PCCN Exam Prep: What's on the Current Exam, and What It Takes to Pass

By the Castleport Test Prep Editorial Team · Last verified: August 26, 2026

The PCCN exam is 150 questions in three hours. Only 125 of them count. You need 82 of those 125 to pass — 65.6% of the scored ones, or about 98 of the 150 you actually see. The fee is $260 for AACN members and $375 if you are not one. Three things change your answer: which practice-hour rule you meet, how sick your patients are, and whether your study guide was printed before February 6, 2024.

That last date is the one nobody warns you about. AACN replaced this exam on February 6, 2024, and a surprising number of pages ranking for "PCCN exam prep" right now are still describing the exam it replaced. We'll show you the one-minute test that catches them — including on books we don't sell and have never inspected.

Castleport Test Prep is the independent exam prep publisher that matches every study material to the exact exam version and jurisdiction you're testing under — every requirement verified against the official handbook, every product updated when the blueprint changes.

Start here: the free PCCN Exam Setup

Five checks, no sign-up, nothing for sale. Open the tab that matches the question you came with.

The 82 map — where the 82 points you need actually live, by content area. Study plan builder — your test date and weekly hours, split across all 12 content areas by weight and by where you're weakest. Eligibility clock — enter your hours, see which practice-hour option you meet and by how much you're short. Version check — six words that tell you whether your book was built for the current exam. 72-second pace — 15 original questions on the real per-item clock, scored by content area.

Best for you if

• You care for acutely ill adults on a stepdown, telemetry, intermediate care, transitional care, direct observation or emergency unit
• You've decided to certify and don't know where to start
• You're holding a book, an app or a course and want to know if it's current
• You failed once and want a different plan, not a louder version of the same one
• You're a manager, educator or preceptor and someone told you your hours don't count

Not for you if

• Your patients are ICU-level. That's the CCRN, and your hours have to match the exam you sit. Start with AACN's CCRN eligibility page.
• You care for children or newborns. Neither exam on this page is yours.
• You want real, recalled or leaked exam questions. We don't use them, we won't link to them, and AACN's own policy handbook says sharing exam content can cost you the credential.
• You want someone to promise you'll pass. Nobody honest can.

The right prep path isn't the same for every candidate — it depends on the exam version you'll actually sit, which practice-hour pathway you meet, your test date, and how far you are from passing today. The official handbook and AACN Certification Corporation set the requirements, not a checklist. Because a general answer can't resolve those for you, open the free PCCN Exam Setup above and see exactly where you stand before you spend anything.

What score do you need to pass the PCCN exam?

You need 82 of the 125 scored questions. AACN sets that as a raw number, not a percent. It has been 82 since January 31, 2024. The exam also holds 25 questions that do not count, so 82 works out to about 54.7% of the 150 you see.

Here's the whole scoring picture in one place, because no other page we found puts it together:

That "98 or 99" number is ours, and it matters more than it looks. You cannot tell which 25 questions are unscored — they're mixed in and unmarked. If those 25 land evenly across your right and wrong answers, netting 82 scored-correct means getting about 98 of the 150 correct overall. We're stating the assumption out loud because AACN publishes no total-correct target, and you should know which numbers on any page are official and which are somebody's math.

Why this matters at question 70. Read enough nurse forums and you'll find the same sentence over and over: around question 70 I was sure I'd failed. Of course you were. You're allowed to miss 43 and still pass. A run of hard questions in the middle of a 150-item exam is not a signal. It's Tuesday.

One number to throw away right now: if a page tells you the passing score is 68, it's describing the exam AACN retired in February 2024. We found that number live on more than one site in August 2026.

See where those 82 points sit. Open the 82 map in the tool above — it shows all 125 scored questions split across the 12 content areas, with the pass line drawn on it.

What's actually on the PCCN exam?

Eight of every ten questions test clinical judgment. The other two test how you work with patients and staff. In real numbers, that is about 100 clinical questions and 25 of the other kind, out of the 125 that count. Cardiovascular is the biggest single block, at 25 scored questions.

