What is the current national first-time pass rate for the EPPP (Psychology) exam?

The most recently published national first-time pass rate for the EPPP exam is 75.07% (n=17,748 candidates, reporting year 2025). Source: ASPPB official.

What is the current national first-time pass rate for the ASWB Clinical (Social Work) exam?

The most recently published national first-time pass rate for the ASWB Clinical exam is 75.3% (n=23,443 candidates, reporting year 2024). Source: ASWB official.

What is the current national first-time pass rate for the ASWB Masters (Social Work) exam?

The most recently published national first-time pass rate for the ASWB Masters exam is 73.0% (n=20,566 candidates, reporting year 2024). Source: ASWB official.

What is the current national first-time pass rate for the ASWB Bachelors (Social Work) exam?

The most recently published national first-time pass rate for the ASWB Bachelors exam is 67.2% (n=3,080 candidates, reporting year 2024). Source: ASWB official.

What is the current national first-time pass rate for the ASWB Advanced Generalist (Social Work) exam?

The most recently published national first-time pass rate for the ASWB Advanced Generalist exam is 50.0% (n=84 candidates, reporting year 2024). Source: ASWB official.

What is the current national first-time pass rate for the ASWB Associate (Social Work) exam?

The most recently published national first-time pass rate for the ASWB Associate exam is 66.7% (n=415 candidates, reporting year 2024). Source: ASWB official.

What is the current national first-time pass rate for the BCBA (Behavior Analysis) exam?

The most recently published national first-time pass rate for the BCBA exam is 51.0% (n=9,955 candidates, reporting year 2025). Source: BACB official.

What is the current national first-time pass rate for the BCaBA (Behavior Analysis) exam?

The most recently published national first-time pass rate for the BCaBA exam is 60.0% (n=1,196 candidates, reporting year 2025). Source: BACB official.

What is the current national first-time pass rate for the RBT (Behavior Analysis) exam?

The most recently published national first-time pass rate for the RBT exam is 75.0% (n=109,341 candidates, reporting year 2025). Source: BACB official.

What is the current national first-time pass rate for the NCE (Counseling) exam?

The most recently published national first-time pass rate for the NCE exam is 92.0% (n=3,960 candidates, reporting year 2024). Source: Program-disclosure scrape.

What is the current national first-time pass rate for the NCMHCE (Counseling) exam?

The most recently published national first-time pass rate for the NCMHCE exam is 54.4% (n=40,218 candidates, reporting year 2024). Source: State board (FL + VA).

What is the current national first-time pass rate for the MFT National (MFT) exam?

The most recently published national first-time pass rate for the MFT National exam is 73.3% (n=814 candidates, reporting year 2021). Source: State board (FL + CA).

What is a good NCMHCE pass rate?

Based on regulator-collected state-board data, the true national first-time NCMHCE pass rate is approximately 54.4%. Programs publishing voluntary disclosures often report 80-95% pass rates, but those figures suffer from a measured 30-35 percentage point selection bias compared to state-board ground truth. A program pass rate at or above 60% should be considered above the true national first-time average.

Is the ASWB Clinical exam getting harder?

ASWB Clinical first-time pass rates dropped from 78.3% in 2017 to 75.3% in 2024, a 3-point decline that ASWB has attributed to the 2018 exam blueprint refresh and post-pandemic cohort effects. The 2022 ASWB Exam Pass Rate Analysis also surfaced significant demographic disparities (white test-takers approximately 84% pass, Black test-takers approximately 45%), and ASWB is implementing a 2026 exam redesign in response.

Which U.S. states have the highest social work licensure pass rate?

Based on ASWB's 2024 per-jurisdiction PDFs, Vermont (94.6%), Utah (88.6%), Massachusetts (82.4%), Pennsylvania (83.0%), Colorado (83.5%), and Oregon (84.7%) lead the U.S. for first-time ASWB Clinical pass rates. Alabama (56.2%), Florida (58.5%), and several smaller jurisdictions sit below 60%. The full 30-point spread across U.S. jurisdictions is published in this dashboard.

Why is the BCBA pass rate so low?

The BCBA first-time pass rate fell from 66% in 2020 to 51.0% in 2025, the lowest in BACB's published history. Candidate volume tripled over the same period, and BACB has not signaled a corresponding shift in exam difficulty calibration. The eventual pass rate (first-time plus retake) is approximately 74%, so most candidates do eventually pass.

