Use practice tests to find the rules you cannot yet state in your own words, then sit one full length test a day for a fortnight rather than six in an evening. Treat the score as a diagnostic, not as proof you are ready, and match your own bar to the pass mark your Australian state or territory actually sets.
Practice tests are the best preparation tool available for any Australian learner test, and most people use them in a way that quietly wastes their time. The common pattern is to sit test after test in one long session, watch the score climb, and take the climbing score as evidence of learning. Often it is evidence of nothing more than having seen that particular set of questions three times.
When does a climbing practice score start lying?
The score is the least useful output of a practice test. What matters is which questions you got wrong and why. For every miss, find the underlying rule, read it, and be able to state it in your own words before you move on.
The most common self deception in test practice is learning that a particular question's answer is the third option. That works perfectly on the practice set and not at all on the real test, where the order is not yours to rely on. A learner who has sat the same draw four times can point at option C before they have finished reading the stem.
The check is simple: cover the options and answer from the question alone. If you cannot, you have memorised a pattern rather than learned a rule. This matters even in New South Wales, where the real questions are practisable because Transport for NSW publishes the car question bank in full under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. The 358 questions we parsed from the current bank are genuinely the pool the test draws from, but which ones appear and in what order is not.
How often should you sit a practice test?
Learning that has to survive several weeks is built by short sessions spread across many days, not by long sessions crammed into a few. Twenty minutes a day for a fortnight beats five hours on a Sunday, and it is not close.
The reason is that forgetting a little and then retrieving the answer is what makes a rule stick. If you review something before you have started to forget it, the retrieval is easy and it teaches you very little. The mild difficulty of pulling a rule back after a day or two is the part that does the work.
In practice that means a single full length paper each day, spread out rather than stacked into one sitting, and it means keeping going for longer than feels necessary. A rule you got right today is not a rule you will still have in three weeks. If your test is a fortnight away, start now and sit fourteen sessions, not four long ones in the last week.
What score should you practise to?
Set your own bar at the bar the test sets. Treating a fail as a near miss is how people fail repeatedly. Each figure below comes from the agency named at the start of its paragraph. The same numbers sit in the state by state comparison and the pass mark calculator if you want every jurisdiction in one place.
New South Wales, Transport for NSW and Service NSW, Driver Knowledge Test: 45 questions in two sections. Section one is 15 general knowledge questions, 12 correct to pass, which leaves three wrong answers. Section two is 30 road safety questions, 29 correct to pass, so one wrong answer is the whole allowance. The road safety section is where sittings end, because one slip on a give way rule or a speed limit ends the test.
Since 2024 Transport for NSW has been moving learners onto DKT Online, a 4 to 6 hour course with the test at the end on a single fee. That course does not change the 12 of 15 then 29 of 30 marking, and it does not make option order something you can rely on. The NSW car question bank on this site is drawn from the published bank. Sit it as a full 45, not as a handful you abandon when you feel sharp.
Victoria, VicRoads, learner permit knowledge test: 32 questions, 78 percent correct to pass. Fee $50.80 for the in-person test and appointment, with the first online attempt free and the learner permit issue listed as free. There is a separate Hazard Perception Test sat before the drive test, free on the first online attempt or $44.00 in person. Both fees are on the VicRoads Ls and Ps fees page. Logbook: 120 supervised hours.
Queensland, Department of Transport and Main Roads, PrepL: an online course of roughly 4 to 6 hours finished with a 30 question assessment, 27 correct to pass, which is 90 percent, the highest bar of any learner assessment in the country. A 25 is a fail. Fee $29.70, covering the course and the assessment. You can start from 15 years and 11 months of age. Hazard perception is a separate online test, not part of PrepL: 25 computer generated videos after at least 6 months on a learner licence, passed before booking a practical driving test, fee $42.70 as at 1 July 2026, according to the Queensland Government hazard perception and fees pages. Logbook: 100 supervised hours.
Western Australia, Department of Transport, theory test: 30 questions, 24 correct to pass. Fee $22.40 for the first sitting and $19.20 for each resit, charged for each sitting rather than once. The Hazard Perception Test comes after the theory test, and the Department of Transport and Major Infrastructure lists it at $29.90 for the first sitting and $24.10 for each resit. Logbook: 50 supervised hours including 5 at night, logged after the theory test and before the practical driving assessment.
