The CCMA passing score is 390. It is not 78%.

You pass the CCMA® at a scaled score of 390, on a scale that runs from 200 to 500. That is the whole answer to the question most people came here for.

The part that needs explaining is the word scaled, because almost everything written about the CCMA passing score online quietly drops it — and once you drop it, 390 out of 500 looks like a percentage, and the percentage looks like 78%. When we checked in September 2026, six independent sites were publishing "390 = 78%," four of them on the first page of Google. Candidates now repeat it to each other in forums as though it came from the National Healthcareer Association (NHA®).

It did not. And the arithmetic behind the mistake is clean enough to be worth seeing, because once you see it you will stop chasing a number that does not exist.

How the CCMA is scored

Scaled score. Range 200 to 500. Passing is 390.

NHA states the mechanism itself. The scale:

"considers the difficulty of each exam form by weighting the exam questions based on the difficulty level so that the passing scaled score of 390 is consistent regardless of which form the candidate takes."

Read that sentence slowly, because it does more work than it looks like it does.

Not every CCMA form is exactly as hard as every other. There are multiple forms in circulation, drawn from a larger bank, and two candidates sitting on the same day can get forms of slightly different difficulty. NHA adjusts for that. Questions are weighted by difficulty, and the weighting is calibrated so that 390 represents the same standard of competence on every form.

That is the whole point of a scaled score. It is not a curve against other candidates — your result does not depend on how anyone else did. It is a correction for the form you happened to draw, so that passing means the same thing whichever one you got.

Why 390 is not 78%

The 78% figure comes from one calculation, and it is the calculation almost anyone would make in three seconds:

• 390 ÷ 500 = 78.0%. That is where the number comes from. It treats the scale as though it started at zero.
• The scale does not start at zero. It starts at 200. The lowest reportable CCMA score is 200, not 0. Read the scale linearly and 390 sits at (390 − 200) ÷ 300 = 63.3% of the distance from the bottom of the scale to the top.
• Neither number is the answer, because the question does not have a fixed answer.

Here is the reasoning, and it follows directly from NHA's own sentence. If questions are weighted by difficulty so that 390 means the same thing on every form, then the number of questions you have to get right in order to reach 390 must move with the difficulty of the form you sit. A harder form needs fewer correct answers to clear the same standard; an easier one needs more. A fixed percent-correct cut score and a difficulty-weighted scale cannot both be true at the same time.

So there is no published percent-correct equivalent for 390, and there cannot be a stable one.

One point of precision, because it matters. NHA does not publish a sentence saying "the scale is not a percentage." We have not found one, and we are not going to put words in their mouth — several sites in this niche get into trouble by attributing to NHA things NHA never wrote. What NHA publishes is the mechanism quoted above. The conclusion is ours, drawn from that mechanism. We think it is sound, and we would rather show you the reasoning than hand you a different unsourced number to memorize in place of the first one.

What this means practically: stop aiming at a threshold. Chasing a specific percentage on practice material is chasing a number that does not map onto the thing being measured. The useful target is not "78%" or "63%" — it is your weak domains stopping being weak.

What we will not tell you, and neither can anyone else

Scaling depends on NHA's per-form item difficulty parameters. Those are not public, and they are not going to become public — they are the technical core of a certification body's exam program.

Which means no practice tool, ours included, can honestly convert a practice percentage into a predicted 390-equivalent scaled score. Not with more questions, not with better AI, not with a bigger user base. The input required for the calculation does not exist outside NHA.

If a site shows you "your predicted CCMA score: 412," that number was generated from nothing. It is a comforting number and it is fiction.

What we report instead:

• Your raw percent correct — how many of the questions you answered you got right.
• Your per-domain counts — scored and missed, for each of the seven domains and the 3A–3F subdomains, against the blueprint's real item counts.
• Your timing.

And this line sits on the results screen permanently: the real CCMA reports a scaled score from 200 to 500, with 390 passing. This simulator reports your raw percentage — your real CCMA score is scaled and will differ.

The per-domain counts are the part worth paying attention to. At 150 scored questions the domain counts are large enough to mean something. Missing 5 of 12 phlebotomy questions is a signal you can act on. A single overall percentage is not.

What the real score report shows

NHA provides a scaled score.

Candidates also report that the score report includes a per-content-area breakdown, flagging which areas fell below the passing standard. Three independent accounts describe this. That is useful information if you did not pass, because it points you at where the next 30 days should go rather than leaving you to re-study everything.

On timing, NHA states that for online CCMA exams, results are posted to your account within two days of your test being scored. Candidate accounts split between seeing a result on screen immediately and seeing it posted the following day — both patterns are reported by multiple candidates, so plan for either.

The CCMA pass rate

NHA-reported 2024 CCMA pass rate: 81.38% across 78,681 examinations administered.

That figure comes from NHA's own annual pass-rate document. Two points of precision that other sites skip, and both of them change what the number means.

