CCMA Pass Rate: The Official NHA Numbers, and What They Actually Count

By the Castleport Test Prep Editorial Team · Last verified: August 12, 2026

The 2025 official figure, four years of NHA data in one table, and the 75.3% standard-setting estimate placed beside the observed results.

The CCMA pass rate is 81.73% — the share of the 98,609 CCMA exams administered in the 2025 calendar year that passed, published by the National Healthcareer Association (NHA). That is NHA's most recent report. It counts exam administrations, retakes included, so it is not a first-attempt rate and not your personal odds.

Now the part that makes this page worth your next four minutes.

NHA publishes a second number, in a different document, that belongs beside the first one. When NHA set the passing score for this exam, its own impact analysis estimated that 75.3% of candidates would clear that bar. The actual result came in at 81.73%. Same organization, same exam, two documents, a 6.43-point gap — and that gap tells you more about the CCMA than the headline percentage does.

We'll get to it below. First, the register.

Castleport Test Prep is an independent exam prep publisher built around exact-version matching and primary-source verification.

Castleport Test Prep is an independent publisher of exam preparation materials and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or approved by the National Healthcareer Association (NHA). Exam and credential names are used for identification purposes only; all trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Is this the right page for you?

This is your page if you:

• Saw a CCMA pass rate somewhere and want to know which year and which exam it describes.
• Are about to pay the exam fee and want an honest read on what you're walking into.
• Got quoted a pass rate by a school and can't tell whether it means anything.
• Just didn't pass, and want to know how unusual that actually is.
• Run or advise a program and need a defensible national benchmark.

This is the wrong page — here's where to go instead — if you:

• Are taking the CMA (AAMA), the RMA (AMT), or the NCMA (NCCT). Different organizations, different exams. → Compare all four medical assistant credentials
• Need eligibility, registration, fees, or the full retake rules. → CCMA exam requirements
• Are trying to decode a score report you already received. → NHA exam results decoder
• Want practice questions right now. → Free CCMA diagnostic

Decode the CCMA pass-rate number you were shown

Use the decoder to identify the number, check a claimed national rate against the official register, or put a 95% interval around a school's result. The decoder runs in your browser; this component makes no network requests and does not persist your entries.

What is the CCMA pass rate right now?

Answer capsule: The most recent official CCMA pass rate is 81.73%, covering the 98,609 CCMA exams administered during the 2025 calendar year, with 278,295 active CCMA certifications as of December 31, 2025. NHA publishes one figure per exam per year and counts exam administrations rather than individual candidates.

Castleport assembled the four NHA reports into one register so the current figure, the version boundary and every derived count can be checked together.

Exams administered, pass rate and active certifications are published by NHA in its 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 annual pass-rate reports, all four read directly on August 12, 2026. Passed and did-not-pass counts are ours: administrations × the published rate. NHA publishes the percentage rounded to two decimals and does not publish exact head counts, so treat those two columns as close approximations. The rank column is ours, calculated from each year's full eight-exam table.

Why the number you saw is probably a year or two old

Here's a small, checkable thing we ran into that explains most of the confusion on this topic.

NHA's annual pass-rate reports live at predictable web addresses — except the newest one. The unversioned file titled as the general NHA annual pass-rate file still served the 2024 report when we opened it on August 12, 2026. The 2025 report sits at a separate address with -2025 in the file name.

So a site that bookmarked the obvious link and re-checks it periodically can still see 81.38%, conclude nothing has changed, and republish it as current. That stale endpoint can explain why 81.38% — and sometimes 77.28%, the 2023 figure — continues to circulate as today's number.

It isn't dishonesty. It's a stale bookmark. But it means the number you were shown may describe a different year and, as you'll see next, a different version of the exam.

Got handed a different number? Drop it into the decoder above with the year it claims to cover. It will tell you whether the figure matches NHA's register and whether the stated year describes the current exam, the prior exam, or the 2024 transition year.

Why is the CCMA pass rate higher than NHA expected?

Answer capsule: When NHA set the CCMA passing standard in 2023, its published standard-setting summary estimated an expected pass rate of 75.3% at that cut score. The actual published results have come in at 81.38% for 2024 and 81.73% for 2025 — roughly six points above the estimate. NHA does not publish an explanation for the difference.

