NextGen Bar Exam Passing Scores by State (2026)

"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, and every announcement so far has landed inside it.

This is the complete picture: all 25 announced scores, a planning estimate for every TBA state, and the transfer rules that trip people up. Everything is checked against NCBE's decisions table (last updated by NCBE on July 16, 2026) as of July 17, 2026. The always-current version lives on our jurisdictions hub, where each state's page tracks its own number.

What changed in July 2026

• Massachusetts announced 620 — the month's only new number on the 500–750 scale, and a perfect match for its legacy 270 cut.
• California adopted NextGen (July 15 Supreme Court order) for July 2028. It hasn't set a 500–750 score yet, but the court anchored the standard: passing must be equivalent to 1390 out of 2000 on California's current scale — the toughest-reputation cut in the country carries over.
• Montana joined the February 2028 wave; its score is TBA.

Announced NextGen passing scores (25 jurisdictions)

*Oregon's 615 applies to the July 2026 administration only; it rises to 620 afterward — the only announced score with a built-in escalator, set by Oregon Supreme Court order.

No jurisdiction has gone below 610 or above 620. If you see a number outside that band attributed to any state, treat it as unsourced until NCBE's table says otherwise.

How announced scores map to the old UBE cuts

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:

The pattern — legacy cut + 350 — has held for every announcement so far, including July's newest (Massachusetts, 270 → 620). That makes a TBA state's current UBE cut your best planning proxy. It's a heuristic, not a promise; boards occasionally move cuts during transitions, as Iowa did when it lowered 266 → 260 effective July 2026.

Every TBA state, with a planning estimate

Here is the full waiting list — what each TBA state's legacy cut implies under the +350 pattern. Treat the estimate column exactly as labeled: an estimate.

Until your state announces:

1. Plan around 620, the top of the recommended band. Prep that clears 620 clears every announced score in the country.
2. Use the legacy-cut proxy for a sharper guess where you need one.
3. Watch your state's page — each one flags whether its number is announced or an NCBE-midpoint estimate, and updates when the board speaks.

Passing score ≠ transfer score

NCBE's table carries a warning people miss: a jurisdiction's minimum passing score may differ from the minimum score it accepts for transfer. Six states currently have no passing score but a numeric transfer minimum — they'll accept a NextGen score earned elsewhere before they even administer the exam:

Never read a transfer minimum as the passing score (or vice versa) — they're set separately, and conflating them is the single most common error in secondhand score lists.

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:

• Most adopting states accept inbound NextGen transfers from July 2026, years before their own first administration — the table above, plus announced-score states like Massachusetts, Maine, and Pennsylvania (620), Kentucky (616), Iowa (610), and others.
• Ohio opens to 620+ transfers in November 2026; Virginia starts accepting in 2028.
• New York and Florida will not accept NextGen transfer scores earned from any administration before July 2028 — NCBE's footnote is explicit. Hawaii simply doesn't accept transferred scores at all.
• Texas says it plans to accept scores from July 2026 and will update its policy — check before relying on it.
• 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 a 618 into a state still means completing its local requirements. Every component, plus how long a transferred score stays valid and why the published score-age chart may not govern NextGen scores, is in what a score transfer carries.

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 from November; 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.

Sources: NCBE's decisions-by-jurisdiction table and minimum passing scores page, both verified July 17, 2026. This post is updated as boards announce.