Alaska CDL practice tests

Alaska licenses commercial drivers through its Division of Motor Vehicles, part of the Department of Administration. The road network here is famously incomplete: many communities have no highway connection to the rest of the state at all, reachable only by air or water. That single fact shapes commercial licensing in Alaska more than almost anything else, because how far you travel to sit a knowledge test can depend entirely on whether your town is on the road system.

What Alaska requires

Every figure below names the document it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

Passing score
80% 49 CFR Part 383, Commercial Driver's License Standards, 383.135
Minimum age (in-state driving)
18 years old 49 CFR Part 383, Commercial Driver's License Standards, 383.71
Minimum age (across state lines)
21 years old 49 CFR Part 391, Qualifications of Drivers, 391.11
Permit holding period
14 days 49 CFR Part 383, Commercial Driver's License Standards, 383.25

Fees change without notice, so we do not repeat them here. Check Alaska Division of Motor Vehicles for the current cost.

Alaska practice tests

The knowledge tests are set by federal rule, so the questions are the same wherever you sit them. What changes is the paperwork above.

The knowledge test is federal, not local

Whichever office you test at, the questions come from the same place: 49 CFR Part 383, the federal rule covering commercial driver licensing across every state. Alaska does not write its own version of the general knowledge exam or the endorsement tests, so the material you study is identical to what a driver in Florida or Ohio is studying. Alaska's role is administering the test and issuing the license, not setting the syllabus.

Passing

Each section needs 80 percent correct, the federal floor set by 49 CFR 383.135. Fifty questions on general knowledge means ten wrong answers before you fail, so a couple of guesses will not end your attempt, but skipping a whole topic area probably will.

Age limits

You can drive commercially within Alaska from age 18. The moment a route crosses into Canada or another state, federal rule under 49 CFR 391.11 raises that to 21, because interstate and international hauling is governed more strictly than driving that stays inside state lines. Given how much freight in Alaska genuinely does move only within the state, this distinction matters less here than it does in a smaller state where every route crosses a border within a few miles.

The permit hold

Once you have a commercial learner permit, federal rule fixes a 14-day wait before the skills test, under 49 CFR 383.25. There is no way around that wait, wherever you are testing from, so it is worth treating those two weeks as study time rather than dead time, especially if a return trip to a testing office is expensive or difficult to arrange.

Endorsements and hazmat

Past general knowledge, what else you need depends on the vehicle: air brakes if it has them, combination vehicles for a heavy trailer, and endorsements for tanks, doubles and triples, passengers and school buses. Hazardous materials adds a Transportation Security Administration background check on top of the written exam, run on a federal timetable rather than the state's, so it is worth starting that process well before you plan to test.

Before you travel to test

We do not publish fees on this site, because they change and a stale number is worse than none at all when a trip to a testing office might already involve a flight or a long drive. Check current costs and locations directly with the Division of Motor Vehicles before you set out. What we do give you is the practice material itself, with every question traced back to the page of the rule it comes from.

Jump to a test

Every question on every one of these is free, and each answer names the handbook page it came from.

Other states

Cited to the page, every time.

Every question names the handbook, section and page it was read from, so you can check the answer instead of taking our word for it.

How we write these