Castleport assembled this comparison from two separate NHA documents.

Start with how the bar got set. NHA uses a modified Angoff method — a standard-setting process where a panel of experienced medical assistants and educators goes through the exam item by item and judges whether a "minimally qualified" candidate would get each one right. Those judgments produce a raw cut score, which NHA then converts onto its reporting scale. For the CCMA, that landed on 390 out of 500.

Then NHA's summary adds one more sentence, and it's the interesting one: based on existing impact data, the expected pass rate at that cut score is 75.3%.

That's NHA telling you, in its own document, roughly what it thought this bar would do. Three in four.

Here's how that estimate has held up:

NHA's CCMA standard-setting executive summary and its 2024 and 2025 annual pass-rate reports. The gap calculation is ours.

Put in people, not percentages: if 2025 had landed on the 75.3% estimate, roughly 74,253 of those 98,609 sittings would have passed. About 80,593 actually did — around 6,341 more passing sittings than the impact estimate implied.

What this does and doesn't tell you. It does not mean the exam is easier than NHA intended, or that the standard is soft. NHA's public reports do not provide the candidate-level mix, training timing, first-attempt status or causal analysis needed to explain the gap. The comparison proves that the expected and observed rates differ; it does not prove why.

The cleanest reading is blunt: NHA expected 75.3% at the cut score, and the first full calendar year on the current exam finished at 81.73%. Anything beyond that is a hypothesis, not a result NHA published.

Is 81.73% a first-attempt CCMA pass rate?

Answer capsule: No. NHA's report column is headed "# of Examinations Administered" and is not limited to first attempts, so retake administrations are included. NHA does not publish a first-attempt rate or a per-candidate rate for the CCMA, which means no one can convert 81.73% into an individual probability of passing.

You'll see 81.73% described as a "first-time pass rate" in several places. It isn't, and the fix matters, because a per-sitting rate and a per-person rate answer different questions.

One candidate passes on the first try. A second candidate tests twice and passes on the second. That's three administrations from two people. The public annual report counts three administrations. It does not reveal that they came from two people.

So how many people don't pass?

You'll also see the flip side stated as a fact: "about 18% of candidates fail." NHA's public data cannot support that claim because it does not publish unique candidates or retake volume.

The table below is a sensitivity model, not an estimate. It assumes every modeled candidate's first attempt and every retake happened inside 2025, and that candidates stopped testing once they passed. Under those closed-calendar assumptions, call the number of retake sittings R. The modeled share ending 2025 without a pass is (18,016 − R) ÷ (98,609 − R):

Our arithmetic. The model does not adjust for candidates whose attempts cross calendar years, and NHA does not publish the data needed to do that. It therefore cannot produce the actual share of people who passed or failed.

18.27% is an upper bound inside this model, not a real-world candidate estimate. Outside those assumptions, the annual reports support no per-person rate at all.

Four numbers you'll see quoted that the source documents don't support

We ran into all four while building this page. Each has an innocent explanation. Each can point your study time or your expectations in the wrong direction.

Has the CCMA pass rate changed over time?

Answer capsule: Yes. The CCMA pass rate rose from 75.10% in 2022 to 81.73% in 2025 — up 6.63 percentage points — while exam volume grew 76.60% and active certifications grew 57.71%. Most of the rate increase happened in a single year, the year NHA replaced the exam.

The four-year shape is not a smooth climb. It's a step:

Rate movements are ours, from NHA's four annual reports. The January 10, 2024 date is from NHA's own CCMA 3.0 announcement.

Read those three rows together and you get something the single-year numbers hide. The rate stepped up across the version-change year, then moved only 0.35 points in 2025.

But 2024 was not a full current-version year. NHA made the current exam available January 10, 2024, while the annual report covers the entire calendar year and does not split January 1–9 from January 10–December 31. That makes 2024 a transition-year aggregate and 2025 the first clean full-year result for the current exam. It is fair to say 81.73% sits close to the 2024 aggregate. It is not fair to call the pair two full years of stable current-version data or proof that either number was a fluke.

