.png)
Bar exam dates 2026: February 24 and 25, and July 28 and 29. For 2027 it is February 23 and 24, and July 27 and 28. The rule behind them is the last Tuesday and Wednesday of February and July, and NextGen shares the same dates as the legacy UBE.
February 24 and 25, 2026, and July 28 and 29, 2026.
The governing rule is worth memorising instead of the dates. NCBE administers the MBE on the last Wednesday in February and the last Wednesday in July, and the two-day exam runs the preceding Tuesday and that Wednesday (https://www.ncbex.org/exams/mbe).
July 28 and 29, 2026 is also the first NextGen administration anywhere (https://www.ncbex.org/exams/nextgen).
February 23 and 24, 2027, and July 27 and 28, 2027 (https://www.ncbex.org).
Those follow the same last-Tuesday-and-Wednesday rule, so you can derive future years yourself rather than waiting for a board to post them.
What you cannot derive is your own jurisdiction's application deadline, its fee, or whether it has added a state component day. Those are board decisions and most were unpublished for 2027 at verification.
AdministrationDatesFebruary 2026February 24 and 25, 2026July 2026July 28 and 29, 2026February 2027February 23 and 24, 2027July 2027July 27 and 28, 2027
From NCBE (https://www.ncbex.org/exams/mbe, https://www.ncbex.org/exams/nextgen) and jurisdiction date pages. Verified July 27, 2026.
No. NextGen and the legacy UBE run on the same calendar dates, and NCBE lists them together under one set of dates (https://www.ncbex.org/exams/nextgen).
The difference is hours, not days. NextGen examinees sit nine hours and finish midday Wednesday. Legacy examinees sit twelve hours including a full six-hour MBE on Wednesday.
Plan travel accordingly. A NextGen examinee can often fly Wednesday evening; a legacy examinee in the same city usually cannot.
Four, and each is off-cycle in a different way, so a generic calendar will mislead you.
Louisiana runs three days, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, mid-month, entirely locally drafted with no MBE, MEE or MPT. July 2026 was July 13, 15 and 17; February 2027 is February 15, 17 and 19; July 2027 is July 26, 28 and 30 (https://www.lascba.org/info/BarExam/).
Puerto Rico administers in March and September rather than February and July. The Revalída General is September 16 and 17, 2026 and the Revalída Notarial September 18, 2026 (https://poderjudicial.pr/tribunal-supremo/junta/examenes-de-revalida/).
Nevada runs three calendar days, February 24 to 26 and July 28 to 30, 2026, and its July 2026 sitting was the last traditional Nevada exam ever (https://nvbar.org/licensing-compliance/admissions/bar-exam/dates-locations/). The Northern Mariana Islands sits local Wednesday and Thursday because it lies west of the International Date Line (https://www.nmijudiciary.gov/bar-admissions).
Three jurisdictions have announced footprints that will not fit a standard calendar from July 2028 (https://reports.ncbex.org/comp-guide/charts/chart-17/).
Florida adds a four-hour state component the day BEFORE the NextGen UBE from July 2028, making a three-day exam.
Alabama and Texas add state components in July 2028. North Carolina adds a separate Decedents' Estates exam offered four times a year from July 2028, which is a separate sitting rather than an extra day.
Guam's and Palau's exact bar exam calendar dates were not published by their courts at verification, and neither were Puerto Rico's March 2027 dates.
Nevada's 2027 Foundational Law Exam and Lawyering Performance Exam calendar dates were not published beyond the January 19, 2027 first LPE.
California's July 2027 dates were not published by the State Bar of California at verification. For all of these the answer is not yet published rather than an estimate.
The first is adoption. Supreme courts issue orders on their own schedule and NCBE's compilation pages lag them, which is exactly what happened with California in July 2026.
The second is the calendar. Most jurisdictions had not posted 2027 dates or 2027 fees at verification, and several were serving prior-cycle pages without saying so.
The third is cut scores. NCBE states on its own page that jurisdictions are currently evaluating its recommended NextGen range (https://www.ncbex.org/exams/nextgen/minimum-passing-scores), so that list grows month by month.
None of those three settles before autumn. Treat September as the re-check point for anything on this page that carries a date or a number.