South Australia, Service SA, theory test in two parts. Part one is 8 give way questions and all 8 must be correct, no margin at all. Part two is 42 questions with 32 correct to pass. Fee $40, sat online through myLs or in person at Service SA. After the theory test South Australia splits again: either the one off Vehicle On Road Test, or competency based training and assessment recorded in a logbook with an accredited instructor. The intersection diagrams in part one are the reason most people repeat it.
Tasmania, Service Tasmania: the knowledge test is free, booked through Service Tasmania, which makes it the cheapest entry point in the country. The question count and pass mark have not yet been confirmed against the Tasmanian source, so they are not published here. No statewide practical pass rate with a named Tasmanian publisher is held here either.
Northern Territory, Northern Territory Government: DriveSafe NT runs the learner stage. Its knowledge test asks 30 questions and needs 26 correct, with a $20 test fee covered by DriveSafe NT enrolment, as set out on the government's Get your driver licence and fee pages. The Northern Territory Government hosts its own free practice test.
Australian Capital Territory, ACT Government, knowledge test: 35 questions, 31 correct to pass, which leaves four wrong answers. The fee has not been confirmed and is not published here. The territory sits inside New South Wales road rules that differ in places.
Sit full length tests rather than short quizzes, at least some of the time. Concentration over 45 questions is different from concentration over ten, and in a two section test like the New South Wales Driver Knowledge Test the pacing itself is part of what you are rehearsing. Practice questions for each of the jurisdictions above are gathered under learner test questions by state, so you can rehearse against your own state's pass mark rather than someone else's.
Two weeks with a Queensland learner, as an illustration
This walk through is an illustration, not a measured case. If you are 16 in Queensland, you have paid the $29.70 PrepL fee published by the Department of Transport and Main Roads, and you are working through the online course of roughly 4 to 6 hours toward the 30 question assessment, the bar waiting at the end is 27 of 30. Nothing in the method below is special to Queensland; it works for any state once you swap in that state's pass mark.
If a practice assessment at the end of your first pass through the course comes back at 23 of 30, that is seven wrong, and it is a fail, exactly as a 25 would be. Treating 23 as close is how people book, sit, and pay again. You need four of those seven misses converted, and you need the remaining 23 to stay correct under a different draw of questions.
Write the seven misses down and sort them by topic, not by the order they appeared. In this example three are give way diagrams, two are speed limits, one is a roundabout lane choice, and one is blood alcohol. The pattern matters more than the total. Three misses in one topic point to a single gap, and it is the gap most likely to fail you, since give way errors are also the classic critical error that ends a practical test early. What you have is a give way problem and two smaller ones, so the give way three come first.
For the next fourteen days, sit one full length 30 question assessment a day, about twenty minutes, not an evening of six. After each sitting, review only the misses. Days one to four, reread give way until you can state each diagram rule in your own words with the options covered. Days five and six, do the same for speed limits. Day seven is the roundabout. Day eight is alcohol. Days nine to fourteen, sit full assessments without targeting a topic, and keep going after the score looks good.
In this illustration the second week brings scores of 27, then 26, then 28, then 27. 26 is still a fail, so you do not book on the 26. You book after three sittings at or above 27 with a day between them, which in this worked example lands on day fourteen at 28, then 27, then 29. Those numbers are a teaching device, not a result anyone measured. The point is the arithmetic: Queensland gives three wrong answers across the whole assessment, so a 26 is not nearly there.
What is a wrong answer actually telling you?
Separate the two kinds of wrong answer. Not knowing the rule is fixed by reading. Knowing the rule and misreading the question is fixed by slowing down, and it is the more common failure once you are scoring well. If you can state the rule before you look at the options, and you still picked the wrong one, the problem is not knowledge. It is haste, or a diagram you glanced at, or a negative in the stem you skipped. A simple habit helps here: as you review each miss, mark it K for a knowledge gap or R for a reading slip. After a week the balance of letters tells you whether the next session belongs in the handbook or in slowing down.
Sort the misses by topic before you sit another mixed paper. Four wrong answers scattered across four topics is thin coverage. Four wrong answers all in give way diagrams is a single gap you can close in one evening. In Victoria, more than one drive test in five is stopped part way through for a critical error, according to a VicRoads freedom of information release covering 492,504 tests from January 2024 to April 2026. Close the give way gap on paper before it costs a practical. The pass rate by attempt figures show how that plays out across repeat sittings.
