Every Customs Broker Exam and Answer Key, 2018 to 2026

CBP publishes the five most recent customs broker license exams. The older ones come off the site.

This page has all 17 exams from 2018 through April 2026, each one with CBP's official answer key and the citation behind every answer. (October 2020 was given in morning and afternoon sessions, each with its own question set and its own page.)

The exams

Blank pass rates: CBP has not published one for that sitting. We do not estimate. Note the spring 2024 sitting was May, not April. Where a count is under 80, the missing questions depended on exhibits CBP never published, were credited to every candidate, or tested law that has since changed. "Sit it" starts that exam as a timed session in its original question order.

How to actually use these

Working through old exams is the highest-value thing you can do, and most people do it wrong. They read the question, read the answer, feel like they learned something, and move on. Recognizing an answer you have already seen is not the same as being able to find it cold, in the book, with the clock running.

The version that works is slower. Answer it cold, without the key. Then look up the citation in the actual reference before you check whether you were right. That last step is the whole point, because on exam day nobody hands you the citation. You have to find it, in the book, with the clock running.

What the answer keys do not tell you

CBP states plainly that answer keys are not modified after appeal decisions.

So a published key can contain an answer that was later overturned on appeal, and the PDF you are downloading still shows the original. It is not common, but it happens, and it is worth knowing before you spend forty minutes convinced you are losing your mind over one question.

Where the key and the eventual appeal outcome disagree, the key is what CBP published. It is not automatically what is correct.

Old exams test old law

The reference editions change every sitting. The October 28, 2026 exam uses the 2026 HTS Basic Edition and the 2025 annual edition of 19 CFR.

An exam from 2019 was written against a different HTSUS and a different CFR. Most of what it tests is still true, because the structure of the regulations does not move much year to year, but some of it is not. Rates change, provisions get added and removed, and a handful of questions test things that are simply no longer the rule.

This is why the questions in the simulator are filtered. Of the 1,314 questions in the bank, 1,128 are drillable. The rest are held back because the law moved underneath them or because they depended on an exhibit CBP never published.

Practice these properly

The simulator runs any of these sittings as a timed exam, in the original question order, with HTSUS and 19 CFR lookups that work the way the exam platform works. No keyword search, because the real one does not have it.

CBP's five most recent exams and answer keys: cbp.gov past-exams page. Last verified August 2, 2026.