The Complete GPhC Registration Assessment Study Plan
TL;DR — The GPhC registration assessment (now formally the Common Registration Assessment, or CRA) is two papers sat on one day: 40 calculations in two hours, then 120 multiple-choice questions in two and a half hours, with a two-and-a-quarter-hour scheduled break between them. From 2026, calculators are permitted in both parts. A working study plan runs roughly twelve weeks: four weeks rebuilding therapeutics from the BNF, four weeks on practice volume, three weeks on full-paper mocks under timed conditions, and a final week reserved for routine and rest. Plan around your foundation training, not in spite of it, and start calculations on day one — not week six.
Reviewed by our clinical team · Updated May 2026
How the GPhC actually structures the assessment
If you've been preparing from older revision guides, the first thing to know is that the exam has been renamed. From 2025 onwards the GPhC and the Pharmaceutical Society of Northern Ireland refer to it as the Common Registration Assessment, or CRA. The format is the same exam most people still call the GPhC — but the framework, weighting, and sitting rules have all been refreshed for 2026, and a few details that older blogs still get wrong actually matter.
The CRA is two papers, sat on one day, on a locked-down computer at a Surpass test centre. Part 1 is forty pharmacy and healthcare calculations, free-numerical entry, two hours — about three minutes per question. Part 2 is a hundred and twenty multiple-choice questions split into ninety single best answer items and thirty extended-matching items, two and a half hours total, roughly one minute per SBA and two minutes per EMQ. There are no penalties for wrong answers, so guess everything you can't solve. You need to hit the pass mark in both parts at the same sitting; there's no compensation between them, and you cannot carry a Part 2 pass into a future sitting if you fail Part 1.
The day itself is longer than the test time. Per the official GPhC sitting guidance: Part 1 starts at 10:00 and ends at 12:00, Part 2 starts at 14:15 and ends at 16:45. That's four and a half hours of exam, plus a two-and-a-quarter-hour break between papers, plus the mandatory 30-minute early arrival. Plan to be at the test centre from 09:30 until nearly 17:00. The break is long enough to leave the venue and eat — and long enough that managing anxiety during it becomes a real task in itself. Most candidates underestimate how much the lunch break matters; we cover this in detail in the exam day strategy guide.
The thing most older guides get wrong: calculators are now permitted in both parts. Until recently, calculator use was restricted to Part 1. The 2026 framework explicitly allows an approved calculator (or the Surpass on-screen one) throughout the assessment. If a forum thread or YouTube revision channel is telling you to drill mental arithmetic for Part 2, they're working off out-of-date guidance.
The pass mark is set per-sitting using a modified Angoff method with a one-SEM correction, then anchored across sittings using item response theory. In plain English: the pass mark moves a few marks up or down each sitting depending on how hard the questions are, but the standard you're being held to doesn't. For the June 2025 sitting, Part 1 was 24 out of 40 and Part 2 was 79 out of 120 — published in the Board of Assessors' feedback document. Don't anchor your prep on hitting “60%”. Anchor it on demonstrating safe practice across every domain, because the standard-setting method effectively asks: would a competent newly-registered pharmacist get this right?
You're allowed three attempts within your registration time limit. Don't optimise for “I have backup tries”. The third-attempt pass rate at the November 2025 sitting was 47 per cent — significantly lower than first-time. Plan for first-time pass.
The 12-week framework
Twelve weeks is the sweet spot for most candidates. Less than eight and you can't cover the framework's fifteen clinical therapeutic areas honestly. More than sixteen and motivation breaks down before exam day. The structure that works splits into four phases: foundation, practice volume, full-paper mocks, and exam-week routine. Each has a specific job. Each has a specific way candidates derail it.
Weeks 1–4: Foundation
Goal: rebuild therapeutics knowledge across the BNF chapters that the framework actually weights heavily.
Measurable target: one BNF chapter every two to three days; thirty calculations per week, no exceptions.
The CRA framework lists fifteen clinical therapeutic areas in priority order, and that order is not arbitrary — the GPhC has explicitly aligned it to UK disease and prescribing prevalence. Cardiovascular leads. Then central nervous system, endocrine, infection, gastrointestinal, respiratory, musculoskeletal, nutrition and blood, malignant disease and immunosuppression, skin, eye, ear/nose/oropharynx, vaccines, drug toxicity, and obstetrics/gynaecology/genito-urinary. That is the order of your foundation phase. If you spend week one on dermatology because it's the chapter you find easiest, you're spending your freshest week on a low-prevalence area. Don't.
