Enrolled Agent exam prep: EA practice test, practice questions and mock exams for SEE Parts 1, 2 and 3

The fee is $317 per part, paid to PSI when you schedule, which puts all three parts at $951 if you pass each one on the first attempt. That figure comes straight from the IRS enrolled agent FAQ, updated April 9, 2026, and from the PSI Candidate Information Bulletin revised August 28, 2026. It is non-refundable and non-transferable. A great many prep sites still print $350, and it is worth understanding why, because the difference is real money and it explains which pages are current. The $317 is two charges stacked: a $66 IRS user fee plus $251 paid to the contractor that administers the exam. Until April 20, 2026, the IRS user fee was $99, which is where $350 came from. On that date the Treasury Department and the IRS published interim final regulations at 91 FR 20899 cutting the user fee from $99 to $66 per part, after a biennial review found the government's full cost of overseeing the exam had fallen. Anyone quoting $350 is quoting the sum that was correct for about seven weeks. For context, the same arithmetic in the previous window was $99 plus a $168 contractor fee, so $267 per part. The contractor fee jumped to $251 when the new contract was awarded, which is the real driver of the increase. The same rulemaking states the contractor fee stays $251 through the May 2028 to February 2029 testing periods and then drops to $211 for May 2029 to February 2030, so a candidate testing in that window would pay $277 per part. The contract expires February 28, 2030. Budget past the exam itself. A PTIN costs $18.75 to obtain or renew, and you need a valid one before you can be paid to prepare returns. After you pass the third part you have one year to apply for enrollment, and the Form 23 enrollment fee is $140 through Pay.gov. So the unavoidable federal cost of becoming an Enrolled Agent, with no retakes, is $951 plus $18.75 plus $140, which is $1,109.75. Commercial review courses sit on top of that and commonly run several hundred to well over a thousand dollars.

A scaled score of 500, on a scale that runs from 200 to 800. That replaced the old 40 to 130 scale with its passing mark of 105, and if a study guide still quotes 105 it was written for a vendor that no longer administers this exam. The IRS explains the mechanics plainly. Scaled scores are produced by counting the questions you answered correctly and converting that raw count onto the 200 to 800 scale, and the IRS set 500 as the point representing the minimum knowledge acceptable for someone who will practice before the IRS. The cut was established through a scoring study in which a panel of Enrolled Agents and IRS representatives judged what a minimally qualified candidate should be able to do. Two consequences matter for how you prepare. First, there is no fixed percentage you can aim at. A scaled score is not a percentage correct, and the raw number of right answers behind 500 moves with the difficulty of the form you happen to draw. Chasing "75%" on practice tests is chasing a number the exam does not report. Second, passing tells you nothing about margin. If you pass, the score report shows a passing designation and no score at all, because, as the IRS puts it, all score values above passing indicate that a candidate is qualified, not how qualified. If you fail, you do get a number, and the IRS gives two useful anchors for reading it: a candidate scoring 495 is very close to passing, and a candidate scoring 245 is far from it. You also receive diagnostic information by content area, which is the single most valuable thing in a failing report because it tells you which domain to attack rather than making you re-study all 85 items' worth of material.

Each of the three parts has 100 multiple choice questions and a 3.5 hour clock. Of those 100, 85 are scored and 15 are experimental items distributed throughout the exam and not identified, seeded so PSI can gather statistics before promoting them to scored items. They do not count for or against you, and since you cannot tell which is which the only workable approach is to treat every question as live. Appointments are booked for four hours to accommodate a pre-exam tutorial and a post-exam survey. Here is the part almost nothing published before mid-2026 tells you, and it changes how you should sit the exam. PSI divides each part into three sections with two scheduled 10-minute breaks between them. Section one is questions 1 to 34. Section two is questions 35 to 67. Section three is questions 68 to 100. When you finish reviewing a section and acknowledge that you are done with it, you can no longer access that section's content. The exam clock stops during a scheduled break, and you may decline the break and keep testing, but you cannot decline the section boundary. The practical effect is that the standard advice to flag anything hard and sweep back at the end no longer works across the whole exam. It works inside a block of 33 or 34 questions and nowhere else. Budget roughly 70 minutes per section and resolve every flagged question before you acknowledge the section, because after that acknowledgment a blank is permanent. If you take both scheduled breaks and then need the clock back, note that failing to restart the next section within 10 minutes restarts the exam clock whether you are seated or not. Unscheduled breaks are allowed for the bathroom or your locker, but the exam clock keeps running during those.

PSI publishes the scored question count for every domain, which is unusually specific and lets you allocate study time by arithmetic rather than by instinct. All three parts total 85 scored items. Part 1, Individuals, spreads widest: Preliminary Work with Taxpayer Data 14 items, Income and Assets 17, Deductions and Credits 17, Taxation 15, Advising the Individual Taxpayer 11, and Specialized Returns for Individuals 11. No single domain reaches a quarter of the part, which is why Part 1 rewards broad coverage of individual return preparation over depth in any one area. Part 2, Businesses, is the opposite shape and the part candidates most often underestimate. Business Tax Preparation alone is 37 of the 85 scored items, 44% of the part. Business Entities and Considerations is 30, and Specialized Returns and Taxpayers is 18. Two thirds of Part 2 is entity selection and the mechanics of preparing partnership, corporate and S corporation returns. If your day job is individual 1040 work, this is the part that will hurt, and the item counts say so before you sit it. Part 3, Representation, Practices and Procedures, is the shortest to study and the one most people pass first: Practices and Procedures 26, Representation before the IRS 25, Specific Areas of Representation 20, and Filing Process 14. It leans heavily on Circular 230, practitioner duties and sanctions, powers of attorney, examination and appeals, and collection alternatives. It is a rules exam rather than a computation exam. You may take the parts in any order. Many candidates take Part 3 first to bank a pass cheaply, then Part 1, then Part 2. That order is defensible, but be aware it starts your three-year carryover clock on the part with the least study time invested in it.