AACN publishes its blueprint as percentages. Percentages aren't a study plan. So we multiplied them by the 125 scored items and counted every topic and every "testable nursing action" AACN names in its own test plan. Here's what came out.

Percentages are AACN's, from the PCCN Exam Handbook (July 2026). They total 101% — AACN prints its own note saying the sum isn't 100 because of rounding. Scored-item counts and per-point figures are Castleport arithmetic. Our hand count of AACN's own lists: 80 named patient-care problems across the ten clinical areas, plus 9 "General" nursing actions that apply everywhere.

Three things fall out of that table, and we haven't seen any of them published elsewhere.

1. The block everybody skips is the size of the block everybody studies. Professional Caring and Ethical Practice is 20% of the exam — 25 scored questions. Cardiovascular is also 25. They are worth exactly the same. And when AACN lists its "testable nursing actions" — the concrete things it says you should be able to do — it names 78 of them, and zero for Professional Caring. You get seven competency names and nothing else.

That's not a reason to skip it. That's the reason people bomb it. If you've read a nurse write "I can't believe I scored 25% on RN behavior" — that's this section, and it's a quarter of the test.

What to study instead of guessing: AACN defines all eight nurse characteristics from its Synergy Model on pages 8 and 9 of the PCCN Exam Handbook — clinical judgment, advocacy and moral agency, caring practices, collaboration, systems thinking, response to diversity, facilitation of learning, and clinical inquiry. That's your study list. It's free, it's four paragraphs, and it's the closest thing to a blueprint this section has.

2. The study load inverts. Cardiovascular is the biggest clinical block and the cheapest per point — AACN names 15 topics for 25 scored questions, or 0.60 topics per point. Endocrine and Gastrointestinal are the most expensive at 1.07 and 1.03. Those are exactly the areas nurses wave off as "only 6 or 7 percent." Across the ten clinical areas the spread is 1.78x.

Practical translation: cardiac gives you the most points for the least breadth, so it deserves your first hours but not your last ones. Endocrine and GI are small blocks that will eat your time if you leave them to the final week.

3. Four blocks carry 69% of the exam. Cardiovascular, Multisystem, Respiratory and all of Professional Caring together come to about 86 scored questions — against a cut score of 82. That is not permission to skip everything else, and we'd be doing you a disservice if we framed it that way. It's a statement about where the exam is decided.

Split your weeks by where the points are. The study plan builder in the tool takes your test date and weekly hours and divides them across all 12 areas — weighted by AACN's blueprint, then adjusted for the areas you rate yourself weakest in.

Is your study material built for the current exam?

AACN replaced the PCCN exam on February 6, 2024. The current one is 150 questions in three hours, with 125 scored. The old one was 125 questions in two and a half hours. If a book says 125 questions, 2.5 hours, 100 scored, or a passing score of 68, it is describing the old exam.

This is the single most useful thing on this page, so we'll be specific about how to run the check.

The six-word test

When AACN announced the revision on November 21, 2023, it named six topics the new test plan added:

takotsubo cardiomyopathy · pulmonary fibrosis · diabetes insipidus · traumatic brain injury · compartment syndrome · pandemic management

Search your book's index, your app's search bar, or your course's module list for those six words. It takes about a minute. A book written for the old exam won't have them, no matter what year is printed on the cover.

We like this test because it works on materials we've never opened and don't sell. You don't need us for it. That's the point.

The structural test

Notice the third row. The exam grew by 25 questions and the clock grew by 30 minutes, so the pace per question didn't change at all — 72 seconds, before and after. That's a small thing that tells you something real: AACN added content, not pressure.

What we found live, in August 2026

We're not going to name and shame, because a page can be fixed tomorrow and the error class outlives the site. But you should know what's out there, because we checked:

• One well-ranked prep page states the exam is 125 questions with 100 scored and a cut score of 68. Wrong on all three.
• Another page, stamped as updated in July 2026, has the current cut score of 82 sitting three lines from "125 multiple-choice questions" and "2.5 hours." Current and retired facts on the same screen.
• A third page states a PCCN retest costs $110 ($75 for members). AACN charges $185 for members and $290 for nonmembers. If you budget off that page you'll be short by more than a hundred dollars.
• Several pages publish a pass rate that appears in none of AACN's three published years. AACN's own table says 70.30% (2023), 68.20% (2024), 70.10% (2025).