The typical mistake candidates make in this phase is opening a question bank on day one. Practice questions before the underlying knowledge is in place teach you to recognise question patterns rather than reason clinically — and CRA questions are deliberately built to defeat pattern recognition. Read the chapter, summarise the high-risk drug classes within it (the framework names twelve: anti-infectives, anti-thrombotics, chemotherapy, conventional DMARDs, corticosteroids, hypnotics and anxiolytics, immunosuppressants, insulins, narrow therapeutic index drugs, opioids, teratogenic medicines, and time-critical medicines), then test recall.
A worked week from the foundation phase: Monday and Tuesday on cardiovascular, focusing on hypertension, heart failure, atrial fibrillation, and antiplatelet/anticoagulation choice. Wednesday morning, write a one-page summary of high-risk drug interactions in the chapter — DOACs with macrolides, statins with clarithromycin, the usual suspects. Wednesday afternoon, twenty cardiovascular-flavoured calculations. Thursday and Friday, central nervous system. Saturday morning, mixed calculation set. Saturday afternoon and Sunday, off, or light review only. You will not retain anything from a seven-day week.
Weeks 5–8: Practice volume
Goal: answer enough questions that recall becomes reflexive and your weak topics surface.
Measurable target: four hundred-plus practice questions across the four weeks, with a mistake-log entry every session.
This is the phase that makes or breaks first-time candidates. Volume is non-negotiable because the CRA's question style — single best answer with four plausible distractors — only becomes intuitive after roughly two hundred reps. The first hundred questions teach you the format. The second hundred teach you your blind spots. Anything before that is just calibration.
The typical mistake here is doing question banks badly. You answer a question, get it wrong, read the explanation, and move on. A week later the same kind of question appears, and you get it wrong again, and you don't notice because your tracker only shows percentage scores. The fix is the mistake log — every wrong answer gets logged with the topic, the specific reasoning error, and a flashcard generated within twenty-four hours. (We've written a separate guide on the mistake log method; the link's at the bottom of this article.)
A worked example: you get an EMQ on emergency supply wrong. You picked “supply five days of medication” when the correct answer was “decline and refer to GP because the request was patient-prompted, not prescriber-prompted”. The mistake log entry is not “got emergency supply wrong”. It is: “confused emergency supply at patient request (5-day rule, certain conditions) with emergency supply at prescriber request (no quantity limit, 72-hour window for prescription)”. That entry becomes three flashcards: one on patient-prompted rules, one on prescriber-prompted rules, one on what conditions disqualify emergency supply entirely. The Board of Assessors specifically flagged emergency supply as a persistent weak area in their June 2025 feedback. Your mistake log makes sure you only get this wrong once.
Weeks 9–11: Full-paper mocks
Goal: stamina and pacing under exam conditions.
Measurable target: at least three full Part 1 papers and three full Part 2 papers, sat in one sitting, in the morning.
By the time you reach week nine, you've covered the framework and you've drilled question banks. What you haven't done is sit a 270-minute exam, and stamina is a real factor. Most candidates who run out of time in Part 2 do so because their concentration broke around question 80 — not because they didn't know the answers.
Sit your mocks at the time of day you'll sit the real exam. The CRA is held in the morning. If you've been doing your practice in the evening because that's when you have time, your circadian peak is wrong. For at least your last three mocks, start at 9:00 on a Saturday and replicate the break structure: short break between Part 1 and Part 2, no phone access during the test, no looking anything up.
The typical mistake here is doing mocks at the wrong time of day, or doing partial papers. Forty calculations over two hours is a different exam from forty calculations broken across four sessions of ten. Pacing is information; you need to feel what minute 90 of Part 1 actually feels like.
Worked example: you sit a full Part 1 mock at 9:00 on Saturday. You finish with twelve minutes spare and you're confident on thirty-six answers, unsure on four. You've also identified that questions 14 and 27 took disproportionate time (a displacement-volume problem and an infusion-rate problem). For your next mock, you do a focused twenty-minute drill the night before specifically on those two calculation types from the framework's Part 1 list (concentrations, dilutions, displacement volumes, dose and dosage regimens, infusion rates, medical statistics, pharmacoeconomics, pharmacokinetics, quantities to supply). Mocks aren't graded — they're diagnostic.
