Certified Paralegal Pass Rate, Format & Study Guide

The certifying body does not publicly publish an official pass rate for this exam. Be wary of third-party sites citing a specific number here — treat any pass-rate claim you see elsewhere for this exam as unverified.

NALA requires a 90-day wait between attempts on both the Knowledge Exam and the Skills Exam, and you get up to three attempts at each within 365 days of your initial authorization-to-test date. Each retake needs a new retake application plus the retake fee and a fresh PSI testing-center fee — there's no free do-over. If you don't exhaust or pass within that 365-day window, the whole application is voided and you must reapply and start over from the Knowledge Exam.

NALA does not publish a numerical passing score or percentage cutoff for either exam — your official result is reported simply as Pass or Fail, and NALA's own materials don't disclose a scaled-score range or cut score the way some other certifying bodies do. Candidates who fail do receive a breakdown of performance by content area to guide a retake.

The Knowledge Exam (120 questions, 100 scored + 20 unscored pretest, 3 hours) is a hard prerequisite — you can't sit the 2-hour written Skills Exam until you've passed it, and the Skills Exam only runs in set windows (Feb/Apr/Jul/Oct), so failing the Knowledge Exam close to a Skills window can cost you months, not just a retake fee. Prioritize the Knowledge Exam first with full timed practice runs, and build in Skills Exam writing practice under a strict clock well before your target testing window rather than after your Knowledge Exam result comes back.