What is the EPPP pass rate for psychology programs?

For 2020-2024 testing cohorts, the EPPP first-time pass rate across all APA-accredited doctoral programs is 75.07% (n=17,748). Nonaccredited program candidates pass at approximately 44.9%. The 5-point decline from pre-COVID baseline (~80%) has been attributed primarily to candidate-pool changes rather than exam difficulty increases.

Do exam prep courses improve pass rates?

Effectiveness varies by provider and individual study habits. Triad / AATBS has prepared therapists for behavioral health licensure for 50+ years across psychology (EPPP), social work (ASWB), counseling (NCE/NCMHCE), MFT, and behavior analysis (BCBA). Independent peer-reviewed analyses of prep-program efficacy are limited; Triad publishes its methodology for partner schools to evaluate independently.

Where can I find state-by-state behavioral health licensure pass rate data?

ASWB publishes per-jurisdiction PDFs annually (2024 release covers 64 U.S. and Canadian jurisdictions). Florida DOH and California BBS publish per-school pass rates quarterly. This Triad / AATBS research dashboard consolidates all publicly available state-level data into one downloadable CSV (4,741 rows as of last refresh).

EPPP, ASWB, BCBA, NCE, NCMHCE, MFT Pass Rates 2026

Name: National First-Time Pass Rates for U.S. Behavioral Health Licensure Exams
Creator: Triad / AATBS
License: https://triadhq.com/research/license

Equity in Licensure

The 2022 ASWB Disparity

ASWB's own 2022 report — the first by any U.S. licensure board to publish exam pass rates by demographic group — surfaced a 39-percentage-point gap between Black and white first-time test-takers on the Clinical exam. Any aggregate national pass rate hides this picture.

ASWB Clinical Exam — First-Time Pass Rate by Race / Ethnicity (2018-2021)

Source: 2022 ASWB Exam Pass Rate Analysis. Full report (PDF).

In response, ASWB issued "Beyond data: a call to action" and committed to the 2026 exam redesign. Triad / AATBS supports rigorous, transparent reporting of demographic outcomes for every licensure exam — see our methodology and partner offerings to address pass-rate gaps.

At a Glance

Quick Facts

Each exam's most-recent first-time pass rate, with sample size, reporting year, and 95% confidence interval.

Exam	Discipline	Year	N	Pass Rate	95% CI	Source

^† Sample-only CI: Wilson 95% interval on the aggregated scrape sample. Captures sampling variance only — does not capture selection bias. Where we have state-board data (NCMHCE, MFT National), we replaced scraped estimates with candidate-weighted state-board means; bias measurement was ~35 pts for NCMHCE and ~38 pts for MFT. For NCE, no state board currently publishes, so the headline still uses the scraped estimate — NBCC's widely-cited 73-75% national rate is closer to truth than our 92.3% scraped figure. See methodology for full bias documentation.

Regulator-Collected Detail

Pass Rates by U.S. State

See all 53 jurisdictions as a sortable table

State / Province	First-Time Candidates	Pass Rate	95% CI

Embed this map. Paste this snippet on your site to embed the U.S. state map with attribution.

<iframe src="https://triadhq.com/research/national-pass-rates#aswb-states" width="100%" height="520" loading="lazy" title="ASWB Pass Rates by State — Triad Research"></iframe>

Source: ASWB 2024 jurisdiction PDFs (Aug 2025 release), accessed via the public WordPress REST endpoint and parsed via tesseract OCR. Validation: derived weighted mean (75.30%) matches ASWB's published national headline (75.3%) across 22,053 first-time candidates of 23,443 nationally reported.

Historical Context

How Pass Rates Have Changed (2011 – Present)

All centrally-published first-time pass rates on one timeline. The 2018-2021 dip across ASWB exams was driven by the 2018 blueprint refresh + COVID-era cohort effects; BCBA's 2020-2025 slide reflects a tripling of candidate volume without a corresponding shift in exam difficulty calibration.

Internal — Sales Context

Partner Schools in Your Territory

Visible only on the internal view (URL must include ?view=internal). Triad partners are filterable below by AM territory; pass-rate gaps highlight opportunities to deepen the partnership.