Week 12: Exam-week routine
Goal: protect performance, not add knowledge.
Measurable target: zero new topics introduced, sleep schedule locked, light review only.
The single highest-leverage decision in week 12 is deciding to stop. Cramming new content in the seven days before the exam costs you the consolidation gains from the previous eleven weeks. If you don't know the management of stable angina by week 12, you are not going to know it by Saturday. What you can still affect is sleep, calorie intake, anxiety baseline, and your familiarity with the test centre.
Light review is fine. Re-read your mistake log, top to bottom. Skim the high-yield BNF chapters one more time. Do twenty calculations a day to keep the muscle warm, but stop drilling new content on Wednesday at the latest. Thursday and Friday should be near-rest. Eat normally. Sleep eight hours. Do not sit a final mock on Friday — there is nothing it can teach you that is worth the anxiety hit if it goes badly.
The typical mistake here is cramming calculations the night before. Calculations decay fastest when fatigued, which means a sleep-deprived performance on calculations is materially worse than your steady-state performance. Sleep wins.
Hour-by-hour weekly schedule
Below is a real week from the practice-volume phase (week 6), shown two ways: first for a candidate studying full-time, then for a candidate working alongside their foundation training year. These aren't theoretical — they're the schedules that fit inside a 168-hour week without breaking sleep, exercise, or a basic social life.
| Time | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 07:00–08:00 | Calcs (20) | Calcs (20) | Calcs (20) | Calcs (20) | Calcs (20) | — | — |
| 09:00–12:00 | CV qbank | Endocrine qbank | Mixed qbank | Respiratory qbank | Infection qbank | Mock Part 1 (full) | Off |
| 12:00–13:00 | Lunch | Lunch | Lunch | Lunch | Lunch | Break | — |
| 14:00–17:00 | CV review | Endocrine review | Mistake log audit | Respiratory review | Infection review | Mock review | Light review only |
| 19:00–20:00 | Flashcards | Flashcards | Flashcards | Flashcards | Off | Off | Flashcards |
That's roughly 38 hours. Not sustainable forever. Sustainable for four to six weeks if you protect Sundays.
For a foundation trainee working a normal week, compress to fifteen hours and shift the centre of mass to weekends:
| Time | Mon–Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|---|---|---|
| 06:30–07:00 | 20 calcs (every weekday, non-negotiable) | — | — |
| 18:30–20:00 | 90 min topic review (rotate the 15 clinical areas) | — | — |
| 09:00–13:00 | — | Mock Part 1 OR full qbank session | Mock Part 2 OR full qbank session |
| 14:00–16:00 | — | Mock review + mistake log | Light review |
That gets you to ~15 hours per week, which is the realistic floor for a working trainee. The non-negotiable item is the daily morning calculations block. Calculations decay faster than therapeutics knowledge — twenty minutes a day beats two hours on a Sunday.
Adapting the plan alongside foundation training
Most candidates reading this are not studying full-time. You are training as a foundation pharmacist, working a contracted week, and trying to fit CRA prep into evenings and weekends. The framework above is built for that constraint.
Three things have changed for the 2025/26 foundation cohort that older study guides don't account for. First, the year now includes ninety hours of dedicated independent-prescribing practice, mandated by NHS England. That's substantial — roughly two and a half hours per week of structured prescribing-related learning that didn't exist under the old framework. Second, multi-sector rotations of at least thirteen weeks are being phased in, which means a chunk of your year may be spent in an environment unfamiliar to you. Third, the CRA does not assess the prescribing learning outcome (LO 37) — that's overseen by your statutory education body. So although you're training as a prescriber, you don't need to revise prescribing for the CRA itself.
What this means practically: your weekly study budget is probably twelve to fifteen hours, not thirty. Compress mocks into weekends. Use evenings for short, high-frequency reviews — flashcards, mistake log audits, twenty-minute calculation blocks. Don't try to do a three-hour qbank session after a clinical shift; you'll retain nothing.
The single biggest leverage point is annual leave. If you have any flexibility, take a week off about ten days before the exam. Use it for full-paper mocks, not for new content. A foundation trainee who books exam-week leave well in advance protects the routine that the entire twelve-week plan was built to deliver.
