Class A
The combination license.
- One run
- 50 questions
- To pass
- 40 of 50
Oregon's driver licensing agency is officially called Driver and Motor Vehicle Services, run as a division of the Oregon Department of Transportation rather than as a stand-alone department. Most people just call it the DMV, but it sits inside ODOT the same way some states fold licensing into their transportation department rather than running it separately — worth knowing before you go looking for a motor vehicle agency that does not exist here under its own name.
Every figure below names the document it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Fees change without notice, so we do not repeat them here. Check Oregon Driver and Motor Vehicle Services for the current cost.
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 combination license.
The heavy straight vehicle license. Group B covers a single vehicle rating 26,001 pounds or more, or one towing a unit of 10,000 pounds or less.
The small vehicle license.
The knowledge test every commercial driver takes, whatever class or endorsement they are after.
Required before you may drive any commercial vehicle with air brakes.
Required for a Class A license. Coupling and uncoupling, off-tracking, trailer brakes and the handling of a vehicle that is jointed in the middle.
The H endorsement. Placarding, shipping papers, loading and segregation rules, and what to do when something leaks.
The N endorsement. Surge, baffles, bulkheads, high center of gravity and the way a part-full tank changes how a vehicle stops and turns.
The T endorsement. Coupling and uncoupling multiple trailers, converter dollies, crack-the-whip and the inspection points a second trailer adds.
The P endorsement. Pre-trip and post-trip checks on a bus, loading and unloading, standee lines, and handling passengers on the road.
The S endorsement, taken alongside the passenger endorsement. Danger zones, mirror adjustment, loading and unloading students, and railroad crossings.
A study drill for the pre-trip inspection.
Oregon's geography is not uniform, and that affects where testing offices are and how busy they are. The Willamette Valley, running from Portland down to Eugene, holds most of the state's population and most of its DMV offices. East of the Cascades the land opens into high desert with far fewer people and far fewer offices, so a test slot there can mean a longer drive than the map distance suggests. West of the mountains, timber and log-hauling still support a meaningful share of commercial trucking work, which is a different freight mix from states built around ports or interstate through-traffic.
What is on the exam does not depend on any of that. The knowledge tests, the pass mark and the age limits come from 49 CFR Part 383 and are identical in every state. Passing a section needs 80 percent correct — a federal minimum, not something Oregon decided on its own. You can drive commercially inside Oregon from 18; work that crosses into Washington, California, Idaho or Nevada needs you to be 21.
General knowledge is required of every applicant regardless of vehicle type. From there, what you need depends on what you drive. An air brakes failure does not cost you the license — it adds a restriction that rules out anything built with them, which is worth knowing if the trucking work in your part of the state leans toward older equipment. Trailers heavier than ten thousand pounds bring the combination vehicles exam into the mix. The endorsements follow last, each one only if your work needs it: tank, doubles and triples, hazardous materials, passenger, school bus.
Hazardous materials adds a Transportation Security Administration background check on top of the written exam. That check runs on a federal timeline you cannot shorten, so start it well before you plan to need the endorsement.
No skills test happens without a commercial learner permit in hand first, and federal rule sets a 14-day minimum hold on that permit before the skills test can be booked. It is worth sitting the knowledge exams as soon as the permit arrives, since a failed section is easy to fix early and much harder to fix with the skills test date closing in.
Fees do not appear anywhere on this site. Oregon's DMV reviews and adjusts them from time to time, and a figure printed here could be out of date before you use it, so treat their office as the source of truth on cost, not us. Our focus stays narrow: which questions the exams draw from, and the exact source behind each answer.
Every question on every one of these is free, and each answer names the handbook page it came from.
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