BSB Pass Marks and Pass Rates, Every Sitting (2025–26)

In April 2026 the BSB pass standard was 42 out of 75 in Criminal Litigation and 48 out of 90 in Civil Litigation; 66% of Criminal candidates and 61% of Civil candidates passed. The pass mark is not fixed: it is set for each paper by standard setting. In the three sittings with published Chair’s reports we saved (August 2025, December 2025 and April 2026) it was 40/75 to 42/75 in Criminal and 47/89 to 49/90 in Civil, and pass rates ran from 48% to 66%. (The Summer 2026 sitting has taken place, but on 27 October 2026 the BSB’s page listed the April 2026 report as the current one.) This page gives the figures from those Chair’s reports, explains in plain words how the standard is set and why it moves, sets out what the BSB itself says about Civil results being lower, and lets you check a mock score against the published standards. Independent — not affiliated with the Bar Standards Board. ProSyllabus is an independent study site and nothing here is official. Every exam fact and figure below is quoted or summarised from the BSB’s own documents, read on 27 October 2026.

BSB Chair’s Report Part 2, April 2026, and Bar Qualification Manual Part 3C, read 27 October 2026.

“Post-intervention” means after the Board’s decisions on individual questions, such as crediting a second answer or disregarding a defective question. Candidate numbers are those whose results went back to AETOs. Other tables can differ: the statistics table in section 3.3 of the April 2026 report gives 985 December 2025 Civil candidates, against 1,002 in its section 1.2 (and in the December 2025 report’s own table). Chair’s Report Part 1 explains that Final Board data “excluded a small number of candidates from the analysis where they were extreme outliers (such as those who only answered one or two questions)”, and that candidates who sit only one of the two Civil papers “are always excluded from analysis at the Final Board”. The reports do not say which exclusions explain this difference.

Across all 17 sittings since Bar Training began in December 2020, the April 2026 report counts 18,595 attempts at Criminal Litigation, 10,500 of them successful (an aggregate 56%), and 18,928 attempts at Civil Litigation, 10,241 successful (54%). These are attempts, not people: one candidate who sits three times counts three times. The December 2025 report records that the April 2023 Criminal pass rate (66%) was then the highest for either subject and August 2023 Criminal (40%) the lowest. For April 2026 Criminal the April 2026 report is not consistent with itself: section 1.2 gives 66% and calls it “the joint highest since the current assessment format was introduced, matched only by the April 2023 cohort result”; its statistics table in section 2.3 prints 66.5; and section 4.2 gives 67% and calls it “the highest recorded for either subject across the 17 sittings to date”. This page uses 66%, the section 1.2 figure.

The BSB uses the Angoff method for both litigation subjects. Before the exam, a panel of subject experts (“judges”) agree what a borderline candidate looks like, then each judge estimates, question by question, the chance that such a candidate gets it right. Each judge’s estimates are added up into an expected score for the whole paper, and the median across the judges becomes the recommended pass standard. The BSB’s standard-setting paper explains why: “a fixed pass mark which does not change between sittings is not appropriate”, because papers in different sittings are not of exactly the same difficulty. It adds that the method “does not compare test-takers to their peers but only to the pass standard”, so there is no quota of passes.

The Board then rounds the recommendation to a whole number. Its convention is to round up: April 2026’s 41.3/75 became 42/75 and 47.3/90 became 48/90. The raw standard is then reported as 60%: Chair’s Report Part 1 gives the example that if the standard is 43/75 “(in effect 57%), a candidate achieving 43/75 will be reported as having a score of 60% (the pass mark)”, and other scores are translated accordingly.

Practise under exam conditions and see where you land: BSB Criminal Litigation mock test, scored against 42/75, three free questions first.

In each of these three sittings the Civil pass rate was below the Criminal one: by 9 points in August 2025, 7 in December 2025 and 5 in April 2026 (our arithmetic from section 1.2 of the April 2026 report). The BSB does not give a single cause. What its reports say:

The reports also show how much the mix of first-sit and resitting candidates matters. In the reports, first sit means a “first ever attempt at the examination, or previous attempts discounted on the basis of accepted extenuating circumstances”. “First sit cohorts tend to be stronger than resit cohorts”, each report says, and the figures bear it out:

The BSB’s own figures are the fairest answer. In the three sittings from August 2025 to April 2026, between 56% and 66% of Criminal Litigation candidates passed and between 48% and 61% of Civil Litigation candidates passed. For candidates classified as first sit (a category that includes candidates whose earlier attempts were discounted for accepted extenuating circumstances) the rates were higher, 57% to 71%; for resitting candidates they were 33% to 52%. Across every attempt since December 2020, 56% of Criminal and 54% of Civil attempts were passes. The pass rates in a given sitting depend partly on who sat it: the April 2026 sitting had far more first-sit candidates (84% Criminal, 76% Civil) than December 2025 (50%, 52%) or August 2025 (46%, 45%).

For the next sitting dates and the resit rules see our dates and resits guide; for what each paper tests see the Criminal syllabus guide and the Civil guide; the full exam page is the BSB centralised assessments exam page.