Where candidates fail at the planning stage
Pass rates at the CRA are not stable. The June 2025 sitting was 77 per cent overall, with first-time candidates at 80 per cent. The November 2025 sitting dropped to 61.5 per cent overall, with first-time candidates at 60 per cent and third-attempt candidates at 47 per cent. The November–June gap is partly cohort selection — many of the November candidates are deferrals or resits, and they're a harder pool by definition. But the Board of Assessors' feedback documents are also unambiguous: the same topics keep failing candidates across multiple sittings. The failure is predictable, which means it's preventable.
Six patterns we see repeatedly at the planning stage:
Starting full-paper mocks too early. A full Part 2 mock in week 4 isn't useful — you don't have the underlying knowledge to interpret what you got wrong. You'll just feel demoralised and lose two weeks. Mocks belong in weeks 9–11. Question banks are different and start in week 5.
Ignoring calculations until late. This is the most common reason for Part 1 failure. Calculations are a perishable skill — daily reps for twelve weeks materially outperform a six-week sprint at the end. The June 2025 feedback specifically named rounding errors, displacement-volume mistakes, and IV infusion rate misinterpretation as persistent weak areas. None of those are content-knowledge problems. They're practice-volume problems.
No mistake log, so the same errors recur. If you score 65 per cent on a question bank, you got 35 per cent wrong. Your mistake log should have an entry for every one of those. If it doesn't, you're studying without measuring, and Pareto guarantees a small number of recurrent error types will dominate your wrong answers.
Single-source revision. One textbook, no question banks. Or one question bank, no clinical reasoning practice. The CRA samples from BNF and BNFC, NICE guidelines, MHRA safety alerts, and UK pharmacy law. No single resource covers all of it. Cross-reference.
A plan copy-pasted from a forum. Someone else's twelve-week plan was built around someone else's life. If you have caring responsibilities, a long commute, or a high-acuity training site, your plan needs different rest patterns and different peak hours. Build your own.
No buffer for illness or training surges. Foundation pharmacists get pulled into rotas, audits, and last-minute clinical-skills sessions. If your study plan has zero slack, the first unexpected ten-hour week destroys the next four weeks of progress. Build in two flex days per month.
When to start using mock exams
Short answer: partial mocks from week 5, full-paper mocks from week 9. Sitting a full mock in week 2 doesn't show you a baseline — it shows you a skill gap that you already knew was there, at the cost of one of your scarcest resources (mock papers, of which there are a finite supply of high-quality ones).
We've covered mock-exam strategy in more depth in our guide to GPhC mock exams and in our practice-paper product, which gives you full Part 1 and Part 2 papers with Surpass-style timing.
When to start practising calculations
Day one. Every day. Twenty-minute floor.
This is the single most important sentence in this article. Calculations are why people fail the CRA — Part 1 has the lowest tolerance for ambiguity, the highest density of recurring mistake types, and the least margin for skill decay. Twelve weeks of daily calculation practice — even just twenty minutes — outperforms six weeks of two-hour sessions.
For the structured calculations curriculum, mistake-pattern analysis, and worked examples across all nine Part 1 calculation types (concentrations, dilutions, displacement volumes, dose and dosage regimens, infusion rates, medical statistics, pharmacoeconomics, pharmacokinetics, quantities to supply), see our complete calculations mastery guide.
Frequently asked questions
How many hours a week should I study for the GPhC registration assessment?
Twelve to fifteen hours per week if you're working alongside foundation training; twenty-five to thirty if you're studying full-time. Beyond about thirty-five hours per week, retention drops faster than coverage gains. Quality of study time matters more than total — fifteen hours of focused weekly work, sustained for twelve weeks, beats thirty hours of distracted weekly work for six weeks.
Can I pass the CRA in 8 weeks?
It's possible if you're studying full-time, you're already strong on the framework's high-prevalence clinical areas, and you've kept calculations sharp during your MPharm. Most candidates who attempt eight-week plans do so because they delayed starting, not because they're confident on content. If you're in that position, prioritise: weeks 1–3 cardiovascular, CNS, endocrine, infection, GI, respiratory; weeks 4–5 question bank volume; weeks 6–7 mocks; week 8 routine. Skip nothing — compress everything.
Should I use the BNF or BNFC?
Both. The CRA framework states explicitly that clinical therapeutic content is drawn from both the BNF and the BNFC. Paediatric dosing errors are flagged in the Board of Assessors' feedback as a persistent weak area, particularly when candidates fail to check against BNFC maximum doses. If you've spent your foundation year mostly with adult patients, your BNFC familiarity is probably weaker than you realise. Cover both.
