The free test

How this free test is marked

This test gives you 20 questions and 45 minutes, which is what the real one gives you.

To pass you need 15 of the 20 correct. That is 75 per cent.

There is a second rule that catches people out. Five of the 20 questions are about Australian values, and you must get all five right. Fifteen correct answers with one values question wrong is still a fail. This test applies the same rule, so a pass here means a pass under both conditions.

You can sit it as many times as you like. The questions are drawn fresh each time from the same bank the real test draws from, so two sittings are rarely identical.

What the 20 questions cover

The questions come from Our Common Bond, the booklet the Australian Government publishes for the citizenship test. The booklet has four parts, and the test draws from all of them.

Part 1 is Australia and its people. Who the first Australians were, how the states and territories came about, the flags, the national symbols and the days that matter.

Part 2 is Australia's democratic beliefs, rights and liberties. The freedoms, equality before the law, and what a citizen is responsible for.

Part 3 is government and the law in Australia. Voting, the three levels of government, how laws are made and how they are enforced.

Part 4 is Australian values. This is the part with the five questions you cannot afford to lose.

Part 3 is also the biggest part of the bank. Of the 595 questions on this site, 221 of them sit in Part 3, against 177 in Part 1, 125 in Part 2 and 72 in Part 4. So more than a third of everything you could be asked is about government and the law, spread across eight topics. If you are deciding where to spend your study time, that is the arithmetic to work from.

What happens on the day

You sit the real test on a computer at a Department of Home Affairs office. An officer checks your identity first, then the test starts.

The test itself has no separate charge. It is included in what you already pay when you lodge your citizenship application, so sitting it does not cost you anything extra, and neither does sitting it again. For the current application fee, read the Department of Home Affairs website, because that figure changes and we will not quote a stale one.

If you do not pass, you are given another appointment. The test is designed to be re-sat. It is not built to keep people out.

How to use this page

Sit the test once cold, before you study. The score tells you which of the four parts is weakest.

Then drill that part. Every question on this site shows the correct answer with a short explanation in plain English, so you learn why an answer is right and not only which one it is.

Come back and sit the full test again. When you are clearing 18 or more, and never dropping a values question, you are ready.

The two ways people lose a pass they had

The first is the values rule. A candidate who scores 16 of 20 has passed on the raw mark and failed anyway if one of those four wrong answers was a values question. There are only five of them in the paper and they are not flagged as you go. The only safe approach is to treat every values question as compulsory, which is why the values drill on this site is worth sitting on its own.

The second is reading past the question. Several questions in the bank turn on one word. A question asking what a citizen must do has a different answer from one asking what a citizen may do, and both appear. Our explanations call that out where it happens, because knowing the material is not the same as reading the question.

What re-sitting actually involves

If you do not pass, the officer books you another appointment before you leave. You do not lodge a new application and you do not pay again, because the test is part of the application you already lodged.

Check the appointment details and anything about your own case with the Department of Home Affairs directly. This site teaches the material; it is not the Department and cannot speak for how your application is handled.

Before you book

Read Our Common Bond once from start to finish. It is free from the Department of Home Affairs, and it is published in 40 community languages, so you can read it in your own language first if that is easier. Practice tests are faster, but the booklet is the source, and everything here comes from it.