Which USA Hire Tests Will My Federal Job Use?
Your USAJOBS announcement already says which USA Hire assessments you will sit. How to read it, and what OPM’s own data shows about tests by grade.
You applied for a federal job on USAJOBS and got a link to USA Hire, the Office of Personnel Management's online assessments. The first question most people ask is which tests are in it. The answer depends on the job's series and grade, not on the agency, and the announcement you applied to already tells you. It just does it in the language of competencies rather than test names.
Read "How you will be evaluated"
Every USA Hire announcement lists the competencies the assessments measure, under a heading like "How you will be evaluated". OPM's own help centre gives the method for turning that list into test names. Each competency points at one assessment:
So an announcement listing Reading Comprehension, Integrity/Honesty and Interpersonal Skills means two assessments, Reading and Interaction. One listing Reasoning, Decision Making and Attention to Detail means three: Reasoning, Judgment and Interaction. When you open the link, the Assessment Activities page lists the same assessments in the order you will take them.
What OPM's lookup data shows by grade
OPM publishes a spreadsheet that agencies use to look up the battery for each series and grade. Counting the standard combinations in it shows a clear pattern. The percentages below are the share of series at each grade whose battery includes the assessment, not the share of applicants.
Three things stand out.
- Reading hands over to Reasoning at GS-9. Below that grade almost every battery has Reading and very few have Reasoning. From GS-9 upwards it flips. If you are applying across that line, you may need both.
- Judgment grows with seniority. About a third of GS-7 batteries use it, most at GS-12 and every one at GS-15. The more senior the job, the more your answers on the scenario test count.
- Math is rare but concentrated. It appears in a small set of job families such as finance, accounting, budget, pay and contracting, and where it appears it is weighted. If your announcement lists Arithmetic, take it seriously.
Battery size follows from that. In OPM's data, 2,111 combinations use three assessments, 1,103 use two and 273 use four. OPM says the battery could take up to three hours, and that most applicants finish in about an hour and a half.
The Interaction Assessment is in every battery
Every standard battery includes the Interaction Assessment, a questionnaire about how you work, with no clock. What changes from job to job is which competencies it is scored against. Integrity/Honesty is scored in every battery, Interpersonal Skills in 99%, Attention to Detail in 94%, Teamwork in 91% and Flexibility in 89%, down to Accountability in 3%.
Two batteries that work differently
- Student trainee posts (series ending in 99, grades 3 to 11) use the Early Career Talent Assessment instead of the standard battery. It has two parts: choosing which of two statements is more true of you, then rating responses to work scenarios from Highly Ineffective to Highly Effective. It takes about 45 minutes and was designed to run on a phone.
- Supervisory posts can add the Federal Supervisor Assessment, part of OPM's core package since June 2026: a situational inventory and a behavioural index, about an hour.
What happens to your answers
Each assessment is scored, then the scores are weighted into one battery score for the job, on a scale from 70 to 100. The weights are set for the series and grade and are not published. In 13 series OPM also applies a government-wide cut score, including human resources (0201), management and program analysis (0343), accounting (0510), budget (0560), contracting (1102) and IT (2210), and on average 20 to 30% of applicants fall below it where it applies. Elsewhere you cannot fail, but the score decides which category you are placed in, and referrals come from the top one.
You never see any of it. OPM does not release scores or cut scores, though the agency may tell you your category. And you cannot retake an assessment for 12 months: your answers are kept and re-scored for every job that uses the same assessment in that time, at any agency.
That reuse is also why a shortcut on USA Hire is a bad bet: it is not a bet on one job, but on every federal job you apply to for a year.
Tests you will not find here
Some jobs add assessments outside the standard battery: the Writing Skills Assessment, the Data Skills Assessment, the Program and Project Management Assessment, and custom agency exams such as the CBP Officer entrance exam. The announcement names them if they apply. We do not simulate them, because they are free-text, file-based or agency-owned and could not be marked faithfully.
You can practise the Occupational Reasoning, Reading, Math, Judgment and Interaction assessments, and both parts of the Early Career Talent Assessment, at our USA Hire hub. Each has the real five-minute clock per question where the real one does, no going back, and feedback that tells you what went wrong, which OPM never will.