Editorial Standards

This site has no author byline. A name proves nothing; a source can be checked. Here is the method.

Every regulatory fact cites a Food Code section

The ServSafe® Manager exam tests the FDA Food Code. Every regulatory statement we publish — a temperature, a time, a holding rule, a reportable illness — names its section, and you can go read it (fda.gov). We build against the 2022 Food Code (10th edition) as amended by the Supplement of 4 November 2024 — the edition the exam's own materials name. That Supplement changed definitions and some wording, but no temperature, time, cooling, holding, date-marking, handwashing, allergen or reportable-illness number.

How the practice questions are made

All 203 questions here are original — written by us, against the Food Code, each keyed to a cited section, 95 distinct sections across the bank. Nothing is copied, leaked or reconstructed from a real exam; real items are copyright-protected and officially secret, and any site hinting otherwise is lying to you. Then we check them by machine: at build time every question runs against the parsed text of the section it cites. The item is rejected if the section does not exist, if a numeric answer is absent from that section's own paragraph, or if a wrong option carries the same value as the right one. The verifier is itself tested against planted defects.

One honest limit. 92 of the 203 turn on a numeric value; those are the ones a machine can prove. The other 111 turn on non-numeric rules — approved sources, exclude versus restrict, monitoring versus verification — where only the citation is machine-checked and the wording was read and checked by a human.

The sentence we stand behind: every item cites a Food Code section, and every numeric answer is checked against that section's own text. Not "every item independently verified" — that would not be true.

What we will not publish

No pass rates. No percentiles. We have no user data, and would not publish rates off a sample this small even once we do. Anyone quoting a ServSafe Manager pass rate is repeating an uncited number or extrapolating from people who chose to post a score — and failures rarely post. Your result is a raw score out of 80, a percentage, and PASS or NOT YET against 70%. Nothing more.

No blueprint, no weighting. The exam has no published content outline — no domain list, no percentage split, no per-topic question count on any official surface, even though the accreditation standard the program is held to says examination specifications "shall be publicly available." So we do not invent one. Our drill sets follow the ten chapters of the official Manager Book, 9th Edition, labeled as book chapters, no percentage attached. See a site telling you what percentage of the exam a chapter is? Someone made it up.

70%, not 75%. The live official FAQ (servsafe.com) says 70% — at least 56 of 80 scored questions. A ©2020 handbook PDF still sitting on the official site says 75%, and most of the internet copied the PDF. We went with the maintained pages and re-check them quarterly. The whole case, with both sources and the arithmetic, is set out on its own page: the ServSafe passing score, and our working

How we handle things nobody has published

Some facts about this exam are not public, and we would rather say so than fill the gap. Where the administrator publishes a number, we state it. Where candidates report something consistently but no official source confirms it, we write "candidates commonly report." Where nothing reliable exists — the online-proctored time limit, whether you may flag and revisit questions — we say so rather than dress a guess as fact. The simulator inherits that rule: it presents 90 questions and scores 80, because the real exam does. Its two-hour clock is labeled as the published limit for print and in-person sessions; its navigation is permissive, with a note that the real rules are unpublished.

What we are not

Not affiliated with the National Restaurant Association or ServSafe. We are an independent study tool. The ServSafe mark belongs to its owner; we use it only to describe the exam we help you prepare for.

Not a substitute for the official course or exam. You cannot get certified here. Buy the real exam from the administrator, and take the official course if your jurisdiction or employer requires training hours.

Partly free, and specific about which parts. One full-length 90-question run is free with a free account and no card, scored honestly — including when it comes back NOT YET. The question-by-question review, with the Food Code section under every answer, is free on the same account. Paid buys more practice and the reference material — a second run, the ten chapter drill sets, the edition-change questions, the printable temperature card. Two Runs is $19, Full Prep $34, both one-time with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Explanations are not the paid part, and no page here may say they are.

Corrections

Food Code editions change, prices drift, official pages get edited. Find a number here that contradicts its cited section, tell us, and we fix it and say so. Every price and test fact is on a quarterly re-check.

Every other page points here instead of a byline. The facts start here: the ServSafe certification guide