CHPN Exam Guide 2026: HPCC Eligibility, Content Outline, Pass Rates, and Practice

Last updated May 14, 2026. Official sources checked: HPCC CHPN credential page, HPCC Certification FAQ, HPCC Scaled Scores FAQ, HPCC Exam Statistics, HPCC Live Remote Proctoring, and HPCC reTEST Assured.

The Short Answer

The Certified Hospice and Palliative Nurse (CHPN) exam is HPCC's specialty certification for experienced hospice and palliative registered nurses. It is not an entry-level nursing test. It assumes you can prioritize care for patients with serious illness, manage pain and complex symptoms, support families, communicate goals of care, and apply hospice/palliative practice standards under ethical and regulatory constraints.

HPCC lists two core eligibility requirements: a current active RN license in the United States, U.S. territories, or equivalent in Canada, plus hospice and palliative nursing practice of 500 hours in the most recent 12 months or 1,000 hours in the most recent 24 months before applying.

The CHPN exam has 150 multiple-choice items and 3 hours for completion. HPCC's exam statistics page reports the 2025 CHPN first-time pass rate as 69.3% and total pass rate as 66.8%. HPCC uses scaled scores; the minimum passing scaled score is 75, which is not the same as a percent correct.

free CHPN practice questionsPractice questions with detailed explanations

CHPN Exam Snapshot

Eligibility And Application Timing

HPCC's CHPN page lists four annual windows. Applications open about three months before each window and close on the 15th before the testing month:

Do not buy an HPNA membership after submitting the exam application if you want the member discount. HPCC states the membership must be purchased before submitting the application.

CHPN Content Outline

The CHPN exam is built around five practice domains. Use the scored-item counts as your study map:

Symptom management, support/education, and practice issues together represent more than 60% of the scored items. Pain management is also high yield and clinically dense. Assessment is smaller, but it drives the first step in many scenarios.

How CHPN Questions Think

CHPN items usually ask for the best next nursing action, not the textbook definition. Expect scenarios with incomplete information, family distress, medication tradeoffs, ethical tension, and patient goals that may differ from family goals.

A strong CHPN answer usually does one of five things:

• Assesses before intervening when the question lacks essential data.
• Aligns care with patient goals and hospice/palliative philosophy.
• Treats distressing symptoms without abandoning safety and reassessment.
• Educates caregivers in language they can use at the bedside.
• Escalates to the interdisciplinary team when a plan needs coordinated support.

10-Week CHPN Study Plan

Weeks 1-2: Assessment and hospice foundations. Review eligibility, trajectories, admission priorities, decline signs, imminent death, goals-of-care communication, interdisciplinary planning, and documentation.

Weeks 3-4: Pain management. Study opioid selection, equianalgesic thinking, breakthrough dosing concepts, renal/hepatic considerations, adjuvant analgesics, nonpharmacologic care, bowel regimens, sedation risk, and reassessment.

Weeks 5-6: Symptom management. Drill dyspnea, delirium, nausea/vomiting, constipation, terminal secretions, fatigue, anorexia/cachexia, wounds, anxiety, depression, and emergency symptom calls.

Weeks 7-8: Support, education, advocacy, and practice issues. Practice family teaching, caregiver burden, grief, spiritual distress, cultural humility, ethics, advance directives, DNR/POLST, scope, boundaries, and quality issues.

Weeks 9-10: Timed mixed practice. Take two timed sets. Review misses by domain and by reasoning error: assessment missed, wrong priority, medication safety, ethics, communication, or hospice benefit/regulatory issue.

Test-Day And Remote-Proctoring Notes

HPCC offers PSI test centers and live remote proctoring. For live remote testing, HPCC says to complete the system check, use a dependable device with webcam, use a private location, keep a clean desk, show government-issued ID, and complete a 360-degree room scan. HPCC also notes that one scheduled break is offered beginning March 2026, but you cannot access previous questions after the break.

If remote testing adds stress, choose a PSI test center. If travel adds more stress, use live remote proctoring but test your computer and internet before the deadline.