Do not infer

We're drawing a hard line here, because this is where pass-rate pages usually overreach. The reports establish none of the following:

• That the exam became easier. Rate changes across a version boundary can come from the exam, the candidates, or the study materials — and NHA's crosswalk describes a content-weight change, not a difficulty change.
• That any school, course, or study product caused the increase. The public sources reviewed for this page contain no candidate-level data linking preparation to outcome.
• That first-attempt performance moved by the same amount. No first-attempt data exists publicly.
• That the CCMA is objectively easier than another NHA exam.

The count that went the other way

One more thing the percentage hides. The rate improved from 2024 to 2025 — and the number of sittings that didn't pass went up, from roughly 14,650 to roughly 18,016. Volume grew faster than the rate improved.

If you didn't pass, that's the number to sit with. You're not in a small, unlucky corner. Your unsuccessful administration sits among roughly eighteen thousand in a single year.

Where the CCMA sits among NHA's eight exams

In the 2025 report, the CCMA had the highest published pass rate of NHA's eight certification exams, ahead of the Phlebotomy Technician exam at 77.44% and the Patient Care Technician/Assistant exam at 75.01%. The lowest was the ExCPT pharmacy technician exam at 62.75% — a spread of 18.98 points.

That is a descriptive ranking of eight different exams taken by eight different groups of people. It is not a difficulty ranking, and it shouldn't be used to pick a credential.

What does the pass rate say about how hard the CCMA is?

Answer capsule: A population pass rate measures the group that sat the exam, not the exam's difficulty and not your readiness. In 2025, roughly one in five CCMA administrations did not pass. The exam presents 180 questions in three hours, and 84 of the 150 scored items — 56% — come from Clinical Patient Care alone.

Roughly 18,016 sittings didn't clear the bar in 2025. Those were paid exam administrations by candidates attempting the credential.

What actually makes this exam hard has very little to do with the pass rate:

• The weighting is lopsided. Clinical Patient Care carries 84 of the 150 scored items. You can know terminology, law and ethics, and scheduling cold and still miss, because more than half of the scored-item blueprint lives in one domain.
• The pace is tight. 180 questions in three hours is about a minute each, before you re-read anything you flagged.
• You can't tell which questions count. Thirty of the 180 are unscored pretest items, unmarked. Every question gets your full effort or you're gambling.
• Scaled scoring hides the finish line. There's no "I need 118 correct." NHA publishes no conversion from raw correct answers to the 390 standard.

Full domain-by-domain item counts, the version change map, and the pacing math live on the CCMA exam requirements and test plan guide — that's the page that owns them, and repeating them here wouldn't help you.

Where this leaves you

A national percentage cannot tell you whether you are ready. Nothing can, exactly — but you can replace a statistic about 98,609 sittings with a directional content-area baseline from your own answers.

Take the free Castleport CCMA diagnostic. 25 original questions written to the current published NHA test plan, scored instantly and broken out by content area, with a written rationale on every item. No account, no email, no results-page trap.

The honest limitation, stated where it costs us: 25 questions cannot predict whether you'll pass, and they can't tell you which slice of Clinical Patient Care is weak — only which sampled top-level content areas looked stronger or weaker on that set. If what you want is full-length endurance practice, our diagnostic isn't that, and you should build that on top of it. A short quiz alone does not support a defensible pass probability.

Plain disclosure: the diagnostic is ours. Our paid CCMA Exam System is still in development and not for sale, so there is no price and no buy button on this page. We don't offer a pass guarantee and we won't imply one — and neither does NHA, whose handbook states plainly that buying preparation materials doesn't guarantee a passing score.

Where does your school's CCMA pass rate come from — and can you trust it?

Answer capsule: NHA's public annual reports do not include a program-level CCMA pass-rate register. Its handbook says schools may receive aggregate pass/fail reports about their own students when the group is large enough to protect individual data, so that may be one source of a school's claim. Accreditor-reported outcomes can use different cohorts, different attempt rules and, under MAERB, a pool of several credentialing exams.

This is the section for anyone who's been quoted "our pass rate is 96%" and couldn't tell whether that was real.

