The New Jersey notary exam is not a difficult test by professional licensing standards. It’s an open-book, online exam with 50 multiple-choice questions, you can reference the official Notary Public Manual the whole time, and the $2.50 fee covers up to three attempts.1New Jersey Treasury. Notary Public FAQ Most applicants who read the manual carefully and complete the required training pass on the first or second try.
Why Most People Pass
You get 75 minutes to answer 50 multiple-choice questions and need 40 correct, an 80% score, to pass.2New Jersey Treasury. Report on the Status of the State of New Jersey’s Notary Education Program The test is delivered through New Jersey’s government services portal, and the single feature that makes it manageable is the open-book format. The Notary Public Manual is open in front of you the entire time, so nothing has to be memorized cold.
The $2.50 exam fee buys three attempts. Fail all three and you pay again, but the structure is forgiving by design. There’s no proctor watching you, no timed section breakdowns to worry about, and the questions are standard multiple choice rather than scenario essays or fill-in-the-blank.
One group skips the exam entirely: attorneys licensed to practice in New Jersey are exempt from the testing requirement.3Justia. New Jersey Revised Statutes Section 52-7-12 – Qualifications Everyone else sits for it.
Where the Difficulty Actually Lies
What catches people off guard isn’t the complexity of any single question. It’s the clock. Seventy-five minutes across 50 questions works out to roughly 90 seconds each. If you treat the exam like a scavenger hunt and start flipping through the manual on question one looking for an answer you’ve never read before, you’ll run out of time well before question 50.
The open book cuts both ways. It lowers the memorization burden, but it rewards familiarity with the manual’s layout more than it rewards raw recall. Candidates who read the manual once the night before and plan to “just look things up” are the ones who fail. Candidates who have read it twice, know roughly where each topic lives, and have tabbed the key sections finish comfortably.
Within the content itself, two areas account for most wrong answers: the prohibited acts, and the distinctions between the different notarial acts. Knowing when to use a jurat versus an acknowledgment is exactly the kind of fine distinction the exam tests heavily, and it’s not something you can reason your way to from common sense.
What the Exam Covers
Every question is drawn from the Notary Public Manual, which is built around New Jersey’s notarial law at N.J.S.A. 52:7-10 and the related sections.4Justia. New Jersey Revised Statutes Section 52-7-10 – Short Title The core content areas are:
- Notarial acts, including acknowledgments, jurats, oaths, affirmations, witnessing signatures, and certifying copies, and when each one applies.
- Signer identification: what counts as acceptable ID, how to verify identity, and what to do when a signer can’t produce proper ID.
- Prohibited acts, including giving legal advice, preparing legal documents, and notarizing your own signature.
- Journal requirements: what you must record for each notarial act and the rules for keeping the journal in paper or electronic form.
- Certificate completion: how to properly fill out notarial certificates and how to handle errors.
The notarial acts category and the prohibited acts category together carry the heaviest weight of exam questions. If you have limited study time, those are the two to prioritize.
What You Must Complete Before You Can Sit
New Jersey won’t let you take the exam until you’ve completed two things and attested to both in the exam portal: reading the Notary Public Manual in full and watching the entire series of Notary Public Manual Training Videos.5New Jersey Government Services. Notary Public Exam Non-attorney applicants must also complete a six-hour course of study approved by the State Treasurer.6State of NJ – Department of the Treasury. Announcement – New Notary Educational and Testing Requirements
Those aren’t suggestions. The portal gates the exam behind the attestation, and the six-hour course is a legal prerequisite for the commission itself.
A Study Approach That Fits an Open-Book Test
The manual is not long, but it is dense. One read-through is rarely enough. A workable approach:
Read the manual once, straight through, without stopping to take notes. The goal of this pass is flow and geography. You want to know what topics exist and roughly where they sit.
Go back and study the sections on notarial acts, prohibited conduct, and journal-keeping more carefully. These are where the exam concentrates. Pay particular attention to the differences between acts that look similar on the surface, like jurats and acknowledgments.
Then prepare the manual as a reference tool for test day. Tab or bookmark the sections on identification requirements, certificate wording, and prohibited acts. When a question stumps you during the exam, you want to land on the right page in seconds, not minutes.
Practice tests from third-party providers can help you gauge where you stand and get comfortable with the multiple-choice format before the real attempt. They’re not required and the state doesn’t produce an official practice version, but working through a set of sample questions surfaces the fine distinctions you may have skimmed in the manual.
If You Don’t Pass
A failed attempt isn’t a setback worth dreading. Your $2.50 covers up to three tries, so a first-attempt fail just means you reopen the portal and go again.1New Jersey Treasury. Notary Public FAQ Before you retake, go back to the questions you were least sure of and find them in the manual. The second attempt almost always goes better because you now know, specifically, where your weak spots are and where in the manual to look for them under time pressure.
If you burn all three attempts, you pay the fee again to reset. That’s rare for candidates who actually completed the required training and read the manual, which is why the exam has the reputation it does: not easy in the sense of trivial, but very passable for anyone who prepares.
Passing Is Not the Finish Line
One thing to keep in mind as you prepare: clearing the exam doesn’t make you a notary. You still have to submit the commission application through the state portal, receive your Notary Public Commission Certificate, and take the oath of office before your county clerk within three months of receiving the commission.7New Jersey Government Services. Notary Public Exam