PTE exam pattern 2026: all 22 tasks, timings and question counts

The PTE exam pattern at a glance

Three parts, fixed order, no going back once a part ends. The timings below are the ranges Pearson publishes, and they vary between test versions because different papers are balanced for total length.

The whole test is a maximum of two hours fifteen minutes. Notice that the part ranges do not add up to that figure, and Pearson says so explicitly: no candidate receives every maximum or every minimum, because papers are balanced for overall length rather than section by section. Plan for the full two and a quarter hours.

Pearson's everyday figure for the test duration is shorter. Its July 2025 Test Taker Handbook says the test takes approximately 2 hours to complete, and Pearson's guide to the 2025 changes adds that many test takers finish in less than two hours. Two hours fifteen minutes is the ceiling, not the typical sitting.

How many questions each part holds. Pearson publishes a question range for every task, and adding those ranges part by part gives the totals below. They are our arithmetic, not a table Pearson prints.

Pearson's total for a whole paper is 65 to 75 questions, while its per-task maximums would add up to 85, so no real paper sits at the top of every range; the part sums above are outer limits, not a promise. The unscored Personal Introduction is not counted.

Part 1: Speaking and Writing

The longest part by a wide margin, and the one that decides most candidates' outcome. It opens with an unscored Personal Introduction, then runs the seven speaking tasks before the two writing ones.

Two things in that table surprise people. Repeat Sentence is the highest-volume task in the whole exam, at up to 12 questions, and it feeds two skills at once, so it moves your score more than anything else you will do. And Answer Short Question scores Listening, not Speaking, even though you answer it out loud, because what is being judged is whether you understood the question and chose the right word.

Two tasks carry their own published time limits inside this part: Summarize Written Text gives you 10 minutes per item, and Write Essay gives you 20. Those clocks are per question and you cannot bank unused time.

The speaking tasks run on clocks too, measured mostly in seconds rather than minutes. These are the times on Pearson's PTE Academic test-format pages, task by task:

Part 2: Reading

The shortest part, and the one where pacing matters most, because there is no per-question clock. You get one budget for the whole section and you spend it as you like.

The two Fill in the Blanks variants are the bulk of the section at up to 11 questions between them, and both are vocabulary, collocation and grammar work. Reorder Paragraphs is the one most people over-spend on: it is worth one mark per correctly ordered adjacent pair, so a near-miss still scores, and it is rarely worth five minutes of staring.

Grammar is in that list because Pearson's scoring notes say both Fill in the Blanks tasks are judged on using context and grammatical cues to find the words that complete the text, so check the word form around each gap as well as its meaning.

Pearson's format page lists no separate answer time for any Reading task: the whole part runs on one clock. Spread across 15 to 20 questions in about 23 to 30 minutes, that averages roughly one to two minutes a question (our arithmetic), but the passages are far from equal.

Part 3: Listening

Eight task types, more than any other part except Part 1, which has nine, and every one plays its audio exactly once. There is no replay button anywhere in this section.

Write from Dictation is the best value in the section: up to four questions, marked one point per word you spell correctly, feeding both Listening and Writing. There is no deduction, so type every word you can recall even when you are sure the sentence is incomplete.

Only one Listening task has an answer time of its own: Summarize Spoken Text, which gives you 10 minutes to listen and write. Pearson lists the other seven with no separate answer time. What the format page does publish is the length of each recording:

Write from Dictation is the eighth and last Listening task in Pearson's list, and because it has no time of its own, keep enough of the part in hand for its three or four sentences.

Why one question can move two scores

Some tasks are integrated, meaning they assess two communicative skills at the same time, and the result counts toward both. Pearson names the combinations that exist: Listening and Speaking, Reading and Writing, Listening and Writing, and Listening and Reading.

This is the single most useful thing to understand about the pattern, because it tells you where practice pays twice. Repeat Sentence, Retell Lecture and Summarize Group Discussion all feed Listening and Speaking. Write from Dictation and Summarize Spoken Text feed Listening and Writing. Highlight Incorrect Words and Highlight Correct Summary feed Listening and Reading. Summarize Written Text is the only task that feeds Reading and Writing, which makes eight integrated tasks in all.

Notice how often Listening appears. It is the skill most tasks touch, which is why a weak Listening score tends to drag several numbers down at once, and why fixing it lifts more than any other single change. Our Listening section covers the tasks in order.

How many task types feed each skill. Counted from Pearson's per-task table, with integrated tasks listed under both of their skills:

Because integrated tasks count twice, the rows add up to more than 22 and the question ranges overlap. Like the part sums, they are outer limits rather than a promise: with every paper capped at 75 questions, the Listening top of 46 cannot actually occur. Pearson does not publish how much each question weighs inside a skill score, so read this as a map of where the questions are, not a formula. Two things stand out anyway: every Speaking question on the test sits in Part 1, and Writing rests on only 7 or 8 questions, four or five of them in Part 3.

One correction worth making, because a great deal of older advice still repeats it: Read Aloud scores Speaking only. It fed Reading under the pre-2025 model. If you are practising Read Aloud to lift a weak Reading score, you are practising the wrong task.