None of that means those companies sell bad questions. It means their public exam facts aren't a reliable version signal, and you should ask before you pay.

The five questions to ask before you buy anything

1. Does it name a test plan date, or just say "latest"? "Latest" is not a version.
2. Does it say 150 questions and three hours?
3. Does it say 125 scored and a passing score of 82?
4. Do the six new topics appear in it?
5. Does it cover Professional Caring at 20%, or treat it as an afterthought?

Anything that fails two or more of those goes back on the shelf.

Run the check on the book you were about to buy. The version check tab takes about sixty seconds and gives you a straight verdict: current, partly updated, or built for the retired exam.

How long should you study, and in what order?

AACN does not publish a required number of study hours, and neither do we. Anyone who hands you one made it up. What is worth doing is splitting the time you have by where the points are, then shifting more of it to the areas you are weakest in.

The baseline split

If you had 40 hours and rated yourself equally across the board, AACN's own weights divide like this:

Castleport planning math. Because AACN's published percentages total 101% from rounding, the planner normalizes them to 100% before dividing your hours — that's the only adjustment, and it's why the column sums to exactly 40.

Then the tool applies a weakness adjustment you can see: weak 1.35×, developing 1.00×, strong 0.75×, renormalized to your available time. Rate respiratory weak and cardiovascular strong and respiratory can end up with more hours than cardiovascular, even though it's a smaller block. That's the plan doing its job.

Say it plainly: this is a way to divide study time. It is not a readiness score, a pass prediction, or an AACN recommendation.

Three runways

Two to three weeks. Version-check on day one — you don't have time to discover in week three that your book is stale. Then go straight at your weak high-weight areas and let missed questions drive what you review. Do one full-length timed run before test day.

Four to six weeks. This is the shape we'd build for most working nurses: one high-weight clinical area per week, one professional competency per week alongside it, mixed questions every week, and a running error log. It fits around three twelves.

Eight weeks or more. Right when you've been away from progressive care content, when several big systems need rebuilding, or when you can only find two or three hours a week. The risk here is forgetting week one by week seven, so build in cumulative review instead of marching straight through.

Three ways plans go wrong

1. Equal hours for unequal domains. Musculoskeletal is 2.5 scored questions. It does not deserve the same evening as cardiovascular.
2. Treating your unit as the blueprint. Your floor's case mix is not a national test plan. Whatever your unit rarely sees is exactly what will surprise you.
3. Skipping the 20%. See the section above. It's 25 questions.

Turn your date into a schedule. Enter your test date and realistic weekly hours in the study plan builder and it prints an area-by-area plan you can stick on the fridge.

Are you eligible for the PCCN exam?

You need a current, unencumbered U.S. RN or APRN license plus practice hours. There are two ways to meet the hours and you only need one: 1,750 hours over two years with 875 in the last year, or 2,000 hours over five years with 144 in the last year. AACN says your patients decide this, not your unit's name.

Source: AACN PCCN Exam Handbook – Direct Care Eligibility Pathway, July 2026, and the AACN eligibility page.

Notice the second column. If you've been in progressive care for years but your recent year has been light — light duty, a leave, a schedule change, a move to a float pool — the five-year option only asks for 144 hours in the last twelve months. That's roughly twelve shifts. A lot of nurses who assume they're locked out qualify under that door.

Four rules that decide more cases than the totals do

Your unit's name isn't the test. AACN's own FAQ says final determination of eligibility "is not based on unit type but on patient acuity, as patient placement varies by facility and bed availability." Its list of qualifying areas includes intermediate care, direct observation, stepdown, telemetry, transitional care — and emergency departments. Plenty of ED nurses don't know they're eligible.

