California Bar Exam Blueprint: Subjects, Components, and Recent Changes

The California Bar Exam is a two-day, three-component examination administered by the State Bar of California twice a year, in late February and late July. As of 2026, the exam consists of three written essay-style components and one multiple-choice component: five one-hour California essay questions, one 90-minute Performance Test (PT), and 200 Multistate Bar Examination (MBE) multiple-choice questions. The written portion (the five essays plus the PT) is delivered on Day 1, and the 200 MBE questions are delivered on Day 2.

Day 1 and Day 2 each count for 50 percent of your total scaled score, so the written work and the multiple-choice work carry equal weight. Understanding this blueprint is the foundation of every study decision you make: it tells you which subjects can appear, in which format, and how your hours should be allocated. A candidate who masters the MBE but neglects the California-only essay subjects, or vice versa, leaves half the score on the table.

The 13 California Written Subjects

The essays and the Performance Test can draw from thirteen subjects. These are the subjects the State Bar's official Scope of the California Bar Examination identifies as testable in the written portion. Six of them are 'California distinctions' heavy or California-only subjects that never appear on the MBE, which is why essay prep cannot be replaced by MBE practice alone.

Note two things in this table. First, California Civil Procedure and California Evidence are uniquely demanding because an essay can demand both the federal rule (which you also learn for the MBE) and the divergent California rule in the same answer. Second, Professional Responsibility appears in the written subject list but is also covered by the separate Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination (MPRE), a distinct admission requirement administered by the NCBE that you must pass independently of the bar exam itself.

The California-only essay subjects deserve a closer look, because they are where many out-of-state and repeat candidates lose the most points. Community Property governs how married couples in California hold, manage, and divide property acquired during marriage, and it appears on essays at a high frequency; mastering characterization, tracing, and the presumptions around separate versus community funds is non-negotiable. Trusts and Wills and Succession both turn on California probate and trust law, including formalities of execution, revocation, intestate succession, and the duties of fiduciaries.

Business Associations sweeps in agency, partnership, corporations, and limited liability companies, and Remedies is rarely tested alone but is regularly bolted onto a Contracts or Torts fact pattern. Because none of these five subjects can be practiced through MBE drilling, every minute you spend on the MBE is a minute that does nothing for them — a structural reason your study plan must protect dedicated essay-subject time rather than letting MBE practice crowd it out.

The 7 MBE Subjects

Day 2 is 200 NCBE Multistate Bar Examination questions covering only seven subjects: Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Contracts, Criminal Law and Procedure, Evidence, Real Property, and Torts. The MBE tests general/federal and common-law principles, not California distinctions, so MBE study should be kept conceptually separate from the California-specific rules you memorize for essays. Of the 200 questions, a portion are unscored 'pretest' items the NCBE uses to validate future questions, but you cannot identify them, so you treat all 200 as live.

Recent Changes (2025-2026): The February 2025 Fiasco and the Return to the MBE

The single most important recent development is that California briefly abandoned the NCBE's MBE and then reversed course. For the February 2025 administration, the State Bar deployed a new, partly remote/hybrid testing model with a vendor (Meazure Learning) and roughly 200 new multiple-choice questions drafted by Kaplan rather than the NCBE's MBE. The rollout failed badly: candidates reported login failures, software crashes, frozen screens, broken copy-and-paste, and inconsistent proctoring.

Reporting later revealed that a psychometrician had used AI to help draft a subset of the scored multiple-choice questions, deepening concerns about validity and fairness. The State Bar launched an independent investigation, offered score adjustments and free retakes, and terminated its vendor relationship. The California Supreme Court ordered a return to the NCBE's MBE beginning with the July 2025 exam. For 2026, that return is firmly in place: both the February 2026 and July 2026 exams use the NCBE MBE for the multiple-choice portion, administered in person.

So when you study, plan for the traditional, NCBE-authored MBE — the Kaplan/AI experiment is over.

It is worth understanding why this history matters for your prep choices and your nerves. First, it means any study material written for the brief February 2025 window — describing Kaplan-authored multiple-choice questions or remote, at-home administration — is now obsolete; ignore it and use NCBE-MBE-aligned materials. Second, it means the format you will sit is the long-established one that decades of commercial MBE banks were built around, so your practice questions and your real exam will match.

Third, the State Bar's reform conversation continues in the background: trustees discussed longer-term options, including the NCBE's forthcoming NextGen exam, but for the concrete 2026 administrations nothing about the day-to-day format has changed from the restored model — five essays, one Performance Test, and 200 NCBE MBE questions, in person. If you read a source that says California 'is changing its exam,' check the effective date: proposals about 2028 and beyond do not affect a 2026 test taker. Plan around what is actually being administered now, and treat reform headlines as context rather than instructions.