What the NLE is
The Philippine Nurses Licensure Examination, commonly called the NLE or PNLE, is the national board examination a person must pass to practise as a registered nurse in the Philippines. It is conducted by the Professional Regulation Commission through the Board of Nursing, under Republic Act 9173, the Philippine Nursing Act of 2002. Passing the NLE and taking the oath before the Board of Nursing are what convert a nursing graduate into a registered nurse eligible for the Professional Identification Card and Certificate of Registration.
The license is a licence to practise, not a placement in a hospital. Employer hiring, whether by a Department of Health facility, a private hospital, or an overseas recruiter, happens on top of the eligibility.
Who conducts it, and when
The PRC administers the NLE twice a year, in cycles that have recently fallen in May and November. Results for the May 2025 sitting were released on 15 May 2025, when the PRC certified 6,935 passers out of 10,770 examinees, a national passing rate of 64.39 percent. The November 2025 cycle drew a much larger candidate pool and produced a record 90.04 percent passing rate, with 40,692 of 45,192 examinees declared successful. A February 2026 cycle was subsequently held and its results were released within five working days by the PRC.
Who can apply
Applicants must be Filipino citizens, or foreign nationals qualified under a reciprocity arrangement the PRC recognises, and of good moral character. The academic requirement is a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from a college or university recognised by the Commission on Higher Education, with the Related Learning Experience component of the curriculum completed. Candidates who trained abroad must have the programme recognised as equivalent by the PRC before they can apply.
How the exam runs
The NLE is an objective, machine-scored pen and paper test made up of five papers of one hundred multiple-choice items each, for a total of five hundred items. The five papers are grouped as Nursing Practice one to five, covering community health and population groups, care of the mother and child and populations at risk, care of clients with physiologic and psychosocial alterations, care of clients with problems in nutrition, gastrointestinal, metabolism, endocrine, perception and coordination, and care of clients with life-threatening conditions and emergencies. The exam runs across two days, with parts administered morning and afternoon per the PRC’s programme released for each cycle.
The passing rule is a general weighted average of at least 75.00 percent with no single paper below 60.00 percent. A candidate whose average clears seventy-five but whose lowest paper falls under sixty is rated failed, so subject-by-subject balance matters as much as the overall figure.
Applying and the examination fee
Registration goes through the PRC’s Licensure Examination and Registration Information System, called LERIS, on prc.gov.ph. Applicants create an online account, choose the sitting and testing venue, upload the required documents including the transcript of records and Special Order where applicable, pay the examination fee through the accepted channels, and receive the Notice of Admission digitally. The exact fee, deadlines and testing venues are posted with each cycle’s PRC advisory.
On exam day
Bring the printed Notice of Admission, the original valid government photo identification whose name matches the notice, and a black ballpoint pen. Mobile phones, smartwatches, calculators, and any electronic device are not allowed inside the testing room. Arrive well before the reporting time on the notice because latecomers are not admitted, and confirm any additional items, such as the metered-stamp envelope the PRC has required for other board exams, against the current advisory.
After passing
A passer must appear for the oath-taking scheduled by the Board of Nursing and register with the PRC to receive the Professional Identification Card and Certificate of Registration. From that point the passer is a registered nurse, subject to the continuing professional development framework the PRC administers for licence renewal. For nurses seeking to work abroad, the PRC-issued documents are also the base credentials for verification by the recruiting country’s regulator.
Some figures on this page were verified against secondary reporting where the primary PRC pages were not directly reachable from the build environment on the last-verified date. Every fact carries its source and should be re-checked against prc.gov.ph before it is quoted publicly.