5723)	100 minutes: a 40-minute selected-response section plus two 30-minute essays	40 selected-response, 2 essays	100–200, interval 2	144–162	162 (19 of 25)
Mathematics (5733)	90 minutes	56	100–200, interval 2	130–150	150 (18 of 24)
Core Combined (5752)	All three subtests in one session	—	Reported as three separate subtest scores	None published	None

Two more official details matter on test day. The Mathematics subtest supplies an on-screen four-function calculator. On Writing, both essays are read holistically by experienced teachers and then combined with your selected-response score, and ETS notes that your score report lists selected-response points separately from essay points.

Why the figures you find online disagree

Search this question in 2026 and the first page of results will contradict itself violently: one page publishes 89.6 percent, another publishes 45 percent for first-time takers. Neither can be traced to ETS, because ETS publishes no pass rate for these tests. And neither can be checked, because a pass rate needs a cut score, and the cut score is a state variable that swings 20 scaled points on Mathematics alone.

What ETS does publish is a score distribution, in Appendix A of its Technical Manual. The figures below cover test takers between August 2022 and July 2025 who were college freshmen, sophomores, juniors, or associate-degree holders, using each candidate's most recent score where they tested more than once:

• Reading (5713): 18,898 test takers, median 170, middle 50 percent scoring 158–184
• Writing (5723): 20,167 test takers, median 162, middle 50 percent scoring 154–168
• Mathematics (5733): 19,652 test takers, median 166, middle 50 percent scoring 150–180

Read carefully, those figures tell you where the bar sits without telling you how many people clear it. The most common Reading cut of 156 falls below the middle 50 percent band entirely. The most common Mathematics cut of 150 sits exactly on its lower edge. And the most common Writing cut of 162 is exactly the median — the point that, by definition, half of that reference group did not exceed.

That last line is the whole explanation for the 45-versus-89.6 spread. A first-attempt Writing figure somewhere near half is arithmetically unsurprising. A figure near ninety is equally unsurprising if it counts candidates cumulatively across retakes, or comes from one university's own cohort, or is measured in a state with a lower cut. Two honest numbers, two different denominators, forty-five points apart. None of it is a national pass rate, and none of it tells you your odds in your state.

What separates passing from failing candidates

Subtest	Content category	Approx. questions	Approx. % of exam
Reading (5713)	Key Ideas and Details	17–22	35%
	Craft, Structure, and Language Skills	14–19	30%
	Integration of Knowledge and Ideas	17–22	35%
Writing (5723)	Text Types, Purposes, and Production	6–12 selected-response plus both essays	60%
	Language and Research Skills for Writing	28–34 selected-response	40%
Mathematics (5733)	Number and Quantity	20	36%
	Data Interpretation and Representation, Statistics, and Probability	18	32%
	Algebra and Geometry	18	32%

ETS notes that those counts include unscored pretest questions, so the exact number in each category shifts between forms.

Writing is the binding subtest, and the essays carry it. Text Types, Purposes, and Production is 60 percent of the Writing score but only 6–12 selected-response questions — the rest of that weight is the two essays. Candidates who drill grammar and skip timed writing are optimizing the 40 percent category. With the modal Writing cut sitting on the reference median, this is the subtest where preparation is most likely to decide the outcome.

Mathematics is where the score moves most. It has the widest middle-50 band of the three (150–180) and the widest state variation (130–150). A candidate who ignores it because "the cut is only 150" is reading a percentage that does not exist.

Reading is a clock problem, not a knowledge problem. ETS states that every question can be answered from information contained in the passage and that none requires outside knowledge. What it requires is 56 questions in 85 minutes — about 91 seconds each, across paired passages, 200-word passages, 100-word passages, and single-question statements.

Aim above the cut, not at it. The Technical Manual reports standard errors of measurement of 7.5 scaled points on Reading, 7.6 on Mathematics, and 5.7 on Writing. Since state cuts land on 2-point intervals, a score within a few points of your state's bar is inside the measurement noise. Targeting the cut exactly is a coin flip you have paid for.

No state grades the combined test. Not one of the 54 states, territories, and agencies in ETS's comparison tool publishes a qualifying score for 5752. You are assessed subtest by subtest, so a strong Reading score cannot rescue a weak Mathematics score — but it also means a failed subtest is retaken alone. ETS requires at least 28 days between the previous test date and the retake.

The bottom line

Nobody publishes a Praxis Core pass rate because the question is malformed: there is no single passing standard to measure against. What is official and checkable is that you sit three separately scored subtests on a 100–200 scale in 2-point steps, that 22 of 25 jurisdictions set Reading at 156, 19 of 25 set Writing at 162, and 18 of 24 set Mathematics at 150, that the spread runs as low as 130 on Mathematics, and that ETS's own reference group posts medians of 170, 162, and 166 on the three. The single most useful thing you can do before booking is look up your own state on ETS's passing-score tool and write your three numbers down. That converts a fake national statistic into three real targets.

Then find out how far you currently are from each of them. Work through a free Praxis Core Academic Skills for Educators practice test before you pay the $150, so the subtest you need to work on is a decision rather than a discovery on results day.

Official numbers that matter more than an estimated pass rate

The figures below come from the official source documents linked in the table. They are included so you can make study and registration decisions from published requirements rather than an unsupported estimate.

Published detail	Value	Official source
The test consists of four types of stimulus material: paired passages totaling approximately 200 words followed by four to seven questions, long passages of approximately 200 words with four to seven questions, short passages of approximately 100 words with two or three questions, and brief statements followed by a single question	four stimulus types: paired ~200-word passages (4-7 qs), long ~200-word passages (4-7 qs), short ~100-word passages (2-3 qs), brief statements (1 q)	Educational Testing Service (ETS)