Examination statistics · Q3 FY 25/26 · checked August 2026
The pass rate is 84%. It is also 65%.
In short
What is the actual pass rate for the California clinical exam?
Both published rates for all seven exams across seven quarters, and how far each one moves before anything has changed
80% first-time, 65% overallBoth are the California LMFT Clinical exam. The Board publishes two rates for every exam and almost nobody quoting one of them says which. Here are seven quarters of both, for all seven exams.
Two rates, not oneThe latest quarterSeven quartersHow much it movesWhat is not publishedWhen the score was wrong
The distinction everything turns on
Two rates. They are not close, and they answer different questions.
Only candidates sitting the exam for the first time. In Q3 FY 25/26 that was 742 of the 1,057 people who sat the LMFT Clinical exam, and 80% of them passed. This is the number that answers “if I sit it properly prepared, what happens?”
Every sitting in the quarter, including second, third and later attempts. The same quarter’s figure was 65%. It is lower because retakes are harder than first sittings, not because the exam got harder. This number answers “what share of the exams sat this quarter were passed?” — a question about the Board’s workload, not about you.
Whichever makes the point being made. The free analysis that circulates in study groups reports a figure in the high fifties and was last revised in 2017; the schools quote first-time rates. Neither is wrong and neither is the whole number. This page prints both every time, in that order.
Q3 FY 25/26 — the most recent published
Every California behavioral sciences exam, most recent quarter.
| Exam | Sittings | First-time | All sittings | vs prior qtr | Who sits it |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LMFT Law & Ethics | 1,451 | 78% | 71% | -3 | Every AMFT, within their first registration renewal period |
| LMFT Clinical | 1,057 | 80% | 65% | -5 | The last exam before licensure, after the 3,000 hours |
| LCSW Law & Ethics | 1,256 | 79% | 73% | -3 | Every ASW |
| ASWB Clinical | 1,389 | 72% | 55% | +3 | The national social work exam, written by ASWB and not by California |
| LPCC Law & Ethics | 693 | 81% | 75% | -7 | Every APCC |
| NCMHCE | 300 | 77% | 68% | +7 | The national clinical counselor exam, written by the NBCC |
| LEP | 59 | 90% | 86% | +12 | Licensed Educational Psychologists |
The arrow column compares the overall rate with the previous quarter, which is the comparison the Board itself prints. It is not a trend — see the next two sections for how far these move quarter to quarter before anything has actually changed. 6,205 exams were administered in Q3 FY 25/26, against 5,998 the quarter before.
Seven quarters
First-time pass rates, quarter by quarter.
Each cell is the percentage of first-time sitters who passed. Every quarter except the two ends appears in two separate board packets, because each packet prints the prior quarter beside the current one, and the overlapping figures agree.
| Exam | Q1 24/25 | Q2 24/25 | Q3 24/25 | Q4 24/25 | Q1 25/26 | Q2 25/26 | Q3 25/26 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LMFT Law & Ethics | 79% | 79% | 80% | 83% | 77% | 83% | 78% |
| LMFT Clinical | 85% | 88% | 81% | 86% | 81% | 84% | 80% |
| LCSW Law & Ethics | 74% | 68% | 85% | 80% | 62% | 84% | 79% |
| ASWB Clinical | 73% | 70% | 70% | 76% | 69% | 73% | 72% |
| LPCC Law & Ethics | 71% | 77% | 71% | 58% | 69% | 86% | 81% |
| NCMHCE | 77% | 81% | 78% | 79% | 76% | 75% | 77% |
| LEP | 68% | 69% | 84% | 79% | 82% | 82% | 90% |
And the overall rate, the same seven quarters.
| Exam | Q1 24/25 | Q2 24/25 | Q3 24/25 | Q4 24/25 | Q1 25/26 | Q2 25/26 | Q3 25/26 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LMFT Law & Ethics | 72% | 74% | 75% | 77% | 73% | 74% | 71% |
| LMFT Clinical | 71% | 76% | 68% | 73% | 71% | 70% | 65% |
| LCSW Law & Ethics | 69% | 63% | 81% | 77% | 58% | 76% | 73% |
| ASWB Clinical | 54% | 51% | 53% | 59% | 49% | 52% | 55% |
| LPCC Law & Ethics | 63% | 72% | 67% | 52% | 66% | 82% | 75% |
| NCMHCE | 68% | 69% | 67% | 70% | 67% | 61% | 68% |
| LEP | 58% | 57% | 80% | 69% | 73% | 74% | 86% |
Sittings, not candidates: someone who sat twice in a quarter appears twice. Totals administered across the seven quarters ran 5,970 to 6,960.
Before you plan around a number
How far each of these moves without anything changing.