Supervision hours count. This one is worth reading twice, because we found a well-ranked page telling nurses the opposite. AACN's handbook says nurses serving as manager, educator (in-service or academic), APRN or preceptor may apply hours spent supervising nursing students or nurses at the bedside, as long as they're actively involved in direct patient care — performing a procedure, or supervising a new employee or student performing one. AACN's renewal page repeats it. If someone told you your charge, educator or preceptor hours are worthless, they were wrong, and it may have cost you a year.

Orientation cuts both ways. Hours spent shadowing a nurse who holds the assignment don't count. Hours during orientation where you are the assigned nurse do.

Location matters. Hours must be from a U.S.- or Canada-based facility, or one judged comparable to the U.S. standard — evidenced by Magnet designation or Joint Commission International accreditation.

If you influence care but don't mainly give it

There's a second door. The Knowledge Professional pathway (the credential is written PCCN-K) is for nurses whose work influences care for acutely ill adults without primarily providing it — educators, managers, supervisors, directors, academic faculty, transitional care coordinators. It requires 1,040 practice hours over two years with 260 in the most recent year. Same exam. Same fee. Roughly 40% fewer hours.

What an audit actually is

AACN audits at random, and it audits after you pass, not before. If you're selected you get 60 days to send documentation and AACN responds within 30. Failing or ignoring an audit revokes the certification, gets reported to your board of nursing, and blocks you from applying for any AACN exam for three years. So the honest advice is boring: line up a real verifier who will actually answer an email, and don't round your hours up.

Check your hours against both options. The eligibility clock in the tool tells you which door you're through, or exactly how many hours short you are — and flags the PCCN-K route if it fits you better.

PCCN or CCRN — which one should you take?

Both exams are AACN's. Both cost the same. Both are 150 questions in three hours, with 125 scored. What splits them is how sick your patients are, and that decides which exam your hours can count toward. The two patient groups are spelled out below.

All figures from AACN's exam statistics and cut-score page and the two eligibility pages, checked August 26, 2026.

Two things nurses get wrong here.

The PCCN is not the easy CCRN. By AACN's own 2025 numbers, slightly more first-time PCCN candidates didn't pass. The cut scores are one point apart. Progressive care is narrower in acuity and just as broad in content.

Don't study CCRN material for the PCCN. It's a common workaround because PCCN-specific resources are thinner on the ground, and it costs you time. CCRN material is heavy on Swan-Ganz catheters, intra-aortic balloon pumps and deep hemodynamics that a stepdown nurse won't see on the PCCN — and it's weighted for a different blueprint. Borrowing it isn't fatal, but you'll be studying somebody else's exam.

If your patients sit near the line, AACN publishes a PCCN/PCCN-K practice decision tree. Use theirs — they're the ones who decide.

How hard is the PCCN exam?

AACN reported first-time pass rates of 70.30% in 2023, 68.20% in 2024 and 70.10% in 2025. Across those three years, 9,789 nurses tested and about 2,977 did not pass on a first try. Those numbers describe a group, not your own odds.

Tested counts, pass rates and certificant counts are AACN's. The "did not pass" column is our arithmetic from AACN's own two columns.

Now the part that changes how you should read those numbers. We pulled every exam on AACN's statistics page and compared 2023 to 2025:

The PCCN has the steadiest pass rate in AACN's entire fleet. Every other exam on that list fell by six to eighteen points. The PCCN moved two-tenths of one point.

Why? Because the PCCN already went through its revision. The new exam launched in February 2024, the rate dipped two points that year, and it came back the next. The exams that fell hardest are the ones revised more recently. You are studying for a settled target, and that's a genuinely reassuring thing to know when you're deciding whether this is the year.

What actually makes it hard, in the order it bites people:

• Breadth. Twelve content areas. Your unit shows you maybe seven of them regularly.
• It asks what you'd do, not what something is. AACN says the majority of items are written at the application and analysis levels of Bloom's taxonomy — recognizing a condition isn't the question, deciding what to do first is.
• The 20% nobody drills. Advocacy, collaboration, systems thinking, teaching. Twenty-five questions.
• Three hours of continuous decisions. Not hard, exactly. Tiring, definitely.

