Which exam bodies publish free official practice material
Last verified August 18, 2026 · free to cite with attribution
12 rows, machine-readable: JSON · CSV. Free to reuse and cite with attribution to Every Exam Prep and a link to the report URL.
Before you pay anyone for practice questions, it is worth knowing what the body that writes the exam already gives away. Some publish complete past papers with marking guides. Some publish an interactive practice assessment. Some publish nothing but a syllabus and let a market form around the gap.
We checked 12 exams by fetching the publisher's own page and reading what it actually offers. Nine publish something free, one publishes official practice tests but charges for them, and two publish exam objectives with no practice items at all.
The spread is wider than the marketing around these exams suggests, and the best free material is not where you would expect. A state education department gives away more usable practice than most commercial certification bodies do.
What each exam body actually publishes
| Exam | Publisher | What is published free | Verdict | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NY Regents Earth and Space Sciences | NYSED | Every past administration since June 2025 as a complete test booklet, plus the scoring key, rating guide and conversion chart for each | Free — full past papers | nysedregents.org |
| U.S. Naturalization Civics Test | USCIS | The full published question set, interactive practice tests, flash cards, audio and vocabulary material — described by USCIS as free resources | Free — full question set | uscis.gov |
| Microsoft PL-300 (Power BI Data Analyst) | Microsoft Learn | A free practice assessment matching the style, wording and difficulty of exam questions, plus an exam sandbox that reproduces the interface | Free — practice assessment | learn.microsoft.com |
| Microsoft AZ-900 (Azure Fundamentals) | Microsoft Learn | The same free practice assessment and exam sandbox; Microsoft publishes one per role-based certification | Free — practice assessment | learn.microsoft.com |
| Securities Industry Essentials (SIE) | FINRA | A practice test linked from the exam page, plus the full downloadable content outline with per-section question counts | Free — practice test | finra.org |
| ASVAB | Official ASVAB (U.S. Department of Defense) | Sample questions from each ASVAB subtest, alongside an official statement warning about fraudulent third-party prep claims | Free — sample questions | officialasvab.com |
| Google Cloud Digital Leader | Google Cloud | Untimed sample questions with no limit on attempts; Google states they do not represent the full range or difficulty of the real exam | Free — sample questions | cloud.google.com |
| NCLEX-RN | NCSBN | An exam preview with sample questions, plus the full test plans covering content categories and clinical judgment | Free — preview and test plans | nclex.com |
| AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner | Amazon Web Services | Official Practice Question Sets and exam prep courses are free on Skill Builder; the full-length Official Practice Exams require a paid subscription | Partly free — questions yes, full exams no | aws.amazon.com |
| Praxis Core | ETS | Official interactive practice tests exist, but they are sold — listed at $99.99 for the elementary course and up to $199.00 for a full-length subject practice test | Paid — official practice is not free | ets.org |
| HashiCorp Terraform Associate | HashiCorp | Full exam objectives and exam mechanics are published; no free practice questions are offered on the certification page, and a retake is not included in the $70.50 fee | Objectives only | developer.hashicorp.com |
| ISC2 Certified in Cybersecurity (CC) | ISC2 | Free career eBooks are offered on the credential page, but no free practice questions appear on it | Objectives only | isc2.org |
Verified 2026-08-18 by fetching each publisher page and reading what it states it offers. 'Free' describes what the publisher gives away without payment; several of these require a free account.
The pattern worth noticing
Public bodies publish more than commercial ones. NYSED gives away every past Earth and Space Sciences paper with its marking guide, USCIS publishes its entire civics question set, and the Department of Defense publishes ASVAB sample questions alongside a warning about fraudulent prep vendors. None of them has a prep product to protect.
Certification vendors mostly publish a taste. Microsoft's free practice assessment is the most generous of the commercial offerings and is genuinely modelled on the real item style. Google and AWS publish sample questions but caveat them heavily — Google states explicitly that its sample questions do not represent the range or difficulty of the exam and should not be used to predict your result.
Two of the twelve publish nothing to practise on. HashiCorp and ISC2 give you objectives and mechanics and stop there, which is precisely the gap third-party question banks fill.
The most useful thing on this page for a student is the middle column, not the verdict. 'Free' covers everything from a complete past paper with an official marking guide to twenty untimed sample questions that the publisher warns you not to draw conclusions from.
Method
- — Each row was checked on 2026-08-18 by fetching the publisher's own page and reading what it says it provides. No third-party claim about a publisher's free material was accepted.
- — 'Free' means available without payment from the body that sets the exam. Some of these require a free account; none require a purchase.
- — A row is only included if the publisher page could be read. Four exams — CompTIA A+, Cisco CCNA, the AICPA CPA sample tests, and NREMT — publish through pages that render client-side and returned no readable text to our fetcher. All four are believed to publish free sample material, but believing is not verifying, so they are excluded from the count rather than listed on assumption.
- — Four more exams were dropped for a different reason: Prometric (for the IRS Enrolled Agent exam), PMI, the Arizona Secretary of State and the Air Force study-guide portal all returned bot-protection responses, so their pages could not be read from our environment either.
- — This is a snapshot of a fast-moving set of pages. Publishers add and withdraw free material without notice; the date above is when each row was last read.
Questions
- Which exam bodies give you free official practice questions?
- Of the 12 we checked, 9 publish something free: NYSED (complete past Regents papers with marking guides), USCIS (the full civics question set), Microsoft (a free practice assessment per certification), FINRA (a practice test for the SIE), the Department of Defense (ASVAB sample questions), Google Cloud (untimed sample questions), NCSBN (an NCLEX exam preview and test plans), and AWS (free official practice question sets, though its full-length practice exams are paid).
- Are official practice tests always free?
- No. ETS sells its official Praxis practice tests, listed from $99.99 up to $199.00, and AWS puts its full-length Official Practice Exams behind a Skill Builder subscription while keeping the shorter question sets free. Official does not mean free, and free does not always mean substantial.
- Is free official practice material enough to pass?
- Rarely on its own, and the publishers say so. Google states plainly that its sample questions do not represent the range of topics or difficulty of the real exam and should not be used to predict your result. The exception is a body that publishes complete past papers with official marking guides — NYSED's Regents archive is the strongest example on this list, because it is the real exam rather than a sample of it.
- Why are CompTIA, Cisco and the CPA exam not in the table?
- Because their publisher pages render client-side and returned no readable text to our fetcher, so we could not verify what they offer by reading the page. All three are believed to publish free sample material. We would rather leave a row out than assert something we did not check.
- Can I cite this page?
- Yes. Every row links to the publisher page it was read from and carries the date it was read. Please include the date — this is the most volatile of our censuses, because free-tier offerings change without announcement.
Citing this page? Link to https://www.everyexamprep.com/reports/official-free-practice-material and include the verification date — a census is a snapshot, and these publishers change what they release without notice.