Yes, schools can get a genuine number — with a catch

NHA's Candidate Handbook (revision dated June 1, 2026, which we read end to end) says that information in its database, including pass rates, may be used in aggregate, and that schools or employers may be provided aggregate reports showing the pass/fail percentage — on the condition that there are enough students for individual data not to be deducible.

So a school quoting you an NHA-sourced pass rate may be quoting something real. Two things follow from that same sentence:

1. There's a minimum-size condition. If the cohort is too small for NHA's privacy condition, ask what source and denominator the school used instead.
2. The report is about that school's students, on that school's timeframe. It is not comparable to the national figure until you know the denominator.

What accredited programs report, and why the number can mislead

Programs accredited through CAAHEP report annually to the Medical Assisting Education Review Board (MAERB). We read a publicly posted, submitted Annual Report Form to see exactly what the form collects. Four things stood out:

The separate columns and example below come from a publicly posted submitted MAERB Annual Report Form. MAERB's current policy manual confirms the 30% participation and 60% passage thresholds, the five eligible exams, the graduation-year denominator and the publish-one-outcome rule. ABHES uses a different calculation where credentialing reporting applies: graduates passing on any attempt divided by graduates who tested, over July 1, 2025–June 30, 2026; a result below 70% triggers an action plan.

Here's the example that makes it concrete. On the form we read, one year's row reports "Exam Passage: 100%." Open the columns underneath and that 100% is three people, out of five graduates — and none of the three took the CCMA. Every figure is truthful and correctly filed. As a signal about your odds on the CCMA, it's worth nothing.

And one structural fact worth knowing: the CCMA doesn't require you to graduate from a CAAHEP- or ABHES-accredited program at all — a qualifying state-recognized program or a work-experience route can satisfy NHA's eligibility rules. That flexibility is a genuine advantage of the credential. It also means programs outside those two accreditation systems will not have a CAAHEP/MAERB or ABHES outcome report.

The math problem with small cohorts

Even a real, CCMA-only school rate can mislead you if the group is small. A perfect record on a handful of students tells you less than it looks.

Here's what a 100% claim is actually worth at different sizes, using the lower end of a 95% Wilson score interval:

95% Wilson score intervals, z = 1.959964, computed by us and recalculated independently before publication. For a perfect record the lower bound simplifies to n ÷ (n + z²). The national comparison is valid only when the school figure is CCMA-only, counts all administrations and covers the same 2025 calendar-year basis as NHA. The interval treats counted results as independent; repeated attempts by one person can violate that assumption.

Under those like-for-like conditions, 18 straight passes is the first perfect record whose 95% Wilson lower bound clears 81.73%. Change the exam, attempt basis or reporting period and the comparison stops being valid.

Six questions to take back to the school

1. How many graduates are in that number, and from which graduating years?
2. Does it count first attempts only, or every attempt?
3. Which exam — CCMA, CMA (AAMA), RMA, NCMA, CMAC, or a blend?
4. Is it all graduates, or only the ones who chose to test?
5. Did it come from NHA's aggregate report, or from your own tracking?
6. Can I see how it's calculated?

A program that answers all six without flinching is telling you something good about more than its pass rate. A program that cannot state the cohort size has not given you enough information to verify its number.

Run their number first. Put the counts into the decoder above and you'll get the confidence interval in about five seconds — then take the six questions with you.

My practice test score is 68% — does that mean I'll fail?

Answer capsule: No practice percentage converts to the 390 scaled score, and NHA's Candidate Handbook states directly that a high practice score does not guarantee passing the certification exam. Practice results are useful for locating content gaps and testing pacing, not for predicting an outcome.

This is the question behind the panic: someone staring at a number in the sixties two weeks out and quietly assuming the result is already decided.

The honest answer has two halves. First: there is no conversion. Scaled scoring adjusts for the difficulty of the specific exam form you receive, so no fixed number of correct answers equals 390. Any site presenting "score 80% on practice and you're ready" as an NHA rule invented that threshold. We're not going to invent our own.