Four attempts per part per testing window. If you fail a part four times inside a window you must wait for the next window before trying that part again. Each attempt is a fresh registration at the full $317, so four failed attempts at one part costs $1,268 before you have passed anything. The window normally runs May 1 to the end of February, with a blackout in March and April while the exam is updated for the new tax law. The 2026 to 2027 window is atypical because of the vendor transition: scheduling opened May 1, 2026, but domestic testing runs July 1, 2026 to February 28, 2027. International testing dates had not been announced at the time this page was written. Two scheduling rules cost people money more often than the retake limit does. You must wait at least 24 hours before rescheduling the same exam part. And you can cancel or reschedule without forfeiting the fee only if you do it at least 48 hours before your appointment. Inside 48 hours, the fee is forfeited. Miss the appointment or arrive 30 or more minutes late and you will not be permitted to test, the fee is gone, and you pay again to rebook. The retake limit is rarely the binding constraint. The window is. A candidate who fails Part 2 in early February has one window's worth of chances left and a March and April blackout sitting between them and the next opportunity.

For exams taken between July 1, 2026 and February 28, 2027, every reference on the exam is to the Internal Revenue Code, the Code of Federal Regulations, and IRS forms, instructions and publications as amended through December 31, 2025. Unless a question says otherwise, it relates to calendar year 2025, and a question that says "current tax year" means 2025. The instruction the IRS adds to that is the one candidates violate: do not take into account any legislation, court decisions or penalty amounts in effect after December 31, 2025. This is genuinely counterintuitive for a working preparer, because you spend your professional life keeping up. On this exam, being current past the cutoff is a way to get questions wrong. If a figure changed in 2026, the 2025 figure is the answer. That cutoff is also why the March and April blackout exists. The exam is rebuilt during those two months to move the reference date forward, which means material written for the previous window carries stale dollar amounts, phase-out thresholds and mileage rates. When you buy or generate practice questions, the reference year matters more than the volume of questions.

Yes. PSI offers online proctored testing alongside in-person testing at test centers, and you can sit the exam at home, at school or at your office. The requirements are stricter than most people expect and are worth checking before you book, because a failed check-in is a forfeited fee. You need a walled room where you will not be disturbed, and nobody else may be in the room while you test. Only one monitor is allowed, and the PSI Proctoring Platform has to be installable on the machine you use, which rules out many locked-down corporate laptops. The session is recorded. A military ID, which is otherwise acceptable identification, is not valid for remote testing. The difference that actually affects your score is note-taking. In a test center you are given scratch paper and a pencil, collected at the end. Remotely there is no paper at all: you get an electronic whiteboard, and your notes vanish when the test ends. For Part 1 and especially Part 2, where you are tracking basis, holding periods and multi-step computations, an on-screen whiteboard is meaningfully slower than a pencil. Candidates who compute on paper should think hard before choosing remote for Part 2. Both formats are closed book. No notes, books, reference materials, phones, smart glasses or electronic devices at any time, including during breaks. An onscreen calculator is provided and personal calculators are not permitted, so practice with a basic four-function calculator rather than the financial calculator on your desk.

Three years, counted separately from the date you passed each part. A passing score carries over for three years from the day you earned it, so the deadline is a rolling one rather than a single cliff. The IRS example makes it concrete. A candidate who passed Part 1 on November 15, 2025 and Part 2 on February 15, 2026 has until November 15, 2028 to pass the remaining part or loses credit for Part 1, and until February 15, 2029 before losing credit for Part 2. Lose a part and you retake it at full price. There is a transitional allowance worth knowing if you were caught by the vendor changeover. For domestic candidates with examination parts expiring between May 1, 2026 and June 30, 2026, the three-year carryover period is extended by two months, because domestic testing did not resume until July 1. International candidates whose parts expired during the delay are also to receive additional time, with the specifics still to be published. One more clock starts after the last part. You must apply for enrollment within one year of the date you passed your third part, using Form 23 through Pay.gov with the $140 fee. Allow roughly 60 days for processing, longer if your suitability check raises anything. The check covers tax compliance, meaning all required returns filed and no outstanding liabilities, plus a criminal background review, so an unfiled return of your own is a genuinely common reason an application stalls.

Volume of questions, in the right proportions, with explanations you read even when you got the item right. That is a boring answer and it is what separates people who pass from people who nearly pass, because the SEE is not testing whether you can derive a rule. It is testing whether you recognize which rule applies to a fact pattern in about two minutes. Weight your practice to the published item counts rather than to your comfort. If you are a 1040 preparer, Part 2 is 37 items of business tax preparation and 30 of entity considerations, and no amount of individual return experience covers that. If you came out of a corporate tax department, Part 1 will surprise you in the other direction with 17 items on deductions and credits that touch the individual provisions you have never had to know cold. Rehearse the three question formats PSI actually uses, because two of them trip people. The direct question is straightforward. The incomplete sentence stem, where the question ends in a colon and the options complete it, reads differently under time pressure than a question does. And the "all of the following except" format inverts what you are hunting for, which is where careless errors cluster: you know the material, you select a true statement, and the item wanted the false one. The IRS also warns that you should choose the best answer among the options presented even if a technically more precise answer is missing, which is a real scoring rule and not a hedge. Finally, practice with the section structure in mind. Sit blocks of 33 or 34 questions in about 70 minutes and force yourself to close each block with nothing unanswered, because on the real exam that acknowledgment is irreversible. Practicing 100 questions as one open pool trains a habit the exam will punish.