0.1 Exam Blueprint, Eligibility, and the CMGT-BC Retirement Timeline

0.1 Exam Blueprint, Eligibility, and the CMGT-BC Retirement Timeline

High-Yield Exam Focus: Before you study a single clinical concept, fix four numbers in memory: 150 questions (125 scored), 3 hours, a scaled score of 350 out of 500 to pass, and December 31, 2026 - the last day ANCC will accept an application for initial CMGT-BC certification. Every study decision in this guide flows from the official Test Content Outline effective October 23, 2024, and from the fact that this credential is on a published sunset schedule.

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What the CMGT-BC Credential Is

The Nursing Case Management Board Certification (CMGT-BC) is awarded by the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC), the credentialing arm of the American Nurses Association. It validates that a registered nurse practices at a competent level in the nursing case management specialty: coordinating care across settings, managing utilization and benefits, driving quality and outcomes, and promoting health at the individual and population level.

CMGT-BC is an RN-level board certification, not an advanced practice credential. That distinction matters in three practical ways:

• There is no advanced pharmacology continuing education requirement (the 25-hour pharmacology rule applies only to Nurse Practitioner and Clinical Nurse Specialist certifications).
• Eligibility is built on RN licensure plus specialty practice hours, not on a graduate degree.
• The credential is written after your name as CMGT-BC. Older job postings, policies, and continuing education catalogs may still refer to this specialty by the generic RN-BC styling ANCC used before it moved to specialty-specific credential abbreviations; they describe the same certification.

The credential is valid for five years and is maintained through continuing education and professional development rather than through re-examination in most cases (see Section 3.3).

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The Official Test Content Outline (Effective October 23, 2024)

ANCC publishes a Test Content Outline (TCO) for every certification. The CMGT-BC TCO is the only authoritative statement of what is tested. Everything else - including this guide - is an interpretation of it.

Examination Structure

Pretest items are indistinguishable from scored items and are embedded to gather performance data for future exam forms. Answer every question. Performance on pretest items has no effect on your score, and there is no penalty for guessing.

The Four Content Domains

Why the percentages appear to sum to 101%. ANCC prints a footnote on the TCO stating that the total does not come to 100 because of rounding. The question counts - 27, 37, 32, and 29 - are exact and sum to 125. When a percentage and a question count seem to disagree, trust the counts.

Every Sub-Topic on the Outline

The TCO enumerates knowledge and skill statements beneath each domain. There are eighteen of them, and each one maps to teaching in this guide.

I. Professional Foundation (Knowledge)

1. ANA Code of Ethics for Nurses with Interpretive Statements
2. CMSA Standards of Practice for Case Management (e.g., patient advocacy)
3. Concepts of nursing case management
4. Nursing scope and standards of practice

II. Care Coordination (Knowledge)

1. Technology/trends used in care management

II. Care Coordination (Skill) 2. Utilization management (e.g., authorizations, denials and appeals) 3. Benefit management (e.g., payor reimbursement, cost sharing, coordination of benefits) 4. Resource coordination (e.g., providers, community) 5. Transition of care management (e.g., planning, facilitation, evaluation)

III. Quality Management (Knowledge)

1. Clinical guidelines
2. Evidence-based practice
3. Government health care regulations

III. Quality Management (Skill) 4. Data management (e.g., collection, analysis, benchmarking) 5. Performance improvement (e.g., outcome measurement and evaluation)

IV. Health Promotion (Knowledge)

1. Disease management
2. Wellness promotion

IV. Health Promotion (Skill) 3. Patient education (e.g., readiness for change, motivational interviewing, health literacy, medication reconciliation, safety, therapeutic communication, advance care planning) 4. Population health initiatives (e.g., screenings/risk stratifications, risk-reduction strategies, health equity, social drivers/determinants of health)

ANCC adds a standing caution to the outline: the examples in parentheses are not all inclusive and do not indicate importance. Treat them as illustrations of scope, not as an exhaustive checklist.

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Eligibility Requirements

To sit for the CMGT-BC examination, a candidate must satisfy all four of the following:

Three traps recur when nurses self-assess eligibility:

• The two years of RN practice and the 2,000 specialty hours are separate tests. A nurse with fifteen years at the bedside and eight months in a case management role does not qualify; a nurse with exactly two years of RN experience, all of it in case management, generally does.
• The 2,000 hours and the 30 CE hours are both anchored to the last three years. Older hours expire out of the window.
• The 30 CE hours must be in nursing case management, not general nursing.

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Cost

All listed prices include a $140 non-refundable administrative fee. The $100 member/non-member differential is why many candidates price out ANA membership before applying; compare current member dues against the discount rather than assuming either way. Expedited application review is available for an additional non-refundable fee, and requesting a new testing window after the first one lapses costs $100.

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The Retirement Timeline: Why the Application Deadline Is the Real Deadline

In 2026 the ANCC Commission on Board Certification determined that the Nursing Case Management program would transition to renewal only. ANCC attributed the decision to candidate-volume and participation trends that made long-term exam viability and psychometric soundness difficult to sustain. The published schedule is unambiguous:

        CMGT-BC PROGRAM TRANSITION TIMELINE

  DEC 31, 2026  ──▶  Last day ANCC accepts applications for
                     INITIAL CMGT-BC certification.

  DEC 31, 2027  ──▶  Last day to TEST. Candidates already
                     authorized may sit until this date.

  JAN 1, 2028   ──▶  Exam RETIRED. No new candidates.
                     Actively certified nurses may continue
                     to RENEW and maintain the credential.

What this means for you, concretely:

• If you want the credential, the binding date is the application deadline of December 31, 2026 - not the testing deadline. Build your timeline backward from the application, not from the exam.
• After you are approved, you receive an Authorization to Test notice and a 120-day window to schedule with Prometric. That window can be extended once, for a $100 fee, and the new window must begin less than six months after the original one ends.
• Failing the exam is not automatically fatal to your plan, but the calendar tightens: retesting requires waiting 60 calendar days from your last test date, and testing ends permanently after December 31, 2027.
• Nurses who already hold CMGT-BC keep it. The credential remains renewable indefinitely under the renewal requirements in Section 3.3. The only structural change is that Category 8 (re-examination) becomes unavailable once the exam retires, because ANCC does not allow testing as a renewal category for a retired or renewal-only certification.
• Nurses who miss the window and still want a case management credential typically pursue the CCM from the Commission for Case Manager Certification or the ACM from the American Case Management Association. Neither is an ANCC product, and both carry their own eligibility rules and outlines.

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Common Exam Traps & High-Yield Takeaways

• Trap 1: Confusing scored with total items. The exam has 150 questions, but your score is based on 125. A question asking "how many questions count toward your score" is answered 125; "how many questions will you see" is answered 150.
• Trap 2: Treating the domain percentages as exact. They round; the question counts do not. 27 + 37 + 32 + 29 = 125.
• Trap 3: Assuming the testing deadline is the deadline that matters. Applications close a full year before testing does.
• Trap 4: Assuming general nursing CE satisfies eligibility. The 30 pre-application CE hours must be in nursing case management, exactly as the 75 renewal CE hours must relate to the certification specialty.