Mistakes That Cost Points

• Treating the scaled score of 75 as a simple 75% raw score. HPCC says scaled scores are not percentages.
• Studying only pain pharmacology and underpreparing caregiver education, ethics, and practice issues.
• Choosing hospital-transfer answers before checking patient goals, hospice plan, and symptom-control options.
• Missing reversible causes of agitation, dyspnea, or confusion when the question asks for assessment priority.
• Forgetting family teaching during active dying, especially normal breathing changes, mottling, intake decline, and comfort goals.
• Buying reTEST Assured or HPNA membership without checking timing and eligibility rules.

Official Links

• HPCC CHPN credential page
• HPCC Certification FAQ
• HPCC Scaled Scores FAQ
• HPCC Exam Statistics
• HPCC Live Remote Proctoring
• HPCC reTEST Assured

Practice With OpenExamPrep

OpenExamPrep's CHPN practice testPractice questions with detailed explanations

Add This Clinical Review Layer Before Test Day

Use the final stretch for decision quality, not just more exposure to facts. Start each study block for CHPN Exam Guide 2026: HPCC Eligibility, Content Outline, Pass Rates, and Practice by naming the task the question is really testing: recognition, prioritization, safety, communication, documentation, or workflow. Healthcare exams often hide the correct answer behind a familiar detail, so the safest habit is to pause before reading the options and predict what a competent entry-level professional would do next. That prediction keeps you from chasing the option that sounds medically interesting but does not answer the actual patient-care problem.

Build a small error log with four columns: missed topic, missed cue, correct rule, and next drill. A missed cue is more useful than a broad content label. For example, do not only write cardiovascular, infection control, medication safety, specimen handling, imaging, or professional practice. Write the actual cue you ignored: unstable finding, contraindication, timing before a procedure, patient identification, scope boundary, chain of custody, isolation wording, or documentation sequence. Review that log every two or three days and convert repeated misses into short practice sets.

Official-Source Check

Before relying on any third-party outline, compare your plan with HPCC certification pages. Official pages and candidate handbooks are the place to confirm current eligibility language, testing vendor instructions, identification rules, rescheduling policies, accommodations steps, and any content outline changes. You do not need to memorize administrative details for every practice question, but you do need to avoid preparing from an outdated blueprint or an old retake policy. If a handbook uses different domain names than your notes, rename your notes to match the handbook so your remediation stays aligned with the exam owner.

Scenario Strategy for Clinical and Administrative Questions

Read healthcare scenarios in this order: setting, role, patient or client status, time pressure, and requested action. The role matters because many distractors are clinically reasonable but outside the expected scope for the candidate. A nursing, allied health, pharmacy, laboratory, imaging, respiratory, compliance, or management exam may ask what should be done first, what should be reported, what should be documented, or what should be delegated. Those verbs change the answer. Highlight them in practice even if the real test interface does not let you mark text the same way.

When two options both look correct, choose the one that best protects the patient, preserves specimen or data integrity, follows policy, or escalates an unsafe condition. Avoid answers that skip assessment, skip identification, skip hand hygiene or privacy safeguards, give education before immediate safety is addressed, or perform a task that belongs to another licensed professional. For management and compliance exams, translate clinical safety into system safety: risk identification, incident response, documentation, auditing, corrective action, and communication with the right stakeholder.

Practice Routing After Each Score Report

Do not retake full-length practice exams until you know what the previous one taught you. After each set, sort misses into three groups. Knowledge misses need a short content review and then ten targeted questions. Reasoning misses need rationales: write why the correct answer is safer or more aligned with the role than your answer. Speed misses need shorter timed sets, not another full review chapter.

In the last week, keep practice mixed. Real exam questions rarely announce the domain, and mixed sets force you to choose between similar procedures, symptoms, lab clues, safety steps, and communication tasks. End each day with a brief review of high-yield normal findings, urgent findings, infection prevention, medication or equipment safety, and professional boundaries that appear in your own missed-question history. The goal is not to feel as if every topic is finished. The goal is to enter the exam with a repeatable method for unfamiliar cases: identify the role, find the safety issue, rule out unsafe shortcuts, and choose the action that a careful professional could defend.