"What score do I need?" has a different answer in every jurisdiction — the NextGen bar exam reports one scaled number from 500 to 750, but each state sets its own passing score. NCBE recommends the 610–620 band; the announcements so far cluster tightly inside it.
This post is the state-by-state picture as of publication. Because boards announce on their own schedules, the always-current version — including every "TBA" — lives on our jurisdictions hub, where each state's page tracks its own number.
Announced NextGen passing scores
| Score | Jurisdictions |
|---|---|
| 610 | Iowa, Missouri, New Mexico, North Dakota, Washington |
| 612 | Guam, Palau |
| 614 | Indiana |
| 615 | Northern Mariana Islands, Oregon* |
| 616 | Connecticut, District of Columbia, Idaho, Kentucky, Maryland, US Virgin Islands |
| 620 | Illinois, Maine, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Vermont |
*Oregon's 615 applies to the July 2026 administration only; it rises to 620 afterward — the only announced score with a built-in escalator.
Two special cases worth calling out:
- Minnesota hasn't finalized its cut, but its Supreme Court has guaranteed that candidates scoring 620 or above pass regardless of where the final number lands — effectively a planning ceiling.
- Utah and West Virginia announced transfer thresholds (610+ and 620+ respectively) for accepting NextGen scores from other states even before their own first administrations — as did South Dakota (620+), while Ohio accepts transferred NextGen scores ahead of its own first administration.
How these map to the old UBE cut scores
NCBE describes its recommended 610–620 range as corresponding to the familiar 260–270 band on the legacy 400-point scale, and the announcements bear that out with unusual neatness:
| State | Legacy UBE cut | Announced NextGen score |
|---|---|---|
| Missouri | 260 | 610 |
| Iowa | 260 | 610 |
| Indiana | 264 | 614 |
| Connecticut | 266 | 616 |
| Maryland | 266 | 616 |
| Maine | 270 | 620 |
| Pennsylvania | 270 | 620 |
The pattern — legacy cut + 350 — is visible enough that for a TBA state, its current UBE cut is your best planning proxy: a 266 state will very likely land at 616. (It's a heuristic, not a promise; boards occasionally move cuts during transitions, as Iowa did when it lowered 266 → 260 effective July 2026.)
Still TBA — what to plan for
Most jurisdictions that adopted NextGen for 2027–2028 haven't announced scores yet — including heavyweights like Texas, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York. Until they do:
- Plan around 620, the top of the recommended band. Prep that clears 620 clears every announced score in the country.
- Use the legacy-cut proxy above for a sharper guess where you need one.
- Watch your state's page — each one flags whether its number is announced or an NCBE-midpoint estimate, and updates when the board speaks.
Portability: your score travels; requirements don't
Like UBE scores before them, NextGen scores are portable between jurisdictions that administer the exam — subject to the receiving state's own minimum and rules. The seams during the transition:
- Some states accept inbound NextGen transfers before their first administration (Ohio, Utah, West Virginia, South Dakota — thresholds above).
- Others explicitly won't until they switch: New York, Florida, and Hawaii have all said no transferred NextGen scores before their own first administrations.
- State-specific admission components (Missouri's educational test, Maryland's state-law quiz, Washington's open-book state-law test, and similar) attach to the state, not the score — transferring 618 into a state still means completing its local requirements.
If a multi-state plan is part of your strategy — take the exam where it's offered early, waive in elsewhere later — read the receiving state's page first. That plan works for Ohio; it does not work for New York before July 2028.
What a passing score means for practice benchmarks
Honest translation from scaled scores to study targets is limited — the exam is equated, so nobody outside NCBE can map raw percentages to scaled points precisely (how the scoring works). What you can do:
- Track accuracy trendlines by subject over hundreds of questions rather than one-off quiz scores.
- Keep a written-work cadence — question sets and performance tasks carry 51% of the score, and self-graded rubric practice is the only way that half of your readiness shows up in data.
- Use estimates with guardrails: BARGO's dashboard draws your state's actual passing line (or the labeled NCBE-midpoint estimate) on its readiness gauge, and won't show a scaled estimate at all until you've answered enough questions for it to mean something.
Start the trendline with the free 10-question diagnostic, and check your state's page for the exact number you're chasing — it's the most concrete fact in your entire prep.