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CLThe BCBA first-time exam pass rate just hit an all-time low of 51%.
That’s the lowest it’s been since the BACB started publishing this data. And the trend has been moving in one direction since 2020.
For the data, I pulled pass rate data going back to 2013. Since the BACB only publishes historical pass rates from 2020 onward, I retrieved pre-2020 rates from Dubuque & Kazemi (2021), who compiled first-time pass rates from 2013 to 2020.
Here’s what it looks like across three Task List eras.
3rd Edition (2013-2014): 59-60%. Smaller candidate pool, relatively stable.
4th Edition (2015-2020): Jumped to 66-67% and held there for years. The 4th Edition was a remarkably stable period for pass rates despite the candidate pool nearly tripling.
5th Edition (2021-2025): Steady decline. 60%, 55%, 56%, 54%, 51%. That’s a 15-point drop in five years.
A few things are happening at the same time.
First-time candidate volume grew 51% from 2020 to 2025 (6,583 to 9,955). But actual first-time passers only grew 17%. More people are sitting for the exam. Fewer are passing.
The retake pool has more than doubled. In 2020 there were 6,166 retake candidates. In 2025 there were 13,196. Retake candidates now outnumber first-time candidates for the first time. And their pass rate has dropped from 31% to 23%.
This creates a compounding problem. Every year, a large cohort of failed candidates rolls into the retake pool. Most of them fail again. The pool gets bigger and less likely to convert.
Whether this is driven by exam difficulty, candidate preparation quality, the demographics of who’s entering the pipeline, or some combination is an open question. The data just shows the trend.
What’s clear is that the BCBA certification pipeline is becoming less efficient at exactly the moment the field needs it to scale. There are an estimated 103,000 annual BCBA job listings, but only roughly 75,000 active BCBAs.
The supply side math is getting harder every year.
We’ve been using pass rates alongside other certifcant data to help us build detailed analytics on our Clinivise analytics platform. Www.clinivise.ai
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