Open Data: NCLEX Pass Rates
We transcribe first-time NCLEX pass rates from state board of nursing publications, one cohort at a time, and check each row against its primary source. The whole dataset is published here under a Creative Commons license — free to download, analyze, and republish, including commercially, as long as you credit the source.
What is in it
- 1,717
- Verified rows
- 395
- Nursing schools
- 34
- Jurisdictions
- 2012–2026
- Exam years
Every row carries its candidate count, and cohorts under 10 candidates are suppressed rather than shown. This matters more than it sounds: a “100% pass rate” drawn from a two-candidate cohort is the single most common error in nursing-school comparisons, and it is not reproducible from this file. Pass rates are first-time candidates only, transcribed from board publications — never modeled, imputed, or averaged across years.
Download
Version 1.0.0. Both files carry the same rows and the same columns; the JSON envelope additionally embeds the license, the attribution string, and the data dictionary.
License
This dataset is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, redistribute, adapt, and build on it — including for commercial purposes — provided you give appropriate credit, link to the license, and indicate whether you made changes.
Required attribution
MyNursingSchools NCLEX Pass Rate Dataset v1.0.0 by MyNursingSchools.com, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Source: https://mynursingschools.com/data
If you are republishing individual figures rather than the file, link to the school’s own page — each row’s school_url column points at it, and that page shows the cohort size alongside the rate.
Columns
Column names and order are part of the published contract. Rows added in a new state or exam year bump the minor version; a column that changes name, type, or meaning bumps the major version, so a pipeline built on this file breaks loudly rather than silently.
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| school_name | Institution name as published by the state board. |
| school_slug | Stable identifier for the school on mynursingschools.com. |
| school_url | Canonical page for this school's NCLEX history. |
| state | State or jurisdiction whose board reported the cohort. |
| state_abbr | Two-letter postal abbreviation for the reporting jurisdiction. |
| exam_type | NCLEX-RN (RN) or NCLEX-PN (PN). |
| exam_year | Exam year the cohort sat the NCLEX. |
| candidates | First-time candidates in the cohort. Cohorts under 10 are not published. |
| pass_rate_percent | First-time pass rate, 0–100, as reported by the board. |
| source | Board publication the row was transcribed from. |
| source_url | Link to the primary source document, where the board publishes one. |
| source_reference | Page, table, or section within the source document. |
| verified_at | Date this row was checked against its primary source (ISO 8601). |
Where the data comes from
State boards of nursing publish institutional NCLEX results annually, in formats that range from clean tables to scanned PDFs, on their own schedules. Every row here was transcribed from one of those publications and carries the publication name in source, a link in source_url where the board provides a stable one, and the page or table it came from in source_reference. Nothing is scraped from another aggregator.
Coverage grows as boards publish and as we work through their back catalogs. The file is regenerated daily, so a download always reflects current coverage — check generatedAt in the JSON envelope or the comment header in the CSV.
Browse the same data as pages: NCLEX pass rates by school.