ExCPT practice test

A certified pharmacy technician in the United States can hold the CPhT through either of two bodies. PTCB awards it on the PTCE; the National Healthcareer Association awards it on the ExCPT. Employers generally accept either, and which one you sit is usually decided by your training programme rather than by you.

Nothing on this site is affiliated with, endorsed by or authorised by NHA or PTCB. The two names are here for one reason: the papers are different, and revising for the wrong one wastes the part of your revision that would have counted.

The shapes: the PTCE presents ninety questions of which eighty are scored, in one hour fifty minutes. The ExCPT presents a hundred and twenty of which a hundred are scored, in two hours and ten minutes. PTCB publishes a percentage for each of its four domains; NHA publishes an exact item count for each of its five. That last difference is the useful one — on the ExCPT you can say precisely how many questions a topic is worth.

This is the thing worth knowing before you buy a study guide. A new PTCE content outline took effect on 6 January 2026 and it removed non-sterile compounding, the physical and chemical incompatibilities tied to it, narrow therapeutic index medications, and alligations.

NHA’s test plan, based on a job analysis completed in 2023, still carries “Sterile and Non-Sterile Products, Compounding, Unit Dose, and Repackaging” as ten of its hundred scored items, and a separate Calculations sub-domain worth seven more. So compounding is seventeen items of context on the ExCPT and is not listed content on the PTCE.

The practical consequence is that “out of date” depends on which exam you are sitting. A free practice test still drilling alligation is teaching to a superseded PTCE outline — and to a current ExCPT one. If you are sitting the ExCPT, do not skip the compounding chapter because a PTCE-focused article told you it was gone.

NHA’s Laws domain (fifteen items, split nine to regulations and six to controlled substances) covers the same ground as PTCB’s Federal Requirements. Its Drugs and Drug Therapy domain (thirteen) sits inside PTCB’s Medications. Its Medication and Patient Safety and Quality Assurance domain (fourteen) matches PTCB’s Patient Safety and Quality Assurance. Its Dispensing Process is the biggest single domain on either paper at forty-three items, and three of its four parts — intake and entry, preparing and dispensing, and calculations — are PTCB’s Order Entry and Processing under another name.

Two parts do not line up at all. NHA gives the technician’s own role a domain of its own, fifteen items on what a technician may do versus what only a pharmacist may do, pharmacy security, medication reconciliation, inventory and reference sources; PTCB spreads that material through its other domains rather than naming it. And the compounding sub-domain has no PTCE counterpart any more, because PTCB removed it.

That is why the run below is seventy-five questions rather than a hundred, and why the two domains it cannot reach are listed above the test rather than left for you to discover. Seventy-five of the ExCPT’s hundred scored items are in territory this site has questions for; twenty-five are not, and a practice test that quietly dealt eighty PTCE questions under an ExCPT heading would be telling you it had covered them.