This page is one spoke of a cluster. The hub is our NextGen bar exam pillar, which carries the whole transition in one place and links every spoke including this one.
The two most closely related pages here are bar exam application deadline and when do bar exam results come out?.
Everything across the cluster is drawn from the same verified fact set and carries the same verified-as-of date, so the numbers agree with each other by construction rather than by coincidence.
Every fact here was read on NCBE's own pages or the jurisdiction's own board or supreme court pages on July 27, 2026. No prep company, no aggregator, no forum and no news summary was used as a source for anything.
Where a jurisdiction's own site was unreachable, robots-blocked or JavaScript-gated, we say the fact rests on NCBE alone rather than presenting it as confirmed. That happened more often than you would expect and it is named on the page each time.
Where two official sources disagree, we publish the conflict and name which one we treat as operational. We do not pick quietly and we do not average them.
Where nothing is published, the page says not yet published by the board. It never says a number we worked out ourselves, because an estimate that looks like a disclosure is worse than a gap.
It cannot tell you what your own board will do. Jurisdictions set their own dates, fees, cut scores, deadlines and admission rules, and NCBE compiles those decisions rather than making them.
It cannot substitute for reading your jurisdiction's rule text. Compilation charts are an index into the rules, not the rules, and every material decision should be checked against the authority itself.
Start at NCBE's jurisdiction index (https://www.ncbex.org/jurisdictions) to find the name of your admitting authority, which is often not the state bar association and is sometimes a board sitting under the supreme court.
Then go to that authority's own site and look for a dated page. A page with no cycle label is the warning sign, not the exception; several boards serve prior-cycle information with no year on it anywhere.
Cross-check the deadlines page against the program page, because they disagree more often than they should. We found boards contradicting themselves on dates in the same week.
If the two disagree and you cannot tell which is current, email the board and keep the reply. A dated email from the board is better evidence than any table, including this one.
One framing point that governs this whole page. The first NextGen administration was July 28 and 29, 2026 (https://www.ncbex.org/exams/nextgen), so at the time of writing no NextGen exam had been sat anywhere in the world and no results existed. There is no NextGen pass rate, no score distribution, no repeater data and no retrospective on how it went, and anyone offering you one is inventing it.
That matters on this page specifically, because the transition is the reason any of it is moving. Structure, dates and published policy are reportable now; outcomes are not.
NCBE has not published a NextGen mean or standard deviation either. The figures are absent from the Guidance Brief, the Examinees' Guide, the Blueprint and every scoring page (https://www.ncbex.org/sites/default/files/2025-11/FOR%20RELEASE%20NCBE%20NextGen%20Guidance%20Brief-Recommended%20Passing%20Score%20Range-2.pdf), which is worth knowing before you read anyone's confident claim about difficulty.
Open your own jurisdiction's board page and confirm every date and number on this page against it.
Where this page says not yet published, check again in September, which is when most boards refresh.
If your plan turns on a figure here, get it from the board in writing rather than from any table.
Everything on this page about bar exam dates was read on the source pages listed inline on July 27, 2026, and the date is on the page rather than buried in a footer because this material moves faster than anything else we publish.
Three separate clocks are running against it. Supreme courts issue adoption orders and NCBE's own pages lag them.
Most jurisdictions had not posted 2027 dates or fees. NextGen passing scores are being set jurisdiction by jurisdiction right now, and NCBE says so on its own page (https://www.ncbex.org/exams/nextgen/minimum-passing-scores).
Re-check your own jurisdiction's board before you rely on any date or number here, including ours. A figure quoted anywhere without a cycle label and a date attached is unverified by definition.
February 24 and 25, 2026 and July 28 and 29, 2026. The rule is the last Tuesday and Wednesday of February and July.
February 23 and 24, 2027 and July 27 and 28, 2027, on the same last-Tuesday-and-Wednesday rule.
No. Both run on the same calendar dates. NextGen is nine hours finishing midday Wednesday; the legacy UBE is twelve hours including a full MBE Wednesday.
Louisiana runs three days mid-month, Puerto Rico runs March and September, Nevada runs three days, and the Northern Mariana Islands sits local Wednesday and Thursday across the date line.
Written by Ali, Georgetown Law, founder of Lovare Institut.
July 30, 2026
July 30, 2026