NHA reports this per examination administered, and does not specify first attempt. The document's title and its column heading both say "administered." There is no methodology footnote. So the honest statement is the one above, framed exactly as NHA frames it. You will find sites converting it into a claim about how many candidates pass on their first try. No published source supports that conversion, NHA does not report the figure that way, and nobody who repeats it has shown a derivation. We are not going to publish a first-attempt pass rate, because no source establishes one.

It is 2024 data. As of September 15, 2026, NHA has not published a 2025 pass rate, so 2024 remains the most recent official figure — roughly twenty months old at the time of writing. If you see a 74% or a 77% CCMA pass rate quoted, we could not trace either figure to NHA at all.

Either way: a large majority of CCMA examinations end in a pass. That is a real and reassuring number. It is also not a prediction about you, and it is not a reason to skip preparing.

If you do not pass

The retake rules are published by NHA in the candidate handbook, and they are worth knowing before you test rather than after.

There is no discounted retake rate. A retake is a fresh registration at the full price — $165 per attempt, per NHA's own certification store, checked September 15, 2026. Several sites still publish $155 or $160; those figures are stale.

The 30-day wait is a floor, not a recommendation. If your score report flags two content areas below standard, thirty days is enough time to work them properly, and the per-content-area breakdown is the closest thing you will get to a study plan written specifically for you.

Is the CCMA hard?

Everything in this section is candidate-reported. It is not an NHA statement and it is not a prediction about your form. But the pattern across accounts is consistent enough to be worth knowing, and it is not the pattern most people expect.

Candidates report a genuine split. Most describe the exam as easier than they had feared — sometimes markedly so. A substantial minority walk out certain they failed.

And the two groups overlap. "Felt like I failed, actually passed" is a recurring pattern in candidate accounts, common enough that it is worth naming before you sit the exam rather than after. If you finish and feel terrible, that feeling is reported by people who passed. It is not evidence.

Candidates consistently locate the difficulty in the wording, not the content. Eight independent accounts describe the items as deliberately non-intuitive, and they describe the same structure every time: two defensible answers, one most appropriate. Both options are things a medical assistant might reasonably do. One of them is better, and the discriminator candidates name over and over is scope of practice — the wrong answer is usually the one where the medical assistant acts like a provider.

A passing candidate's heuristic, reported in their own words: pick safety, then scope of practice, then documentation, and eliminate answers where the MA is making a clinical decision that is not theirs to make.

This is the most transferable thing anyone can tell you about the CCMA, and it means the exam rewards a kind of preparation that flashcards do not provide. You can know the pharmacology perfectly and still pick the wrong answer, because the most attractive distractor on a scope question is frequently the one that requires the most clinical knowledge to find.

On time pressure: candidates report there is very little. No account in the material we reviewed described running out of time, and three independent accounts describe finishing in roughly 45 minutes to half of the three-hour window. One account advises the opposite — do not rush at all. The CCMA's difficulty is not the clock.

One more thing candidates report, with a caution attached. Among self-reported passing scores, the cluster sits well above the line, and self-reported failures cluster just below it — several describe missing by one or two points. Take that for what it is: people who pass post about it far more often than people who do not, so these numbers are heavily survivorship-biased and cannot be used to estimate anything. What they do tell you is that 390 is a real line, and near-misses are real. It is not a formality.

What to aim for instead

Since there is no percentage to hit, here is a target that actually maps onto the exam.

Work until your per-domain results stop having a hole in them. Not until you hit a number — until Clinical Patient Care, which is 84 of the 150 scored questions, stops being where you lose points. That domain is more than everything else combined, and it is where passing and failing are usually decided.

Practice the question form, not just the content. If two options both look right, the exam is testing whether you know which one a medical assistant is supposed to choose. That is a skill you build by meeting the form repeatedly, with explanations, not by re-reading a textbook chapter.

Read the explanation on everything you got right but were unsure about. Those are the questions you will get wrong on a form that words them slightly differently.

Find out where you actually stand

The most useful thing you can do with a passing score you cannot predict is stop thinking about it and get a real diagnostic instead.

Take the free full-length CCMA practice test — 180 questions, 3 hours, 150 scored and 30 unscored pretest items, drawn at NHA's exact per-domain counts. Identical exam structure to the real thing.

At the end you get your raw percent, your per-domain counts, and your timing. No predicted scaled score, because there is no honest way to produce one. What you get instead is the thing that would actually change how you study this week: which of the seven domains is costing you points, and by how much.

It is free, and it stays free.

More on this site

• The CCMA exam — format, the current test plan at item counts, eligibility, fees, and the 2016 versus 2022 test plan change most sites missed.
• EKG and phlebotomy practice — the 18-question module: placement, artifacts and waveforms, not rhythm reading.
• Free full-length CCMA practice test — the 180-question simulator.
• CCMA FAQ — retakes, test center versus remote proctoring, and the questions NHA does not publish an answer to.