That correction is about PTE Academic. PTE Core, which the 2025 update did not change, still counts Read Aloud toward Reading as well as Speaking, according to Pearson's PTE Core Score Guide (January 2026). Our PTE Core vs PTE Academic comparison covers which test to book, and PTE to CLB converts Core scores into Canadian Language Benchmarks.

How the pattern turns into a score

Every question contributes to your overall score and to the skill or skills it measures. The report you receive shows one overall number and four communicative skills, Listening, Reading, Speaking and Writing, all on the same 10 to 90 scale.

The overall is not an average of the four skills. Pearson states that directly, and it matters: you cannot work out your overall by adding your four scores and dividing by four, and any calculator that claims to do so is guessing. The overall is built from your performance across all the questions in the test.

Marking comes in two shapes. Some questions are simply correct or incorrect, worth one mark or nothing. Others are partial credit, where a partly correct answer earns some of the marks available. And on the three tasks flagged in the tables above, an incorrect selection subtracts a mark, which our guide to PTE negative marking explains in full.

The PTE score chart maps those bands to CEFR levels and to the cut scores institutions and visa programmes actually ask for. How long that score stays usable is a separate question, covered in PTE score validity.

What Pearson does not publish is the formula that turns item points into your 10 to 90 scores, so nobody outside Pearson can tell you exactly what one question is worth on the final scale. What it does publish is how each task earns its points, summarised here in our words:

Our PTE AI scoring guide goes further into the machine side.

What changed in the 2025 pattern update

Pearson revised PTE Academic in August 2025, and a lot of the advice online still describes the older test. Three changes matter for anyone planning study time.

Two task types were added to Part 1. Summarize Group Discussion asks you to summarise a conversation between three speakers, and Respond to a Situation gives you a scenario and asks for an appropriate spoken reply. Both are speaking tasks, and both are unfamiliar territory for anyone using older practice material.

Part 1 got longer. Speaking and Writing now runs about 76 to 84 minutes, up from roughly 54 to 67 before, partly because of the new tasks.

Which tasks feed which skills changed. The integrated pairs were rebalanced, which is where the Read Aloud confusion comes from. If a source still tells you Read Aloud lifts your Reading score, it is describing the pre-2025 test.

Pearson says the original 20 question types kept exactly the same format and timings, that it increased the number of some existing tasks, and that the average sitting is still around two hours. Its 2025 updates page has the details.

The skill rebalancing shows up when you set Pearson's old and new pages side by side. Its format pages, as archived in February and March 2025, listed a second skill for four tasks that now feed only one: Read Aloud (now Speaking only), Answer Short Question (now Listening only), Reading and Writing Fill in the Blanks (now the dropdown task, Reading only) and Listening Fill in the Blanks (now Listening only). A few notes on Pearson's live format pages still carry the older wording; for scoring, the 2025 Score Guide is the document Pearson points you to.

If a PTE Academic guide lists 20 question types, or Part 1 timings below 76 minutes, it describes the older test. The UK version, PTE Academic UKVI, follows the new pattern too.

What 1,561 of our mocks show about where the pattern costs points

The Score Guide publishes no population data, so here is ours. We looked at 1,561 fully answered PTE Academic mocks sat by 909 people on PTE Mocks between 6 July and 27 September 2026, counting only attempts where every skill scored above the 10-point floor. That leaves out abandoned sections and microphone failures. Only 253 of them were full-length papers; the rest were our shorter mini mocks.

Read against the pattern, the result is hard to miss. In 87% of these attempts (57% plus 30%), the single weakest skill was Speaking or Writing, the two skills Part 1 is named after. Every Speaking question on the test sits in Part 1, and Writing rests on only 7 or 8 questions. That is the practical meaning of Part 1 being the part that decides most outcomes: for most of our test takers, the longest part is also where the gap is.

Two honest caveats. These are scores from our AI-scored mocks, an estimate, not Pearson results. And mock-takers are self-selected practisers, many early in their preparation, so absolute levels run low; read the relative pattern, not the numbers as a forecast. If Speaking is your gap too, our PTE speaking practice works through all seven speaking tasks.

How to use the pattern when you plan

Question counts are the closest thing you have to a weighting, so read them as a priority list rather than a syllabus. Repeat Sentence at up to 12 questions and Read Aloud at up to 7 dominate Part 1. The two Fill in the Blanks variants dominate Part 2. Write from Dictation and the multiple choice tasks dominate Part 3.

A reasonable first pass: spend your practice time in proportion to question count, weighted up for anything integrated. That puts Repeat Sentence, Write from Dictation and the Fill in the Blanks family at the top for most people, which is exactly where the fastest score movement tends to come from.

Then sit a full-length mock test under the real timings before you book. The pattern on paper and the pattern at 90 minutes of concentration are different things, and the second one is what you are actually training for.

For the two biggest integrated tasks, start with our Repeat Sentence practice and Write from Dictation practice pages. The Speaking section, Writing section and Reading section guides walk through the rest of the pattern task by task. Our PTE test day checklist covers what to bring, comfort aids and prohibited items.

Quick reference: PTE exam pattern at a glance