Texas teacher certification and the TExES exams

TEA lists five. Earn a bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university. Complete an approved educator preparation program: a university program if you don’t hold a degree yet, or an alternative certification or post-baccalaureate program if you do. Pass the certification exams your program approves you for. Apply to TEA once your program confirms you’re eligible. Then complete fingerprinting for a national criminal background check, which every first-time applicant needs.

You can apply online, but the training and exams have rules of their own. TEA requires an approved EPP, and its map of approved programs is where to check one you’re considering. Pearson describes alternative certification programs as possibly including university coursework or other professional development, with intense mentoring and supervision. The TExES exams themselves are given at Pearson VUE test centers; Pearson’s exam pages don’t list an at-home option.

House Bill 2 (HB 2) tightens the rule for foundation subjects. TEA’s HB 2 page says that for the 2026-2027 school year, K-5 reading and mathematics teachers must be appropriately certified, and for 2027-2028, every reading/English language arts, mathematics, science and social studies teacher at every grade level. Districts with an approved Delay of Certification plan have until the start of the 2029-2030 school year.

TEA issues the certificates and keeps the official record of them, the virtual certificate. Its Office of Educator Testing manages the statewide testing contract and develops the testing rules. The exams each certificate needs are set in the State Board for Educator Certification’s (SBEC) rules, in Texas Administrative Code §230.21(e), and SBEC has authorized TEA staff to run the test-limit waiver process.

There isn’t a fixed number. Pearson says each exam has several versions, and conversion tables adjust for small differences in difficulty, so the number of right answers behind a 240 can vary slightly between versions. Some questions are also pretest questions that don’t count toward your score. Your score report shows how many scored questions you got right in each domain.

Five times: your first attempt and four retakes. You have to wait 30 days between attempts, and if you’re in a preparation program, you need its approval each time. For Core Subjects and the Bilingual Education Spanish Supplemental (165), every session counts as an attempt, even if you retake one subtest. After five attempts, you can’t take that exam again unless TEA approves a test-limit waiver.

TEA lists target dates that it says may move later. The Texas Test of Educator Proficiency (T-TEP) is planned for no earlier than September 2027 and, pending SBEC action, would replace the Pedagogy and Professional Responsibilities (PPR) exam. Redesigned Core EC-6 (early childhood to grade 6) exams are planned for the same date, after the 391 is last offered on August 31, 2027. The 254 English as a Second Language (ESL) Supplemental is planned for no earlier than September 2028. For bilingual Spanish, the 164 and 190 pair can be taken until August 31, 2027, and the 165 replaces them.

TEA charges a $78 application fee for a standard certificate. Fingerprinting costs $42 paid in the Educator Certification Online System (ECOS), which includes a $2 card processing fee, plus $10 to IdentoGO at your appointment. Under HB 2, TEA waives the fee for your first attempt at an eligible special education or bilingual education exam and the application fee for the matching certificate. Pearson adds a Texas.gov processing fee to each exam payment, which isn’t refundable.

Pearson asks you to allow 7 to 10 business days after your score report date for scores to post to your ECOS account. Applying doesn’t happen by itself: you complete the application in ECOS after your program confirms you’re eligible. TEA says its more thorough background checks may make certificates take longer to issue, and it can’t estimate how long any one review will take.