The FE exam does not have exam dates

If you are looking for a list of FE test dates, there is not one to find. NCEES administers the FE year-round at Pearson test centres: you choose an appointment from whatever that centre has open, the way you would book a driving test. The useful question is not when the exam is — it is when you should sit it.

Why everyone looks for dates anyway

Because the PE exam has them. Most PE exams still run in fixed windows a few times a year, and almost everything written about engineering licensure covers both exams together. People carry the PE’s calendar across to the FE and go looking for a window that does not exist.

How booking actually works

  1. Register for the exam in your MyNCEES account. Registration and scheduling are two separate steps, and this is the first one.

  2. Choose your exam location. You are picking a Pearson test centre, not a date, and the centre determines what is available next.

  3. Pick from the appointments that centre has open. If none of them suit, you can browse other NCEES-approved centres rather than wait.

  4. Sit it. The appointment is a single six-hour block — see below for what is inside it.

The appointment is six hours, not five and twenty

The exam itself is 5 hours 20 minutes, but the block you book is six. The difference is an agreement to sign, a tutorial, and the scheduled break. Plan the day around six hours: people who budget five and a half are the ones rushing the tutorial to buy back time they never needed to spend.

What the six-hour FE appointment containsA bar drawn to scale across the appointment block. A two-minute nondisclosure agreement and an eight-minute tutorial come first, then the five-hour-twenty-minute exam, which is the overwhelming majority of the block, and finally a twenty-five-minute scheduled break.
Nondisclosure agreement
2 min
Tutorial
8 min
The exam
5 h 20 min
Scheduled break
25 min
Drawn to scale. The exam is about 90% of the block; everything else is the half hour people forget to plan for.

What it costs

The NCEES exam fee is $225, paid to NCEES directly. Your state board may charge its own application or registration fee on top, and that varies — check the board, not this page.

Fee checked against ncees.org on 18 September 2026. NCEES changes it from time to time; treat their site as current.

When you should actually sit it

Year-round availability removes the deadline that would otherwise make the decision for you, which is why so many people put it off. The usual advice — sit it in your final year or soon after graduating — is about recall: the fundamentals are as fresh as they will ever be. If you are past that point, the constraint is not the calendar, it is finding the weeks to rebuild what has faded.

Where to go next

Practise for it

A full-length FE Civil mock on the real exam's clock, free once every 30 days, or eight questions in a few minutes to see where you are thin.

Free full-length mock8-question diagnostic