Sales-internal data integration is the next phase — it requires joining SF partner records with Magento exam-family-tagged code usage. Stub view here; populated by the SF MCP feed once Marquista + Britta sign off on the AM-territory mapping. See the methodology section's research email for status.

Program-Level Data

Program Rankings

Per-program first-time pass rates with Wilson 95% confidence intervals. Two programs whose CIs overlap are not statistically distinguishable. Filter by exam, state, and minimum sample size to slice the data.

Exam: State: Min N: Search:

Institution	State	Program	N	Pass Rate	95% CI

In Their Words

What the Licensing Boards Have Said

Direct citations from the four regulators whose data anchors this report. Each link goes to the primary source.

"The Clinical exam pass rate for Black first-time test-takers was 45.4 percent, compared to 84.4 percent for white first-time test-takers, over the four-year reporting window."
— Association of Social Work Boards, 2022 Exam Pass Rate Analysis. Read the source PDF

"Approximately 75 percent of first-time candidates from APA-accredited doctoral programs passed the EPPP between 2020 and 2024, down from approximately 80 percent in the prior reporting window."
— Association of State and Provincial Psychology Boards, 2025 Psychology Licensing Exam Scores by Doctoral Program. Read the source report

"BCBA examination first-time pass rate for 2025 testing-year candidates was 51 percent (9,955 candidates tested)."
— Behavior Analyst Certification Board, 2025 BACB Annual Data Report. Read the source page

"Florida administrations of the National Clinical Mental Health Counseling Examination averaged a 51.65 percent first-time pass rate across 2018–2024 reporting years."
— Florida Department of Health, Mental Health Professions Board, NCMHCE 2018–2024 Pass Rate Reports. Read the source publications

Common Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

Plain-language answers to the questions students, programs, and partners ask most about behavioral health licensure pass rates.

How We Built This

Methodology & Data Provenance

Refresh cadence. Tier 1 (official board) data is refreshed within 30 days of each board's annual publication release. Tier 2 (scraped program disclosures) is refreshed on a rolling quarterly schedule, with the most-recent academic year prioritized.

Tier 1 — Official board publications

EPPP data is parsed from ASPPB's 2025 Psychology Licensing Exam Scores by Doctoral Program (covers testing administrations 2020-2024). ASWB headline data is parsed from the 2024 first-time pass-rate table; historical 2011-2021 series comes from Appendices B-F of the 2022 ASWB Exam Pass Rate Analysis. BCBA / BCaBA / RBT data is parsed from BACB's Annual Data Reports (2020-2025) plus the 2024 University Examination Pass Rates PDF (~198 programs deduped).

Tier 2 — Program-disclosure scrape

Neither NBCC (NCE, NCMHCE) nor AMFTRB (MFT) publishes national first-time pass-rate aggregates. CACREP and COAMFTE accreditation standards require accredited programs to publish their own annual outcomes — "Vital Statistics" or "Graduate Achievement Data" — on each program's website. We scrape these directly from a seed list of 484 CACREP-accredited Clinical Mental Health Counseling programs and ~150 COAMFTE-accredited MFT programs.

Tier 1.5 — State-board data (the gold standard for NCMHCE + MFT)

Three states publish per-school exam pass rates collected directly by their licensure boards: Florida (DOH Mental Health Professions Board — 7 years of NCMHCE PDFs, 4 quarters of AMFTRB MFT PDFs), California (BBS — 12 semi-annual periods of LMFT clinical exam stats, the CA-specific exam that replaced AMFTRB for CA in 2016), and Virginia (Board of Counseling — multi-year NCMHCE PDF). State-board data is regulator-collected: it captures every candidate, not just those at programs that volunteered to publish. Our NCMHCE headline of 51.6% is the candidate-weighted mean across 15,662 first-time test administrations from FL state aggregates (2018-2024) and VA state aggregates (2016-2020). Our MFT National headline of 52.6% comes from FL's quarterly AMFTRB reports (2020-2021). These are the most authoritative national figures publicly available.

Selection bias — measured directly, much larger than expected

We measured selection bias by comparing our voluntary program-disclosure scrape against the regulator-collected state-board ground truth. Both sources cover overlapping institutions in the same years, so the gap is the bias.

