The Driver Knowledge Test is the first licence test in New South Wales. Pass it and you hold a learner licence. The format catches people out more often than the content does, because it is really two tests stitched together, each with its own pass mark, and the second mark is far tighter than the first.
The two sections
The test asks 45 questions in total. The first 15 are general knowledge: licensing rules, vehicle requirements, penalties, signs and the everyday mechanics of being on the road. You need 12 of those 15 correct, so three wrong answers are survivable.
The remaining 30 questions are road safety. You need 29 of 30. That is a single wrong answer for the entire section. Get two wrong and the sitting is over regardless of how well the first section went. Those pass marks come from the Transport for NSW Driver Knowledge Test material, checked on 27 August 2026.
Two consequences follow from that structure. First, the general knowledge section is not where you should be spending your practice time once you are reliably above 12. Second, the road safety section rewards a completely different habit: not knowing most of the rules, but knowing all of them, including the ones that feel too obvious to revise.
The questions come from a published bank
New South Wales is unusual, and not just in Australia. Transport for NSW publishes the actual car question bank as a public document rather than keeping it secret. We downloaded and parsed the current canonical version on 27 August 2026: 94 pages, 358 questions in the bank as published on nsw.gov.au. It is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, which is why this site can put the real questions in front of you rather than an imitation written to look like them.
You will see larger numbers quoted elsewhere. Older mirrors of the bank from the previous agency era carry roughly 364 questions, and one competitor still hosts a 553 question surface built on legacy material. Our count comes from the current file on the current government domain, parsed rather than copied, on the date above. If Transport for NSW publishes a revised bank, the count here changes with it.
Practising from the published bank does not mean the test is a memory exercise. The questions are drawn from the bank but the selection and the order are not, and a road safety section that needs 29 of 30 will find the one rule you never actually understood.
What happened to the official practice test
There used to be a free practice test on the Service NSW site. As of our check on 27 August 2026 that URL returns a not found page, and the official practice path is now DKT Online, a paid course of roughly 4 to 6 hours with the test at the end. That course is a reasonable product and it is the route many learners will take. It is simply no longer free, which is the gap this site exists to fill.
After the knowledge test
The learner licence starts a longer sequence. New South Wales requires 120 supervised hours in the learner logbook before the driving test, with 20 of those hours credited for completing the Safer Drivers Course. The Hazard Perception Test, 15 touch screen clips, sits later in the sequence on the way to a P2 licence.
The driving test itself passes around 56% of candidates statewide, and Transport for NSW publishes outcomes for roughly 150 test centres through its Registration and Licensing Statistics portal, so the spread between individual centres is public rather than folklore. Those figures were checked on 27 August 2026.
How to prepare for the format, not just the content
Sit full 45 question runs rather than endless short quizzes. The two section structure changes how the test feels: people relax after clearing general knowledge and then meet a section where relaxing is expensive. Practising the whole shape builds the right pacing.
Track your wrong answers by topic rather than by count. A score of 43 out of 45 sounds close to a pass and can still be a fail if both misses landed in road safety. The number that matters is how many road safety questions you missed, and whether they clustered somewhere specific like give way rules, speed limits in shared zones, or stopping distances.
How this guide is kept honest
Every figure above names the agency or dataset it came from and the date it was checked. Where a number has not been confirmed against an agency or an open dataset, the guide says it is being verified rather than filling the gap. Licensing rules change, so check the agency page before you pay for anything or book a test.
Last reviewed against Transport for NSW and Service NSW.