ASWB publishes first-time pass rates by exam category. Here they are for 2025, and then here is what they do and do not tell you — including several findings from ASWB's own commissioned research that change how you should plan.
| Exam | First-time pass rate (2025) | Candidates |
|---|---|---|
| Clinical | 75.7% | 26,439 |
| Masters | 73.9% | 20,636 |
| Associate | 71.5% | 407 |
| Bachelors | 70.4% | 2,741 |
| Advanced Generalist | 65.0% | 117 |
Source: ASWB exam pass rates, read August 16, 2026.
The first thing to notice is the right-hand column
ASWB prints a caveat above its own table, and it is the most important line on the page:
Pass rates are most representative for groups of more than 200 candidates.
Look at Advanced Generalist. 117 candidates. That is roughly four hundred times smaller than the Clinical cohort and well below ASWB's own threshold for representativeness. A handful of results moves that 65% by several points. It is the lowest number in the table and it is also the least trustworthy number in the table, and those two facts get quoted together as though the first explains something.
Treat the Clinical and Masters figures as real signal — tens of thousands of candidates each. Treat Associate as indicative. Treat Advanced Generalist as barely more than an anecdote with a decimal point. The Advanced Generalist exam sets that number beside the licenses that use it.
A pass rate is not a passing score
These two get conflated constantly, and the difference matters when you are trying to figure out whether you are ready.
There is no percentage you need to score. ASWB reports results as pass/fail against a number of correct answers, and that number moves slightly between exam forms. From the Guidebook:
Because individual exam questions may have minor differences in difficulty, and because questions change from one exam administration to the next, statistical adjustments are made to account for the small differences in the overall difficulty of individual examinations. These adjustments result in slight increases and decreases in the number of questions that must be answered correctly to pass each version of a Social Work Licensing Exam.
So when a prep site tells you that you need 60%, or 70%, or any other figure, it is inventing one. Your score report will tell you the number of questions needed to pass your form.
The exam is a floor, not a ranking. It measures "whether an individual is ready to begin practicing social work safely, ethically, and competently" — minimum competence at entry. A 75.7% pass rate does not mean the Clinical exam is three-quarters as hard as something with a 25% pass rate. It means three-quarters of the people who took it cleared a fixed bar.
These are first-time rates. ASWB's fuller analyses distinguish first-time from eventual pass rates — the percentage who pass at some point, including on a retake. Eventual rates are substantially higher. If you are looking at 70.4% for Bachelors and reading it as "three in ten never qualify", that is not what it says.
What ASWB's own research found about who passes
In 2022 ASWB published a pass rate analysis breaking results down by race and ethnicity, age, and gender, and then commissioned researchers at Rutgers to investigate why the differences exist. The third report in that series looked at first-time Clinical exam results from 2018 to 2022 and controlled for individual, institutional and community factors.
Three of its findings are directly useful to anyone planning an attempt, and they are not the ones usually repeated.
Wait less time after your MSW. The report found that "examinees who waited longer to take the exam after earning an MSW… had lower pass rates than those who waited for a shorter period." If you are deciding whether to take it this year or in two years, the evidence points at sooner.
More years of employment did not help. The same finding held for years worked: candidates "who had more years of employment also had lower pass rates." This is counter-intuitive and worth sitting with. Practice experience is not exam readiness, and the exam is testing entry-level competence against a published outline rather than the accumulated judgment of a long career. Experienced social workers routinely underestimate this exam.
Educational route made a difference. Those who "began their postsecondary education with an associate's degree and majored in social work as undergraduates had lower pass rates than their counterparts."
None of that is destiny. It is a description of averages across tens of thousands of people, and the practical takeaway is narrow: if you have been out of your program for a while, or you are relying on years of practice to carry you, budget more preparation than you think you need — and start from the published content outline rather than from what your job has taught you.
The disparities, and what ASWB says about them
The 2022 analysis found substantial differences in pass rates by race and ethnicity, by age, and by gender. On raw scores in the Clinical data, the Rutgers report found that the average score of all examinees was 110, that half scored at least 111, and that Black examinees on average scored about four points below the passing score, while examinees from other historically marginalized groups scored roughly three to six points above it.
ASWB does not present this as a puzzle about candidates. Its own statement identifies "systemic and institutional racism, specifically anti-Blackism, as being core to the racial disparities" in exam outcomes, and it commissioned the research specifically to examine "the individual, institutional, and community factors that test-takers carry with them throughout their lives."
The researchers' conclusion is worth quoting because it is the opposite of fatalism:
When we can locate the sources of the disparities and know how to intervene strategically, we can reduce and even eliminate them in the long run, as they were socially created and not inherent in the demographic groups.
We are a preparation company, not a researcher or a regulator, and we are not going to pretend that a question bank addresses a structural problem. What we can say is narrow and true: the differences are documented by the body that administers the exam, they are attributed by that body to factors outside the individual candidate, and nothing in that data says anything about you personally. If you are looking at those figures and reading a verdict about your own chances, that is not what they are.
You can read the full reports in ASWB's exam report series. We would rather point you at the source than summarize it for you.
Pass rates answer only part of the question most people are asking. How hard is the ASWB exam? adds ASWB's eventual pass rates and what its own documents say makes the questions difficult.
What to do with any of this
Do not use pass rates to choose an exam. You do not get to choose. Your license level and your state decide which exam you take — our state pages record what each board requires. The gap between 65% and 75.7% is not an argument for anything, particularly when the 65% rests on 117 people.
Do not use them to estimate your own odds. A cohort rate is not a personal probability. Your own preparation, and the gap between what you know and the published outline, are the variables you control. Our free 20-question readiness quiz is a better first measure of yours.
Do use the 200-candidate caveat as a filter. Any provider quoting the Advanced Generalist pass rate as though it were solid, or comparing it with Clinical as if the two numbers were equally reliable, has not read the page they are citing.
Do take it sooner rather than later if you are otherwise ready, on the evidence above.
We publish no pass rate of our own, and neither honestly can anyone else: no preparation provider can isolate its own effect on an exam it does not administer and cannot see. Anyone quoting a pass rate for their own product is quoting something they have no way to measure.