NCMHCE: program-disclosure mean 86.3% vs state-board mean 51.6% — bias ≈ 35 percentage points.
MFT National (AMFTRB): program-disclosure mean 90.4% vs state-board mean 52.6% — bias ≈ 38 percentage points.

This is substantially larger than the 15-20pt estimate we originally hypothesized and is one of the most useful findings in this entire research. Programs choosing whether to publish their numbers are not a random sample; they are dramatically over-represented by high performers. The methodological implication: any pass-rate study that relies on voluntary program disclosures (a common research design) will overstate the true rate by 35-40 percentage points for these exams. For NCE specifically, no state board currently publishes the data, so our NCE headline still uses the scraped estimate — read it with the same caveat (NBCC's widely-cited 73-75% is closer to the truth than our scraped 92.3%).

COAMFTE GAD format change

For the MFT exam at the program level: COAMFTE Standards v12 (effective 2018) restructured the required Graduate Achievement Data table. Programs now publish a Licensure Rate (a long-tail post-graduation outcome — % of grads who eventually got licensed) rather than the historical first-time exam pass rate. The 34 COAMFTE GAD rows we scraped are predominantly Licensure Rate values, which we tag as a separate metric so they aren't conflated with exam pass rates.

Confidence intervals

Wilson 95% score intervals are computed for all program-level rates with disclosed N. Programs whose CIs overlap are not statistically distinguishable, regardless of the point-estimate difference. We surface this so neither top-10 nor bottom-10 lists are read as deterministic.

Eventual pass rates

First-time pass rates understate eventual licensure: ASWB Clinical eventual is approximately 91% (vs 75% first-time); BCBA eventual is approximately 74% (51% first-time + 23% retake). Where eventual data is published by the board, we surface it adjacent to first-time figures.

For programs and institutions

We list programs as published by their accrediting body or as disclosed on the program's own website. If your program's data is incomplete, out of date, or you'd like to provide a more recent disclosure, please contact the Triad research team at research@triadhq.com. We commit to a 14-day response window for data updates and to publishing methodology challenges alongside our analysis at the same canonical URL.

Submit a methodology challenge. If you believe a number in this dashboard misrepresents your program or your discipline, file a structured challenge. We respond within 14 days and publish accepted corrections alongside the original data with a visible change-log entry.

Sample population normalization. National pass rates are calculated across all candidates regardless of program modality (online, on-campus, hybrid), accreditation status, or student demographics. Programs serving adult-learner, military, or fully-online populations may have systematically different baseline performance — we do not currently normalize for this, and a program's deviation from national should be interpreted with that in mind.

Who maintains this

Research lead: Sam Slater, VP, Growth, Triad / AATBS. Email: sam.slater@triadhq.com. Last data refresh: . Next scheduled refresh: within 30 days of any new ASWB, ASPPB, BACB, FL DOH, or CA BBS publication. If the dashboard is materially stale, the email above is the right place to escalate.

For Partners & Press

Use This Data

Whether you're a workforce-focused nonprofit, an employer planning clinical hiring, a journalist covering licensure reform, or a university benchmarking your outcomes — this dataset is built for you. All figures are public-domain primary sources; we just made them comparable.

Download Full Dataset (CSV) Whitepaper (PDF) Partner With Triad / AATBS

Embed the data

Drop these snippets into your CMS to embed live charts with proper attribution back to Triad.

Embed the U.S. state map

<iframe src="https://triadhq.com/research/national-pass-rates#aswb-states"
        width="100%" height="520" loading="lazy"
        title="ASWB Pass Rates by State — Triad Research"></iframe>

Embed the equity chart

<iframe src="https://triadhq.com/research/national-pass-rates#equity"
        width="100%" height="600" loading="lazy"
        title="ASWB Demographic Disparity — Triad Research"></iframe>

Embed the historical trend chart

<iframe src="https://triadhq.com/research/national-pass-rates#trends"
        width="100%" height="560" loading="lazy"
        title="Behavioral Health Pass Rates Trend — Triad Research"></iframe>

Cite this dataset (APA)

Triad / AATBS Research Team. (2026). National Pass Rates for U.S. Behavioral Health Licensure Exams (2024 reporting year) [Dataset]. https://triadhq.com/research/national-pass-rates

Get notified when v2 ships

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