FE Civil Pass Rate, Format & Study Guide

NCEES's own annual Squared 2025 report (fiscal year Oct 2024-Sep 2025) lists FE Civil at a 61% pass rate for 16,639 first-time examinees — the highest-volume FE discipline that year — versus 32% for 9,863 repeat examinees; 64% for EAC/ABET-accredited bachelor's holders specifically. Independently re-confirmed via a second search cross-check.

NCEES allows one attempt per testing window and no more than three attempts in any rolling 12-month period. There's no mandatory cooling-off period beyond waiting for your next available testing window (the FE exam runs in continuous 3-month windows year-round), but every attempt requires paying the full $225 fee again — NCEES doesn't offer a discounted retest rate.

NCEES scores the FE exam on the number of correct answers with no penalty for guessing, converted to a scaled score that adjusts for minor difficulty differences between exam forms; that scaled score is compared against a minimum ability level set by subject-matter experts through psychometric standard-setting methods. NCEES explicitly states it does not publish the passing score, and results are reported as pass/fail only — failing candidates get a diagnostic report of strengths and weaknesses by topic area instead of a numeric score.

NCEES doesn't publish a breadth/depth percentage breakdown for FE Civil the way it does pass-rate data, so don't chase phantom weighting numbers. With 110 questions across 5 hours 20 minutes of actual exam time (a comfortable ~2.9 minutes/question average), the real lever is your depth-module choice — pick Construction, Geotechnical, Structural, Transportation, or Water Resources & Environmental based on your strongest coursework, not your intended PE track — and drill the NCEES-supplied reference handbook (the only resource allowed in the exam) until you can navigate it by section number from memory, since unfamiliarity with its layout wastes more time than not knowing a formula cold.