TLC Exam Practice — Free NYC TLC Practice Questions

What TLC exam practice covers

The exam draws from five subject areas. They are not equally difficult, and the one most people under-prepare is rules and regulations — it reads like common sense but is really a list of precise figures you either know or guess at.

• TLC rules and regulations — licensing, conduct, inspections and penalties. The highest density of learnable facts, and the best place to start.
• Safe driving and traffic rules — New York State traffic law as it applies to a professional driver, not as traffic tolerates it.
• Vision Zero — the city's street-safety programme and the licensing consequences built on top of it.
• Customer service — refusals, accessibility, fares, lost property and passenger rights.
• Geography — bridges, tunnels, airports, expressways and Manhattan's numbering logic, learned as a network rather than a list.

How to practise so it predicts your real score

Practice only tells you something if you use it in the right order. Reading material first feels productive and produces almost no retrieval practice; a question forces you to produce the fact under pressure and then corrects you immediately.

1. 1Take one full timed mock exam before you study anything, and write down your score for each category. That cold score is the plan for everything after it.
2. 2Drill your two weakest categories one at a time, reading every explanation — including on questions you answered correctly, because a lucky guess and real knowledge look identical on a score sheet.
3. 3Keep a short list of every figure you guessed at, and re-test that category two days later. What survives the gap is learned.
4. 4Finish with full-length timed mixed tests. The real exam does not group questions by subject, so context-switching under a clock is its own skill.

Practice by category

Pick a subject to work through on its own. Category practice is where you build a mental model instead of pattern-matching answers you have seen before.

Take the full mock exam

The mock exam mirrors the real thing: 80 mixed questions pulled from every category, under the real time limit. Two hours for 80 questions is about ninety seconds each — generous for a rules question, tight for a geography question where you have to picture a route. Practising against that clock is the only way to find your pacing before it costs you a fee.

Practise in English, Spanish or Bengali

The TLC exam is offered in several languages, including Spanish and Bengali. If you intend to sit it in one of those, practise in that language from the start — studying in one language and being tested in another adds a translation step under time pressure, and technical terms are exactly where that step goes wrong. Switch language at the top of any page.

How to tell when you are ready

Not by a calendar. You are ready when several consecutive full-length timed mixed tests land clearly above the pass mark, with no single category dragging you down. Passing a practice test at 71% means one bad cluster of questions away from failing the real one; aim for a margin, not the line.

Common questions about TLC exam practice