What does the PCCN exam cost?

The exam is $260 for AACN members and $375 if you are not one. A retest is $185 or $290. Renewal every three years is $150 or $230. A one-year membership costs $78 and saves $115 on the exam, so joining first puts $37 back in your pocket.

We pulled every dollar AACN charges into one table, because it's spread across five different pages and a PDF.

Assembled from the PCCN Exam Handbook (July 2026), the Certification Exam Policy Handbook (August 2026), AACN's renewal page, its practice-exam page and its store. All checked August 26, 2026.

What multiple attempts cost

Initial fee plus the discounted retest fee. Excludes membership, study materials, travel, time off and anything your employer might reimburse.

Does joining AACN pay for itself?

Joining before your first exam is free money. Joining before a renewal is a wash on the fee alone — the real reason to be a member at renewal is that your 100 CERPs have to come from somewhere, and AACN's own continuing education generates them. Over six years (certify, renew, renew), joining for one year at each transaction runs $794 against $835 for never joining.

The order-of-operations discount most people miss

AACN's store states that its PCCN review course is half price when purchased at the time of your exam application. Buy it the week before you apply, or the week after, and you pay full price. AACN doesn't say whether the 50% comes off the member or nonmember price, so confirm the figure in the application flow before you pay — but the sequencing is the point.

Put together, here's the spread:

• Bought in the right order: join AACN ($78) → apply as a member ($260) → add the review course inside the same application (about $79.50) → use the free 30-question practice trial. About $417.50.
• Same materials, wrong order: nonmember fee ($375) + review course later at full price ($199) + premium question bank ($90). $664.

Roughly $246 apart, for nothing but sequence.

One live note as of August 26, 2026: AACN's store is on scheduled maintenance from August 28 to September 21, 2026. Physical orders placed after 9 a.m. Pacific on August 27 ship starting September 22. Digital products stay available.

Check the fee page before you apply. Fees change without notice, so confirm the current numbers on AACN's PCCN eligibility and fees page — it's the page that governs, not ours.

What should you actually study from?

AACN gives every candidate 30 free practice questions with full answers, and most nurses never find them. Past that, there is not much PCCN-only material out there. So the useful skill is not picking a winner. It is testing what you find before you trust it.

Here's our damaging admission, up front: we don't sell a PCCN study guide, question bank, course or bundle, and we don't take a commission on anyone else's. That's unusual on a page ranking for this phrase, and it's worth knowing before you read the next few paragraphs, because most pages here get paid depending on which way you go. It also means we can't tell you which book is best — we haven't opened them. What we can do is hand you the test and the official facts to run it against, then get out of the way.

Start with the free official one

From AACN's certification practice exams page and its review course listing, checked August 26, 2026. AACN's course page states the course aligns with the current test plan and was published in 2024. AACN also states plainly that it "does not approve, endorse, or require for eligibility use of any specific exam preparation products" — including its own.

The free trial is the highest-value 30 questions in this market and it costs nothing. Do that before you spend a dollar anywhere.

Third-party options

We ran the version test on the third-party resources nurses mention most. One passes it publicly and specifically as of August 26, 2026:

That's not a recommendation over anything else — it's the one product page we checked that answers question one of the five-question test in writing. Every other resource we looked at either doesn't name a test plan date or has retired facts on its public pages. Run the six-word test on whatever you're holding and decide for yourself.

A note on question banks that report a "pass rate"

Several prep companies publish a customer pass rate. That is a marketing number about their own buyers, not an official statistic, and it should never sit in your head next to AACN's 70.10%. Also worth saying plainly: no practice bank score predicts your official result. AACN doesn't claim its own practice product does.

What to avoid entirely

• Anything advertising real, recalled or "actual" exam questions. AACN's policy handbook says reproducing exam content by memorization or dictation can bring legal action and denial or revocation of certification. It isn't worth the shortcut.
• Buying three overlapping resources before you know your gap. Do the free 30 first.
• Any page that mixes current and retired exam facts. If it can't keep 150 and 125 straight, don't trust its blueprint mapping either.