This is the argument for printing seven quarters instead of one. The range below is simply the lowest and highest quarterly figure in the table above — the same exam, the same Board, the same two years.
| Exam | First-time range | Overall range | Overall spread |
|---|---|---|---|
| LMFT Law & Ethics | 77–83% | 71–77% | 6 pts |
| LMFT Clinical | 80–88% | 65–76% | 11 pts |
| LCSW Law & Ethics | 62–85% | 58–81% | 23 pts |
| ASWB Clinical | 69–76% | 49–59% | 10 pts |
| LPCC Law & Ethics | 58–86% | 52–82% | 30 pts |
| NCMHCE | 75–81% | 61–70% | 9 pts |
| LEP | 68–90% | 57–86% | 29 pts |
The LCSW Law and Ethics exam has been reported at both ends of a twenty-three point range inside two years. Nothing about the exam changed by twenty-three points. A quarter is a small sample of a self-selecting group of people who chose that quarter to sit, and it should be read as one.
What the Board itself concluded
The Office of Professional Examination Services ran a five-year study of the low LPCC Law and Ethics pass rates. Its conclusion, printed in the February 2026 packet, was that “no statistically significant or specific factors were identified that could explain the observed lower pass rates”.
That is the most careful look anyone has taken at one of these numbers, and it found nothing to explain it. It is a good reason to be suspicious of any confident story about why a rate moved.
Established by absence
What the Board does not publish.
These are the questions people ask most often in study groups, and the honest answer to all of them is that the data does not exist publicly. Nine board packets were read for this page; none of them contains any of it.
| The question | What is published |
|---|---|
| Which schools have the best pass rates? | Nothing. The Board does not break any exam result out by degree program, school or accreditation status. Any ranking you find is somebody’s reconstruction, not a Board figure. |
| What is the pass rate on a second attempt? A third? | Nothing. The split is first-time against all sittings. The retake rate can be inferred as a residual, but the Board does not state it and the inference is fragile at these sample sizes. |
| How many attempts do people usually need? | Nothing. Not published in any packet read for this page. |
| What score do I need? | Not a percentage. These are criterion-referenced exams scored against a standard, not curved against other candidates, which is why a practice-test percentage traded in a study group does not convert into a pass probability. |
| Does the pass rate differ by region, language or route to eligibility? | Nothing, except that endorsed and out-of-state candidates are broken out separately in the FY 2025/26 packets only, and those cohorts are small enough that their rates swing wildly. |
That last point is worth sitting with. The single most requested statistic about California licensing exams — which program prepares people best — has never been published by the body that has the data.
A documented failure, with numbers
Once, the passing score itself was wrong.
This is not a rumor from a support group. It is in the Board’s own May 2025 packet. A new publication of the LPCC Law & Ethics exam took effect on 1 February 2025 and was sent to the testing vendor with an incorrect passing score. The Board’s examination services unit caught it while reviewing results.
What the rescoring found
33 of 77Of the 77 LPCC Law and Ethics exams taken between 1 February to 19 February 2025, 33 results were changed from fail to pass. The remaining 44 were unaffected. Candidates were notified by email, and exams sat from 20 February onward were scored correctly.
Nearly 43% of the people who sat that exam in that three-week window were told they had failed when they had passed.
The reason to print this is not that it is likely to happen to you. It is that the Board found and fixed it, published the numbers, and the only place those numbers appear is a meeting packet. If a result ever looks wrong, the quarterly examination report is where an answer would surface — and the packets are public.
The exams themselves are only half of the wait. Once you have passed, the Board still has to process the application, and that queue has moved a long way in the last year — the processing times are here. If you are still counting hours, the hours calculator works from your own numbers and sends nothing anywhere.
Where every figure came from
Sources.
The board packets every figure was read from
- February 27-28, 2025, item 11 — Executive Officer Report - Q2 FY 2024/25 licensing and examination
- May 8-9, 2025, item 18 — Executive Officer Report - Q3 FY 2024/25
- August 21-22, 2025, item 15 — Executive Officer Report - Q4 FY 2024/25
- November 20-21, 2025, item 21 — Licensing Report - Q1 FY 2025/26
- November 20-21, 2025, item 22 — Examination Report - Q1 FY 2025/26
- February 19-20, 2026, item 14 — Registration and Licensing Report - Q2 FY 2025/26
- February 19-20, 2026, item 15 — Examination Report - Q2 FY 2025/26
- May 7-8, 2026, item 20 — Licensing Update - Q3 FY 2025/26, the most recent published
- May 7-8, 2026, item 21 — Examination Report - Q3 FY 2025/26, the most recent published
Finding them yourself
The filename pattern is not stable — three consecutive years use an underscore, a hyphen and no separator at all — so a guessed URL will return a 404. Start from the meetings index and follow the links. Figures are transcribed, never derived: where the Board did not publish something, this page says so rather than estimating it.
