Massachusetts CDL practice tests

Massachusetts runs its commercial licensing through the Registry of Motor Vehicles, the same agency that issues your car license and handles registration. If you have dealt with the RMV before for a standard license, the commercial side sits under the same roof rather than a separate department you have to discover from scratch.

What Massachusetts 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 Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles for the current cost.

Massachusetts 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.

A small state, a short trip

Massachusetts is one of the more compact states by area, and most of the population lives within an hour or two of Boston. That matters for a CDL candidate because it usually means fewer long drives between where you study and where you sit the exam, compared with a state where testing locations are spread across hundreds of miles. It does not remove the need to book ahead, but the logistics tend to be simpler here than in a large, thinly populated state.

What the exam actually tests

The knowledge exams are federal. They come from 49 CFR Part 383, so the material — air brakes, combination vehicles, hazardous materials, general knowledge — reads the same whether you sit the test in Massachusetts or anywhere else in the country. A passing score is 80 percent on each section, which is the federal floor rather than a state choice, so getting more than one in five questions wrong on any section will fail it.

Which sections you need

Everyone sits general knowledge first. From there it depends on the vehicle. Air brakes fitted means the air brakes exam; skip it and you can still get a license, but a restriction is placed on it that bars you from driving anything with air brakes at all. A trailer over ten thousand pounds brings in combination vehicles. On top of those, the usual endorsements apply if you need them: tank vehicles, doubles and triples, passenger, school bus, and hazardous materials.

Hazmat carries an extra step that has nothing to do with the written exam itself: a Transportation Security Administration background check. That process runs on its own timeline and is worth starting early, because it is the one part of getting endorsed that studying cannot speed up.

Before you book with the RMV

You need a commercial learner permit first, and federal rule requires it to be held for at least 14 days before you can sit the skills test. That gap is useful — it gives you time to retake a knowledge exam if you need to without losing ground on the overall timeline. Booking your knowledge tests as early in that window as you can, rather than right before the skills test, means a bad result costs you a re-sit rather than a delay to your whole plan.

Two age rules apply everywhere in the country, Massachusetts included: 18 is old enough to drive commercially within the state, but crossing into another state requires you to be 21. If your work will ever take you over the state line, plan around the higher age from the start rather than finding out at the RMV counter.

What we don't publish

We don't list fees here. The RMV sets and changes them, and a number that was right last year can be wrong by the time you read it — better to check the current figure directly with the RMV than rely on a page like this to get it right months from now. What this page and the tests linked below can do reliably is tell you which knowledge areas the exam covers and where each answer is sourced 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