Test what you already own before you buy anything else. The version check tab gives you a verdict in a minute — and if your material passes, you may not need to spend at all.

What actually happens on PCCN exam day?

You get 150 questions and three hours. That is 72 seconds a question. You can move back and forth, change answers, flag questions, and there is no penalty for guessing. When you book, you pick a PSI test center or live remote proctoring from your own computer.

Testing center or remote?

From AACN's Certification Exam Policy Handbook, August 2026.

If you think on paper, that scratch-paper row alone should decide it. Nobody mentions it, and it changes how you work an ABG or a drip calculation.

On remote proctoring: AACN publishes a list of 21 named behaviors with the exact number of warnings allowed before your exam is terminated. Six of them allow zero warnings, including having a phone or notes in reach and leaving the test area. Closing your eyes longer than a blink allows two. Losing your internet connection allows two. That's not a reason to avoid remote testing — it's a reason to read the list first if you choose it.

Pace

Three hours across 150 questions is 72 seconds each. Useful checkpoints:

The pacing mistake to avoid: budgeting off the 125 scored questions instead of the 150 you see. That gives you 86.4 seconds a question and puts you 25 questions short when time expires. Pace off 150. Always.

Breaks: you may take up to two, five minutes each. The clock keeps running. Ten minutes of break costs you about eight questions' worth of time — take them anyway if you need them, just take them knowing the price.

Results

Your pass or fail appears on screen before you leave. A detailed score report follows by email. AACN's own documents give three different timings for that report, so plan on the slowest: its August 2026 policy handbook says 24 to 48 hours at a testing center and within 24 hours for remote.

That report includes the number of questions you answered correctly in each content area — and AACN gives that breakdown to everyone, pass or fail. That's worth flagging, because several other nursing certification bodies release the content-area breakdown only to candidates who fail. AACN also warns, in its own words, that you can post a high number of correct responses in some areas and still not pass if your total misses the cut score.

Feel 72 seconds before test day. The pace tab runs 15 original questions on the real per-item clock and scores you by content area, the same way AACN's report does.

What happens if you don't pass?

You can take the PCCN up to four times in any rolling 12 months. AACN sets no required wait between tries. Every retest costs less than the first one — $185 for members, $290 for everyone else — and AACN says that lower price stays open until you pass.

First: this is a hard day and we're not going to dress it up. About three in ten first-time candidates don't pass. That's roughly a thousand nurses a year, most of them good at their jobs.

Now the practical part, in order:

1. Read the score report before you buy anything. It tells you how many you got right in each content area. Line those up against the blueprint weights in the table above. A weak showing in a 2%-weighted area is noise; a weak showing in cardiovascular or professional caring is your whole retake plan.

2. Work out which problem you actually had. Content you didn't know? Questions you misread? Running out of clock? Anxiety? Those need four different fixes, and buying a bigger question bank only solves one of them.

3. Rebuild the weak part, not the whole thing. Don't throw out domains that scored well. Reallocate.

4. Know what a no-show costs versus a retest. They're the same price. If you're not ready, rescheduling at least 48 hours out costs nothing; simply not turning up costs you a full retest fee with no refund and no extension.

Rebuild the plan around your score report. Put your weakest content areas into the study plan builder as "weak" and it reweights your remaining hours toward them.

Where AACN's own documents disagree

We read nine AACN documents on August 26, 2026. Three of them disagree with each other. None of it changes what you should do, but you should know which one wins when two answers exist. As a rule, the newest one does.

We're not scoring points off AACN — it publishes more usable data than most certifying bodies, including its cut scores and three years of pass rates, which many don't. We're showing you our work.

There's one more gap worth naming: your eligibility window. The July 2026 PCCN handbook says the period during which you must test is "normally a 90-day window, but currently a 180-day window." That's a temporary state and it will revert. Read the dates in your own confirmation email — that's the window that binds you, not any page's summary of it, including this one.

