The NCLEX-PN Costs $200 Everywhere — Here's What States Add on Top

If you’re pricing out an LPN license, the one number you can bank on regardless of state is the exam fee: the NCLEX-PN costs $200, paid directly to Pearson VUE on behalf of the National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN). We’ve verified that figure independently in Georgia, Missouri, California, Texas, and DC’s own fee schedules — it doesn’t move. What moves, sometimes by hundreds of dollars, is everything the state itself charges on top of it: application fees, license-issuance fees, and background-check costs that are set independently by each board of nursing. This post lays out that spread using our verified LPN requirements hub records.

Why the exam fee is the same everywhere

The NCLEX-PN is a single national exam, not a state-specific test — every jurisdiction relies on the same NCSBN-administered exam to establish minimum competency, so there’s no reason for the fee itself to vary by geography. What each state controls separately is the application process around that exam: whether you pay a state fee before you’re even authorized to sit for it, whether the license itself carries a separate issuance charge once you pass, and what a background check or fingerprinting adds. Those state-controlled pieces are where the real cost differences live.

The cheapest states: Georgia, Missouri, Rhode Island

At the low end, Georgia charges just a $40 state application fee with no separate license-issuance fee, for a documented total of $240 including the NCLEX-PN. Missouri is close behind at $41, for a total of $241. Rhode Island’s state application fee is $45, putting its documented total at $245. Hawaii is slightly higher, with a $40 application fee plus a separate $36 license fee, for a total of $276.

What these states have in common is a single, modest application charge and no separate license-issuance line item — the state fee essentially just covers processing your application and issuing the credential once you pass.

The most expensive states: California, Arizona, DC

At the other end, California is the most expensive state we’ve documented: a $300 examination/application fee, a separate $300 initial license fee, and the $200 NCLEX-PN, for a documented total of $800. That’s before California’s separate DOJ ($32) and FBI ($17) fingerprint-processing fees, which apply to every applicant on top of the $800.

Arizona charges a $300 application fee with no separate license fee documented, putting its total at $500 with the exam included. The District of Columbia’s by-examination pathway costs $237 in combined application-and-background-check fees (per DC Health’s official form), for a total of $437 — though DC’s separate by-endorsement pathway, for nurses transferring an existing out-of-state license, costs more: $280, plus a $30 NURSYS verification fee.

Alaska is worth calling out on its own structure: a $100 application fee plus a $200 license fee plus the $200 NCLEX-PN adds up to a documented total of $500 — and that’s before a separate $75 nonrefundable fingerprint-processing fee that every applicant pays on top, which we don’t fold into the comparable total for the same reason we exclude other conditional charges (it’s a fixed cost, but not part of the application-license-exam formula we use consistently across states).

Where the typical state falls

To keep this comparison consistent with how we total costs everywhere on this site — application fee, plus license/certification fee, plus the exam fee, added together — we calculated a documented total for every state where at least one of those inputs is a known number. Across the 47 states where we could do that, the median total is $300 and the mean is $332. That puts Georgia’s $240 and Missouri’s $241 well below typical, and California’s $800 well above it — Georgia and Missouri aren’t outliers because they’re missing fees we couldn’t find, they’re genuinely inexpensive states to get licensed in.

A structural note: not every state itemizes the same way

Some states, like Michigan, don’t separate “application” from “license” at all — Michigan’s LARA licensing guide states a single combined “Application Fee + 2 year license fee” of $212.90 for LPN licensure, whether by examination or by endorsement. Minnesota similarly charges one $105 fee for licensure by examination or endorsement, plus a separate $32 criminal background check. When you’re comparing states, check whether a published number is an all-in combined fee or one line item among several — a state that looks cheap because it only lists one fee category may simply be bundling costs that another state itemizes separately.

What this means if you’re budgeting for licensure

Two things worth planning around. First, the $200 NCLEX-PN fee is non-negotiable and identical everywhere, so it shouldn’t factor into a decision about which state to get licensed in — it’s a fixed cost of the credential itself, not a state-specific variable. Second, the state-side costs are genuinely worth checking before you apply, especially if you’re weighing licensure by examination against licensure by endorsement (transferring an existing license from another state) — endorsement fees run higher than by-examination fees in several states we’ve checked, including California ($300 endorsement fee) and DC ($280 versus $237). We cover the endorsement process, and which states let LPNs skip it entirely through the Nurse Licensure Compact, in a companion post.

Check your specific state

State fee schedules change — a board can revise a fee page mid-year with no public announcement — so treat the figures above as a snapshot rather than a permanent number. Our LPN requirements hub and its comparison table track application fees, license fees, and renewal costs across all 51 jurisdictions, each one traced to the state board’s own published fee schedule and dated the day we checked. See our methodology for how we source and re-verify these figures.