Statsborgerprøven Pass Mark, Pass Rate and Why People Fail (Mini Test)

Statsborgerprøven has one of the clearest pass marks of any citizenship test in Europe, and one of the highest pass rates. Both are published. What is not published is why the people who fail do fail, so this guide keeps those two things apart: the first half is official figures with their sources, the second half is our own reading of where marks go, and in between is a ten-question test in Norwegian that marks itself and tells you which topics to read again.

Official: HK-dir, “Les om prøven”, and the figure on hkdir.no’s front page, both read 13 October 2026.

HK-dir’s page for candidates gives the rule in three short lines: “Prøven har 36 oppgaver. 32 av oppgavene teller på resultatet ditt. Du må ha 24 riktige svar for å bestå” [official]. The test has 36 tasks, 32 of them count towards your result, and you need 24 correct answers to pass. Each task is multiple choice with three options and one correct answer. The result is passed or not passed (bestått or ikke bestått); there is no grade.

HK-dir explains the four tasks that do not count: “Vi prøver dem ut for å se om de egner seg til senere prøver. Du får ikke vite hvilke oppgaver dette er” [official]. They are being tried out for later tests, and you are not told which they are. Two consequences follow, and both are our reasoning rather than HK-dir’s words. First, you cannot afford to skip any task on the guess that it is a trial one. Second, the number you should hold in your head is not “24 of 36”. A candidate with 24 right out of all 36 may have fewer than 24 right among the 32 that count. To be certain of passing whichever four are trial tasks, you would need 28 right of 36, since at worst all four trial tasks are among your correct ones.

There is an official pass rate. The Ministry of Labour and Social Inclusion has published it in a press release in each of the last four years, and HK-dir shows the latest figure on its front page. The latest release, dated 17 March 2026, says: “I løpet av 2025 tok 5 973 personer statsborgerprøven i Norge og 5 517 bestod” [official]. In 2025, 5,973 people took the test in Norway and 5,517 passed. HK-dir’s own front page rounds this to 92.4 per cent.

Three readings of that table, with their limits. By our arithmetic 456 people did not pass in 2025 (5,973 − 5,517), roughly one candidate in thirteen. The figures count test sittings reported for the year; the releases do not say how many of those were second attempts, so this is not a first-attempt pass rate. And the rate is not the same everywhere: the release of 7 April 2024, on the 2023 results, named Oslo (93.9 per cent) and Vestland (93 per cent) as the counties with the best results, while the 2026 release lists twelve municipalities, among them Lillesand, Nesodden, Porsgrunn and Voss, where everyone who sat the test in 2025 passed [official].

HK-dir’s director said in the 2024 release that since the test was established in 2017 there has been an increase in the share of candidates who pass [official]. The 2026 release adds a sentence worth remembering when you plan your reading: the Storting decided that statsborgerprøven is a knowledge test based on the learning resource samfunnskunnskap.no, and “Prøven måler ikke graden av integrering hos kandidatene”, the test does not measure how integrated a candidate is [official]. It measures whether you know what the lessons say.

These ten questions are ours, written from the lesson text of samfunnskunnskap.no, one from each of ten of the thirteen topics. They are in Norwegian with three options, as in the real test, and each has an English translation. They are not official questions, none is taken from HK-dir’s example test, and none repeats our practice quiz or the kit’s self-test. Democracy and elections are left out on purpose, because our live practice quiz already covers that topic.

If you missed two or more, do not go back to the questions; go to the lessons named in the last column. The full list of 13 topics and 57 lessons, with a tracker you can tick, is in the statsborgerprøven pensum and topic guide, and fifteen more questions of the same kind are in the Norwegian citizenship test in English guide.

No authority has published an analysis of why candidates fail. The ministry’s releases give how many passed and where; HK-dir’s pages give the rules. Neither says which topics or which kinds of task cost the 456 candidates of 2025 their pass. Anyone who tells you “most people fail on history” is guessing. What follows is our own reading of the test’s format and of the lesson text, and it should be weighed as that.

The first row deserves the most weight. A candidate who passed samfunnskunnskapsprøven in Arabic or English three years ago already knows the content, and then meets the same content in Norwegian. The fact has not changed; the word for it has. “Egenandel”, “fastlege”, “fagforening”, “myndighetsalder”, “allemannsretten” are everyday words in the lessons and they are exactly what a three-option task is built from. This is why the mini test above keeps the Norwegian term in every explanation.

The second row is about how three-option tasks are written. A good wrong option is a true statement about something else. In our question on the longest fjord, the two wrong options are the largest lake and the longest river from the same lesson. HK-dir does not publish how its tasks are built, so we do not claim the real test does this in every task, but any test with one correct answer in three has to draw its other two from somewhere, and the lessons are the only place to draw them from.

On the calendar: HK-dir says you can see your result the day after the test; it comes by e-mail and on Min side, and the certificate (prøvebevis) is sent by post two to four weeks after the test if you pass [official]. If your application date is fixed by your residence time, count that wait in. The other conditions, including B1 in spoken Norwegian, are set out in Norwegian citizenship requirements: language level and test.