How do you keep the PCCN once you have it?

PCCN certification lasts three years. It starts the first day of the month you pass. To renew, you need 432 practice hours over those three years, with 144 in the last year. You also need 100 CERPs, which are AACN's continuing education points, or a passing exam. Renewal by CERPs costs $150 for members and $230 for everyone else.

CERPs in plain terms. One contact hour equals one CERP. A six-hour ACLS course is six CERPs. You need 100 across three years, split by category:

Two things to put in your calendar now. You get 90 days past your expiration date to file — but CERPs and hours can't be earned during that grace period, so it buys paperwork time, not study time. And renewal by exam is a one-way door: AACN states you may not take the exam early and then fall back to CERPs if you don't pass.

If you leave the bedside, you're not stuck. AACN offers Inactive status (up to three years to meet requirements), Alumnus status (no hours or CERPs, renews every three years) and Retired status.

What comes next. CMC (cardiac medicine) and CSC (cardiac surgery) are subspecialty credentials that attach to a PCCN earned through the Direct Care pathway — displayed as PCCN-CMC or PCCN-CSC. Both are $150 for members and $240 for nonmembers, and AACN launches revised CMC and CSC exams on November 19, 2026. If either is on your horizon, that date matters.

What we actually verified for this page

Everything on this page was checked on August 26, 2026. Here is the exact list of what we read:

• PCCN Exam Handbook – Direct Care Eligibility Pathway (July 2026) — format, test plan, eligibility, fees, application, renewal overview
• Certification Exam Policy Handbook (August 2026) — testing options, exam day, breaks, ID, scheduling, retakes, audits, score reports
• Certification Exam Statistics and Cut Scores — cut score, effective date, three years of pass rates for every AACN exam
• PCCN (Adult) Direct Care and Knowledge Professional eligibility pages
• PCCN renewal page — CERP categories, 432/144 hours, renewal fees
• Frequently Asked Questions About PCCN Certification — acuity rule, attempts, retest discount, credential term
• Revised PCCN Certification Exam Launches Feb. 6, 2024 (published Nov. 21, 2023) — the version change and the six new topics
• 2022 National Practice Analysis of Progressive Care Nurses — 86 task statements, 105 knowledge statements, 688 usable responses, and the fact that every exam item is validated against at least one reference on AACN's published bibliography
• AACN certification practice exams and the PCCN review course listing — live prices and contents
• One third-party product page for the comparison row, checked the same day

What we could not verify, and therefore did not publish: the content-area percentages of the retired pre-2024 test plan (AACN doesn't keep it online, and we won't print retired weights sourced from someone else's summary), and whether AACN's 50% review-course discount applies to the member or nonmember price.

Our questions. The 15 items in the pace tab are original, written by our editorial team against the test plan effective February 6, 2024. They are not real, recalled or reconstructed exam questions. Each carries the standard its answer rests on.

Reviewer status: no PCCN subject-matter reviewer has been engaged for this page yet. When one is, you'll see a real name, credential and date. An empty reviewer line is more honest than a decorative one.

PCCN exam prep FAQ

What to do next

1. Check your hours against both Direct Care options in the eligibility clock. If you're short, you now know by exactly how much.
2. Run the six-word test on whatever study material you already own. Do this before you buy anything else.
3. Take AACN's free 30 questions. Seven days, no cost, official rationales.
4. Build the schedule. Test date in, weekly hours in, twelve content areas out.
5. Apply in the right order — join, then apply as a member, then add the review course inside the same application if you want it.

Open the free PCCN Exam Setup. Five checks, no sign-up, nothing for sale — and it's the same tool we'd use ourselves.

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This page is study guidance, not legal, employment or licensing advice. AACN Certification Corporation determines eligibility, fees, scheduling, scoring and renewal — confirm anything that affects a decision directly with AACN before you act on it. Castleport does not currently publish a PCCN study guide, question bank, course or diagnostic, and receives no commission from any resource named on this page.

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