How many practice questions are enough?
There's no magic number, but four hundred good-quality questions worked through with a mistake log will almost always beat a thousand questions answered without one. Volume matters less than reflection. The diminishing returns kick in around question 600 if you're not actively analysing your wrong answers — at that point you're testing recall of questions, not reasoning.
What's the GPhC pass mark?
The pass mark is set per-sitting using a modified Angoff method with a one-standard-error-of-measurement adjustment, then anchored across sittings using item response theory. In June 2025, it was 24/40 for Part 1 and 79/120 for Part 2. The pass mark moves between sittings to reflect question difficulty — but the standard you're being held to (the level of competence required for safe practice) does not. Don't anchor on a percentage. Anchor on demonstrating safe practice across the framework.
How do I balance CRA prep with foundation training requirements?
The 2025/26 foundation training year now includes ninety hours of mandatory independent-prescribing practice, plus the assessment strategy and e-portfolio requirements. That's a real workload. Practical advice: ringfence one weekday evening and most of one weekend day for CRA prep; treat foundation training requirements as the immovable constraint and study around them. The CRA does not assess prescribing learning outcome 37 directly, so although you're training as a prescriber, you don't need to revise prescribing content for the exam.
Is the CRA harder than university finals?
Different exam, different demands. University finals tested whether you'd learned the curriculum. The CRA tests whether you can apply that learning to authentic patient scenarios at the standard required to register safely. Most candidates find the calculations harder than they expected and the clinical reasoning broader than they expected. The exam isn't trying to catch you out — it's trying to verify that you'd be safe on day one as a registered pharmacist.
What if I'm resitting after a fail?
First, don't waste a single revision week before you've understood why you failed. Re-read your Board of Assessors feedback letter carefully — it tells you which sections you underperformed on. If Part 1 was the failure, the fix is volume and pattern recognition; rebuild calculations from week one. If Part 2 was the failure, the fix is usually law and governance, public health priorities, or topic-specific clinical areas the Board of Assessors flagged. Resit candidates who change their study method outperform those who repeat what they did first time. Pharmacist Support is also worth contacting — a CRA fail is a heavy thing to carry alone, and they offer free, confidential support.
References and sources
- General Pharmaceutical Council. Common Registration Assessment framework for sittings in 2026. 2025-09. https://assets.pharmacyregulation.org/files/2025-09/Common-Registration-Assessment-framework-for-sittings-in-2026.pdf
- GPhC Board of Assessors. Feedback from the June 2025 Common Registration Assessment sitting. 2025-07. https://assets.pharmacyregulation.org/files/2025-07/Feedback-from-the-June-2025-CRA.pdf
- General Pharmaceutical Council. GPhC announces results for June 2025 registration assessment. 2025-07-29. https://www.pharmacyregulation.org/about-us/news-and-updates/gphc-announces-results-june-2025-registration-assessment
- General Pharmaceutical Council. GPhC announces results for November 2025 Common Registration Assessment. 2025-12-16. https://www.pharmacyregulation.org/about-us/news-and-updates/gphc-announces-results-november-2025-common-registration-assessment
- General Pharmaceutical Council. Sitting the Common Registration Assessment. https://www.pharmacyregulation.org/students-and-trainees/pharmacist-education-and-training/common-registration-assessment/sitting-common-registration-assessment
- NHS England Workforce, Training and Education. The foundation trainee pharmacist programme from 2025/2026. https://www.hee.nhs.uk/our-work/pharmacy/trainee-pharmacist-foundation-year-programme/2025-2026
- The Pharmaceutical Journal. How to optimise the 90 hours of dedicated prescribing practice during the foundation training year. 2025-08. https://pharmaceutical-journal.com/article/ld/how-to-optimise-the-90-hours-of-dedicated-prescribing-practice-during-the-foundation-training-year
- The Pharmaceutical Journal. Autumn 2025 registration assessment pass rate higher than previous year. 2025-12-16. https://pharmaceutical-journal.com/article/news/autumn-2025-registration-assessment-pass-rate-higher-than-previous-year
- Pharmaceutical Society of Northern Ireland. Sitting the November 2025 Common Registration Assessment. 2025-09. https://psni.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Sitting-the-November-2025-Common-Registration-Assessment.pdf
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