Which states are using the NextGen bar exam? The full 2026 to 2028 timeline

The NextGen UBE was administered for the first time on July 28 and 29, 2026, in ten jurisdictions: Connecticut, Idaho, Maryland, Missouri, Oregon, Washington, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Palau and the Virgin Islands. A larger group follows in July 2027, and most remaining states switch during 2028. The legacy bar exam stays available through the February 2028 administration. Which exam you sit is decided entirely by your jurisdiction and your test date.

If you are graduating in spring 2028 or later, you are taking NextGen. That part is simple. Everyone sitting before then needs to check their own jurisdiction, because the answer genuinely differs between neighboring states, and a classmate's answer is not yours.

Which states are using the NextGen bar exam?

Ten jurisdictions went first in July 2026. NCBE publishes a jurisdiction table listing each state's first NextGen administration and, where announced, its passing score.

Checked against NCBE's jurisdiction table in July 2026. Dates have moved before and several states still list their passing score as TBA, so confirm yours directly with NCBE and your board of bar examiners rather than trusting any table, including this one.

California deserves a note of its own. It has never used the UBE and administers its own California Bar Examination: five one-hour essays, one 90-minute performance test and the 200-question MBE across two days, covering twelve subjects. It is listed for July 2028, with everything else about its plans still unannounced.

What is the NextGen bar exam?

It is NCBE's replacement for the exam that has existed in roughly its current shape for decades, and it is a structural rebuild rather than a refresh.

The legacy UBE is 12 hours over two days, split into three separate components: the MBE (200 multiple-choice questions over six hours), the MEE (six 30-minute essays) and the MPT (two 90-minute performance tasks). NextGen collapses all of that into 9 hours across three 3-hour sections over a day and a half. Each section mixes about 40 standalone multiple-choice questions, two integrated question sets and one performance task.

The scored totals: 120 standalone multiple-choice questions of which 100 count, six integrated question sets of which five count, and three performance tasks. Weighting runs multiple choice 49%, performance tasks 30%, integrated question sets 21%.

Two changes matter more than the rest. Essays no longer exist as a standalone component, absorbed into integrated question sets built around a shared fact scenario with legal resources supplied. And performance tasks go from two to three while climbing to 30% of your score. NextGen is a meaningfully more practical exam.

What subjects are on the NextGen bar exam?

Eight Foundational Concepts through February 2028: business associations, civil procedure, constitutional law, contract law, criminal law, evidence, real property and torts. Family law joins as a ninth from July 2028.

Conflict of laws and secured transactions, both on the legacy essay list, are not Foundational Concepts and do not appear in the transition provisions.

Here is the nuance most summaries get wrong. Family law and trusts and estates are not cut. NCBE's blueprint states that from July 2026 through February 2028 they "will appear in these skills-focused questions on every exam," with legal resources provided, and that examinees "are not expected or required to develop a base of knowledge in those areas." So they are on every exam, but you read them rather than outline them. If a prep course has you memorizing the Rule Against Perpetuities for a 2027 NextGen sitting, it has not read the blueprint.

NextGen also names seven Foundational Skills: legal research, legal writing, issue spotting and analysis, investigation and evaluation, client counseling and advising, negotiation and dispute resolution, and client relationship and management. Professional responsibility is tested inside the counseling and negotiation contexts, from recalled knowledge.

One more distinction worth internalizing: the blueprint stars certain topics. Starred means you must answer from recalled knowledge with no resources given. Unstarred means it may be tested either way. That tells you precisely where memorization is still mandatory.

The score scale is completely different

This is the detail most likely to mislead you, because the numbers look like they should be comparable and they are not.

Legacy UBE scores are reported on a 400-point scale, and jurisdictions set passing scores between 260 and 270. NextGen scores are reported on a 500 to 750 scale. Announced NextGen cut scores so far cluster from 610 to 620: Missouri and Washington at 610, Guam and Palau at 612, Connecticut, Idaho, Maryland and the Virgin Islands at 616, the Northern Mariana Islands at 615, Oregon at 615 rising to 620.

A quick way to audit any bar prep page you land on: if it claims UBE cut scores range from 260 to 280, stop reading. No jurisdiction is above 270. That error is everywhere, and it reliably indicates the rest of the page was not checked either.

NextGen written responses are graded by jurisdiction-appointed graders using uniform NCBE rubrics, dual-graded with reconciliation, and explicitly criterion-referenced: NCBE states responses "will not be graded or ranked relative to other examinees' responses." Scores remain portable across jurisdictions.

Will I take the UBE or the NextGen bar exam?

Work through three questions in order.

1. Where are you sitting? Not where you went to school. The jurisdiction you sit in decides which exam you get.
2. When are you sitting? Look up that jurisdiction's first NextGen administration on NCBE's table. Before that date, you take the legacy UBE. On or after it, NextGen.
3. Are you a 2028 graduate or later? Then it is NextGen regardless, because the legacy exam's final administration is February 2028.

That February 2028 sunset is worth flagging. NCBE originally announced July 2027, then extended it, and its own press release still carries the stale July 2027 line in the body text with the correction sitting in an editor's note below. Plenty of prep sites copied the wrong date and never revisited it.

Can you choose between the two? No evidence suggests any jurisdiction offers examinees a choice. Nationally both exams run simultaneously between July 2026 and February 2028, but each jurisdiction has a single switchover date. Treat "you can pick" as false unless your own board of bar examiners says otherwise in writing.

There is one genuinely useful transition quirk. Most jurisdictions began accepting transferred NextGen scores in July 2026, well before they administer NextGen themselves. So a July 2026 NextGen score earned in Missouri is already portable into a large number of states that will not give the exam for another two years.

Is the NextGen bar exam easier?

It is shorter. That is not the same thing.

It tests fewer memorized subjects, which sounds like relief, but it redistributes that weight into practical skills. Performance tasks alone are 30% of the score, and legal research gets its own dedicated performance task format. The exam rewards a different candidate: less pure memorization, more research, writing and client counseling under a clock.

If you were the student who could outline forty subjects and reproduce them cold, NextGen removes some of your edge. If you were the student who was better in a clinic than in a memorization contest, it hands you one. It is worth building comfort with fast, structured legal research well before test day, since the format now scores that skill directly rather than assuming it. Working with tools that let you interrogate case law in plain English is a reasonable way to develop that instinct during your 2L and 3L years, though on exam day you will be limited to the resources NCBE supplies.

For context on the difficulty question generally: NCBE reported a 63% overall pass rate across 2025 on 67,442 examinees, with July 2025 at 69% and February 2025 at 47%. That February gap appears every year and reflects who sits in February, namely a much higher share of repeat takers.

What this means for your prep

The overlap between the two exams is larger than the noise suggests. Seven of the eight NextGen Foundational Concepts are exactly the seven legacy MBE subjects, and multiple choice remains the single largest scored component on both exams. The core work does not change: answer a very large number of questions, then spend longer reviewing them than you spent answering them.

What changes is the periphery. Practice performance tasks under a real clock. Get comfortable being handed unfamiliar law and asked to apply it, because that is precisely what the skills questions do. And before you buy anything, ask the vendor which exam their material was written for. If they cannot answer immediately, you have your answer.

Aspirants.ai generates unlimited bar exam practice questions across the MBE subjects and the NextGen foundational concepts, explaining every answer choice rather than just marking it wrong, for $9 a month. NCBE's own study aids remain the definitive source of real retired questions, so use both.