Second: your practice percentage is still worth something — just not as a forecast. It's worth reading for pattern, not score:

• Which content areas produced the misses, weighted against the official item counts.
• Whether you understood the rationale after getting one wrong, or just recognized the right answer.
• Whether your accuracy holds on questions you haven't seen before.
• Whether you finish inside a realistic time limit.
• Whether your errors are knowledge gaps, application gaps, or reading errors. Those need three different fixes.

Detailed practice strategy and full question sets live on the free CCMA practice test page — that page owns this topic, and it's where the questions are.

Do other medical assistant certifying bodies publish pass rates?

Answer capsule: Yes. NHA, AAMA, AMT, NCCT and AMCA all publish current official outcome data. The catch is the denominator: one reports all administrations, one reports first attempts over a ten-month window, one publishes an annual percentage without defining the attempt basis, one splits first-time results by eligibility route, and one publishes testers and passes without stating first-attempt versus all-attempt treatment. Those figures cannot be ranked as if they measure exam difficulty.

The missing-primary-source problem is real — but it is not that the other bodies publish nothing. It is that old comparison tables strip away the basis that makes each number mean something.

Official publications checked August 12, 2026: AAMA exam statistics, AMT 2025 annual pass rates, NCCT 2025 pass rates, and AMCA CMAC annual statistics. "Basis not stated" means the cited publication does not identify first attempts versus all attempts; it does not mean the organization lacks that information.

Download the denominator-preserving source register: Medical assistant certification outcome comparison (CSV)

Two practical takeaways. First, a table using AAMA 76% / AMT 72% / NCCT 53% is not a current official comparison. AAMA's current page says 69% for first attempts; AMT's 2025 sheet says 71.2%; NCCT publishes route-specific first-time rates instead of one 53% figure. Second, AAMA's current official minimum passing score is 405, not 430. Old numbers can survive long after the source changes, which is the whole theme of this page.

One comparison that is descriptive, not a difficulty ranking: 278,295 active CCMA certifications as of December 31, 2025, against 68,495 active CMA (AAMA) certifications as of January 5, 2026. Different as-of dates, so treat it as scale rather than a precise ratio.

If you're still choosing a credential, close this page. Pass rates are close to the worst input for that decision because the published figures use different populations and denominators. Eligibility routes, what employers in your area actually ask for, and your state's rules matter far more. → Compare the CMA, CCMA, RMA and NCMA side by side. If your state regulates medical assistants directly, your state authority controls, not a national table. → Medical assistant scope of practice by state

What the CCMA pass rate can't tell you

Answer capsule: NHA's public annual pass-rate report cannot supply an individual's probability of passing, a first-attempt rate, retaker performance or a publicly comparable program-level result. Those require data the annual report does not publish.

Four things people reasonably want from this number, and can't get:

• Your odds. It's a fact about 98,609 sittings. It carries no information about your preparation.
• A first-attempt rate. Not published. See the denominator section above.
• How retakers perform. NHA reports no retaker-specific rate. Anyone quoting one is estimating.
• Whether your program prepared you. The annual report is national. The school-rate section explains what may exist instead and why the denominators matter.

If you're here because you didn't pass: the waiting period, the attempt limits and the re-registration rules are covered on the CCMA exam requirements page, and reading your score report is covered in the NHA exam results decoder. Both are more useful to you today than any percentage on this page.

How we verified these numbers

Answer capsule: Every official claim on this page comes from the responsible organization's publication or a publicly posted submitted form, read directly on August 12, 2026 and linked inline. Every derived figure is labeled as Castleport's arithmetic with the method shown, so it can be reproduced or challenged.

Read in full for this page — August 12, 2026:

• NHA's 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 annual pass-rate reports — all four retrieved and read. The 2025 edition is marked revised 01/09/26.
• Confirmed that NHA's unversioned pass-rate file still served the 2024 report on this date, while the 2025 report sits at a separate address.
• NHA's CCMA standard-setting executive summary — the modified Angoff process, the 2023 cut score, the 390/500 transformation, and the 75.3% expected pass rate.
• NHA Candidate Handbook, revision dated June 1, 2026 — the 200–500 scaled range and 390 standard, score-report categories, the practice-score caution, the preparation-materials caution, and the aggregate pass/fail reporting provision for schools and employers.
• NHA's CCMA 3.0 announcement — the January 10, 2024 exam availability date.
• A publicly posted, submitted MAERB Annual Report Form — the five separate exam columns and the real 100%-on-three-people example.
• MAERB's February 2026 policy manual and September 2025 outcomes chart — the eligible exams, 60% passage and 30% participation thresholds, graduation-year denominator and publish-one-outcome rule.
• ABHES's current 2025–2026 Annual Report Guidebook — its any-attempt formula, July 1–June 30 window and below-70% action-plan trigger where credentialing reporting applies.
• AAMA's certification page — 69% first-time pass rate for July 2024–April 2025, 4,171 total administrations, 2,680 first attempts, the 405 passing score and 68,495 active certificants.
• AMT's 2025 annual pass-rate sheet — 71.2% for RMA.
• NCCT's 2025 first-time pass-rate sheet — route-specific NCMA counts and rates.
• AMCA's CMAC annual statistics — 8,530 testers, 6,104 passes, 72% and 12,046 active certifications for 2025.
• Our own live pages — the free diagnostic's 25 questions, instant content-area scoring, written rationales and no-email access; the paid CCMA Exam System remains in development and is not for sale.

What we calculated ourselves, and labeled as ours: the passing and non-passing counts for each year, every year-over-year change, the rank column, the gap between the 75.3% expected rate and the published results, the per-candidate bounding table, and all confidence intervals.

What we don't claim: a first-attempt pass rate · a conversion from questions correct to 390 · a readiness threshold · your odds of passing · a pass guarantee · access to live or recalled exam questions. Our practice questions are original items written to the current published test plan.

What the primary sources do not state. AMT's 2025 pass-rate sheet and AMCA's 2025 CMAC statistics do not identify whether their published rates count first attempts or all attempts. NHA does not publish CCMA retake volume or unique-candidate outcomes, and the current annual-report materials reviewed do not state a timetable for the next report. We have left those fields unknown instead of filling them with inference.

Why there are no testimonials on this page. We don't have real, attributable ones yet, and we won't invent them. When genuine ones exist, they'll be named and dated.

Written by the Castleport Test Prep Editorial Team. Professional review status: Pending — reviewer engagement in progress. No named reviewer is attributed until a real reviewer completes review. Errors are corrected publicly and dated in our corrections log. Read how we verify exam claims and the current reviewer-status register.

Take the data with you. The complete register — all four years, all eight NHA exams, every source URL and verification date — is available as a CSV. Use it, check it, cite it. → Download the CCMA pass rate register (CSV)

CCMA pass rate FAQ

What is the CCMA pass rate?

81.73% of the 98,609 CCMA exams administered during the 2025 calendar year, as published by NHA. That is NHA's most recent annual report, and it counts exam administrations rather than individual candidates.

What is the CCMA pass rate in 2026?

NHA has not published a 2026 figure — calendar year 2026 isn't over. The latest available rate in 2026 is the 2025 result: 81.73%. NHA's current annual-report materials do not state a release date for the next report.

Is 81.73% a first-time pass rate?

No. NHA's column heading is "# of Examinations Administered," so retakes are counted alongside first attempts. NHA does not publish a first-attempt CCMA pass rate.

How many people fail the CCMA exam?

About 18,016 CCMA administrations did not pass in 2025 — our arithmetic from NHA's published rate. Because the report does not publish unique candidates or retake volume, it does not support a defensible count or percentage of people who failed.

Where does the 75.3% CCMA pass rate come from?

NHA's CCMA standard-setting summary, which reports 75.3% as the expected pass rate at the cut score established in 2023. It is a projection made when the passing standard was set, not an annual result.

Is the CCMA exam hard?

The pass rate can't answer that — it measures the administrations completed by the tested population, not your readiness. What the blueprint does show is concentration: 84 of the 150 scored items come from Clinical Patient Care, so 56% of the scored items sit in one domain.

What was the CCMA pass rate in 2024 and 2023?

81.38% across 78,681 exams in 2024, and 77.28% across 67,809 exams in 2023. The current version went live January 10, 2024, so 2024 is a transition-year aggregate and 2025 is its first full calendar year.

Is 390 out of 500 the same as 78% correct?

