How the figures are built

Every fee and rule on this site comes from the state policy pages published by GED Testing Service on ged.com and by the HiSET program on hiset.org. We read each page by hand on October 22, 2026, copied the price per part, the retake price, the one-time fees, the discounts and the age and residency rules, and kept a note of the sentence each figure comes from. Nothing you type into a calculator leaves your browser.

What a total includes

A total is the price of each part you still need, times the number of parts, plus any fee the state charges once or once a year (Missouri $10, Louisiana and Michigan for the HiSET, California’s $20 HiSET fee, Connecticut’s $13 registration). Discounts open to everyone and public promo codes printed on the state page are applied (Alaska, Washington, D.C., Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Pennsylvania). Programs you must qualify for (Texas, Ohio, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Tennessee and several HiSET states) are applied only when you tick that you qualify. When a page publishes a total that does not match its price per part, as Hawaii’s HiSET page does, we use the price per part.

Retakes

GED at a test center: every subject failed at full price opens one discounted retake (two in Texas, South Carolina and Rhode Island), to be used within 365 days. GED Testing Service waives its share; the retake costs what the state page lists. After the discounted retake, the next attempt is full price and the cycle repeats. Mississippi pays every attempt at its centers. GED online: every attempt is full price. HiSET: the full fee is paid on the first and fourth attempt of a subtest; the second and third cost the price minus the test fee, which is the center or proctoring fee. Retakes you plan for are spread one per part in turn: two retakes on four subjects means one retake on two subjects, not two on one. Waiting periods come from each state page: none before the first two GED retakes in most states, then 60 days; online, one retake then 60 days.

Scores

GED scores and levels come from the GED scores page and the College Ready page: 145 per subject to pass, 165 to 174 College Ready, 175 to 200 College Ready + Credit. HiSET rules come from hiset.org: 8 of 20 on each subtest, 45 of 100 in total, 2 of 6 on the essay. GED Ready prices and result bands come from the GED Ready page.

Practice questions

The practice questions are written by us from the subject outlines that ged.com and hiset.org publish. They are not questions from the real tests, which are secure and unpublished, and a score on them does not predict an official score. Every answer was checked by hand and comes with its reasoning.

Updates and reuse

A weekly script fetches every state page we cite and flags any page whose text changed; a flagged page is read again by hand before a figure is changed. The ged.com pages reserve their text, including for data mining, so this site copies facts (amounts, ages, dates) and never reproduces their wording. GED® and HiSET® are trademarks of their owners and are used only to name the tests.

What is left out

Fees a test center adds without the state page publishing them (Montana, Wyoming), Indiana’s HiSET center fees, which each center sets, transcript and diploma copy fees, and accommodations. Where a figure is not published, the calculator says so instead of estimating it.

Checks

Automated tests check the totals of several states against amounts computed by hand (Texas, California, Illinois, Ohio, Mississippi, Pennsylvania), the retake cycles of both tests, the age rules and the passing rules. Each state page is linked from the calculator result.