Massachusetts Court Officer exam — next exam dates & alerts

The Massachusetts Trial Court ran a Court Officer Entrance Exam in 2026. Registration opened on 30 March 2026 and has since closed. The exam fee is $100 at registration, with waivers available for eligible candidates, and the exam is administered for the Trial Court by an outside vendor, I/O Solutions.

Massachusetts publishes far less about this exam than New York City publishes about its uniformed exams — there is no equivalent of a DCAS Notice of Examination laying out the ability areas, the pass mark and the salary schedule in one public document. The orientation and preparation guide is provided free to confirmed registrants through the vendor's dashboard, and the Trial Court states that it and the vendor endorse no other study guides.

One sourcing note we would rather state than hide: mass.gov refuses automated requests from our network, so the facts on this page were corroborated through the public search index rather than read out of the pages themselves. They are accurate to the best of our checking, and they are a weaker class of evidence than the New York facts on the sibling pages, which came from the PDFs directly. Open the official links below before you act on anything here.

There is no publicly posted content outline for this exam, which is the most practically important thing to know about it. Where DCAS prints the ability areas and the pass mark in a downloadable notice, and New York State publishes a test-structure description for the court officer-trainee exam, Massachusetts routes its preparation material through the vendor dashboard after you register and pay.

That has a direct consequence for how you prepare: the only endorsed preparation material is the guide the Trial Court gives registrants, and the Trial Court states that neither it nor I/O Solutions endorses any other study guide. Be sceptical of any third-party product claiming to reproduce this exam's content — including, to be clear about our own position, ours. We do not prepare candidates for the Massachusetts exam and this page does not claim to.

If you are weighing Massachusetts against New York, the structural difference is bigger than the content difference. New York's court officer exam feeds a ranked statewide list that the courts canvass in score order. Massachusetts uses the exam as an eligibility gate in front of ordinary job postings.

This is where Massachusetts departs most sharply from the three New York City exams on this site. There is no numbered civil-service list to wait on and no rule-of-three certification: you pass the entrance exam, that makes you eligible, and you then apply to individual Trial Court postings at Jobs with the Court System as they open.

Practically, that changes what you are waiting for. A New York candidate who passes waits to be reached on a list and can do nothing to speed it up. A Massachusetts candidate who passes waits for a posting — and then competes on the application, the Physical Abilities Test, the structured oral interview and the psychological assessment.

It also changes what expiry means. A New York list dies on a statutory clock of one to four years and takes your rank with it. Massachusetts eligibility attaches to the exam cycle rather than to a ranked list, so confirm on the Trial Court's own pages how long a given exam result stays good before assuming it carries forward.