No. 390 is a point on a 200–500 scaled score range, not a share of questions. There are 150 scored items, not 500, and NHA publishes no raw-to-scaled conversion.

What practice test score means I'm ready for the CCMA?

There isn't a published one. NHA's handbook states that a high practice score does not guarantee passing. Look for steady accuracy across all seven content areas, understanding of the rationales, and finishing inside the time limit — not a magic percentage.

How do I find my school's CCMA pass rate?

Ask the school, and ask six things: cohort size and years, first attempts or all attempts, which exam it counts, whether it covers all graduates or only test-takers, whether it came from NHA's aggregate report, and how it's calculated. NHA's public annual reports do not include a program-level CCMA register.

Is the CCMA easier than the CMA (AAMA)?

No published comparison answers that. NHA reports 81.73% across all 2025 CCMA administrations; AAMA reports 69% for first-time CMA administrations from July 2024 through April 2025. Different periods, denominators, eligibility rules and candidate populations make those rates unusable as a difficulty ranking.

How many times can I retake the CCMA exam?

Three attempts, with a minimum 30-day wait between each, and a one-year wait after a third unsuccessful attempt. Every retake requires re-registration and the full current exam fee. Full details are on the CCMA exam requirements page.

Does Castleport guarantee I'll pass?

No. We don't offer a pass guarantee or publish predicted outcomes. The live free diagnostic is a directional content-area baseline, not a forecast; the paid CCMA Exam System is still in development and is not for sale.

Your next step

You came for a number. You've got it, plus the four things it can't do and the six questions that make anyone else's number checkable.

What's left is the only figure that's actually about you.

Not sure where you stand? Take the free Castleport CCMA diagnostic — instant results, no sign-up required. → Start the free diagnostic

25 original questions written to the current published NHA test plan, scored by content area, with a written rationale for every item. Original questions only — we don't use recalled, leaked or live exam content. NHA's handbook prohibits soliciting, reproducing or disclosing exam content. A directional baseline, not an official NHA score.

Sources — primary

1. NHA 2025 Annual Pass Rates report — 2025 exam volume, pass rate and active certifications for all eight exams. Revised 01/09/26.
2. NHA 2024 Annual Pass Rates report — 2024 calendar-year figures. Revised 01/08/25.
3. NHA 2023 Annual Pass Rates report — 2023 figures.
4. NHA 2022 Annual Pass Rates report — 2022 figures.
5. NHA CCMA Standard Setting Executive Summary — modified Angoff process, 2023 cut score, 390/500 scaled transformation and 75.3% expected pass rate.
6. NHA Candidate Handbook — revision dated June 1, 2026. Scaled scoring, retakes, aggregate reporting to schools and employers, and practice/preparation cautions.
7. NHA CCMA Detailed Test Plan — 150 scored items, 30 pretest items, three-hour limit and domain counts.
8. NHA CCMA 3.0 launch notice — January 10, 2024 exam availability date.
9. MAERB policy manual, February 2026 — annual-report thresholds, eligible credentialing exams, graduation-year denominator and publish-one-outcome rule.
10. MAERB outcomes-threshold chart, updated September 2025 — pooled eligible exams and the 30% participation / 60% passage thresholds.
11. Publicly posted submitted MAERB Annual Report Form — separate exam columns and the 2022 100%-on-three-test-takers example with zero CCMA results.
12. ABHES 2025–2026 Annual Report Guidebook — any-attempt formula, July 1–June 30 window and below-70% action-plan trigger where credentialing reporting applies.
13. AAMA certification and exam statistics — 69% first-time pass rate for July 2024–April 2025, administration counts, 405 minimum passing score and active certificant count.
14. AMT 2025 Annual Pass Rate by Certification — 71.2% RMA pass rate.
15. NCCT 2025 pass rates — first-time NCMA results by eligibility route.
16. AMCA CMAC annual statistics — 2025 testers, passes, pass rate and active CMAC count.
17. Castleport's live free CCMA diagnostic — question count, scoring, rationales, access terms and directional-not-predictive limitation.
18. Castleport CCMA exam requirements page — live disclosure that the paid CCMA Exam System remains in development and is not for sale.

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