Finally, read the official material. Practice tests are excellent at finding your gaps and poor at teaching a rule from scratch. The handbooks and courses each agency publishes are the authoritative description of what you are being tested on, and the questions here work best sitting on top of them. Western Australian questions on this site are original and cite the road rule behind each answer, because the Western Australian handbook is Crown copyright. Original practice is not a substitute for the handbook. It is a check that the handbook actually stuck.
When are you ready to book the test?
The ABC reported on 18 August 2025 that some New South Wales learners were waiting up to two months for a practical driving test. A wait like that changes how people prepare: they book early to secure a slot, then arrive less ready than they would have been. That wait is a reason to start the daily sittings the day you book, not a reason to cram the night before.
Learners who fail once assume they are unusually bad at driving, and there is no honest reference point for how normal multiple attempts are. Victoria publishes one. Drive test pass rate 72.2 percent across 492,504 tests from January 2024 to April 2026, released by VicRoads under freedom of information. First attempts pass 74.2 percent, falling to 51.7 percent by a fifth attempt. A first fail is common. A fifth sitting that is still unprepared is how the rate falls, and it is not evidence that you are uniquely unsuited to driving.
You are ready to book the knowledge test when you can sit a full length paper at the real pass mark, on a day you did not cram, with the options covered on any question you hesitate on, and you can state the rule behind every recent miss. For New South Wales that means 12 of 15 then 29 of 30, not a blended 40 of 45. For Queensland it means 27 of 30. For South Australia it means eight of eight on part one before you even look at part two. One good day is not the signal; a run of them is. Then read the official handbook once more the day before, slowly, without a timer.
Common questions
- Question
- What score do I need on a practice test to be ready?
- The real pass mark for your test, reached on a full length paper you did not cram for. Anything below it is a fail, not a near miss: a 25 on Queensland PrepL falls short of 27 of 30, the New South Wales road safety section tolerates a single wrong answer, and South Australia's part one tolerates none out of eight. One good score can be luck with the draw; the same score repeated on separate days is much harder to fake.
- Question
- Why did I fail PrepL with 25 out of 30?
- Because 25 is below the pass mark. The Department of Transport and Main Roads sets PrepL at 27 correct out of 30, or 90 percent, so three wrong answers are the whole allowance. A 25 means five wrong, which is two more than the test permits. Sort those five by topic, read the underlying rule for each, and sit full length assessments at 27, not at 25, before you try again.
- Question
- Do practice tests use the real questions in every state?
- Only New South Wales publishes the car bank in full, under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Victoria, Western Australia and South Australia handbooks are Crown copyright rather than open licensed, so questions for those states are written from scratch against the current road rules with the rule cited. The Northern Territory Government hosts its own free practice test.
- Question
- How do I stop getting give way questions wrong?
- Treat give way as a subject of its own rather than one topic among many. Gather every give way miss from your recent sittings, work through that pile until each diagram makes sense, and only then return to mixed papers. The stakes are highest in South Australia, where part one is eight give way questions with no room for a single error. On each diagram, cover the options, state who goes first and why, then look.
- Question
- Should I book the learners test as soon as a slot opens?
- Book early if waits in your state run to weeks, then treat the gap as your study window rather than dead time. Long practical test queues, like the New South Wales waits the ABC reported, are exactly what pushes people to grab a slot and turn up underprepared. If the only slot is next week and you are still scoring below the real pass mark on full length papers, sit one every day until then or move the booking.
Sources
- Transport for NSW, Driver Knowledge TestChecked
- Transport for NSW, Driver Knowledge Test question bank for cars (CC BY 4.0)Checked
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 InternationalChecked
- NSW Government, licence publications including the car question bankChecked
- Department of Transport and Main Roads, PrepL online learning and assessmentChecked
- Department of Transport WA, road rules theory test quizChecked
- ABC News, NSW drivers facing lengthy wait times to sit driving tests, 18 August 2025Checked
- VicRoads: Ls and Ps feesChecked
- Queensland Government: Car hazard perception testChecked
- Queensland Government: Licence feesChecked
- Department of Transport and Major Infrastructure: Sit a Hazard Perception TestChecked