Prometric Nursing Exam Fees by Gulf Authority (DHA, SCFHS, QCHP, MOHAP): A Comparison

The exam fee is one of the few costs in a Gulf licensing budget you pay directly, in your own name, to the test vendor — and it is the one most often quoted stale. Search for it and you will get a confident number for every authority. Most of those numbers are second-hand, because most authorities do not print the fee in a stable public document: you pay it to Prometric at the moment you book, and the binding figure is the one on the payment screen.

So this guide does two honest things instead of pretending to a neat table of nine prices. It gives you the one fee a regulator actually publishes, and it compares what is genuinely knowable and durable — the vendor, the currency, where each fee is confirmed, and the retake, reschedule and refund rules that decide the real cost far more than the headline number does. It is fees and logistics only — no exam content.

Who tests through which vendor — and it is not all Prometric

Before any fee, settle the vendor, because two Gulf authorities are not on Prometric at all and their fees are charged somewhere else entirely.

The two Pearson VUE exceptions matter for cost because they are billed through a different company's booking system — the Prometric guide explains why Abu Dhabi and Oman are exceptions, and it is not a technicality.

The one fee a regulator actually publishes: the DHA

Dubai is the exception that proves the rule. The DHA prints the exam fee per licensed title in its Healthcare Professional Licensing Assessment Guideline (CBT), alongside the exam code, duration, question count and pass score. At the review date the nursing entries all carry the same fee:

Note what this fixes: the band you will have seen quoted — USD 180 to 300, depending on profession — is a range read across the whole guideline, and its low end belongs to someone else (the aesthetician entry in the allied-health section). Find your title, read its row. The full DHA cost breakdown sets this fee in the context of the rest of the bill — most of which is not yours to pay.

SCFHS, QCHP and MOHAP: set by the authority, paid at booking

For the other Prometric authorities, the nursing exam fee is set by the regulator and collected by Prometric at booking. We are deliberately not printing a dirham or dollar figure for them, because they do not publish one in a stable document the way the DHA does, and a number lifted from a blog or an agency page is exactly the kind of stale figure this page exists to warn you off. Where each is confirmed:

The costs that decide the real total: retakes, reschedules and refunds

The headline fee is rarely what blows a budget. These structural rules do, and unlike the amounts they are stable enough to plan around.

A retake is another full fee

Fail, and you pay the exam fee again from scratch — there is no discounted second sitting. Attempts are also capped, and for the DHA the cap is counted across the whole UAE rather than per authority, so a wasted booking is not free in either money or attempts. See attempts and retakes.

Rescheduling carries a centre-specific charge

Prometric's own Test Center Regulations leave reschedule and cancellation windows and fees to the programme, and the DHA Manual for Professional Assessment states that rescheduling or cancelling the DHA Prometric exam should be done five calendar days before the exam date, through the Prometric website, and that a centre-specific charge is collected by Prometric to change an appointment. There is no single published reschedule fee to memorise — it depends on where you booked, which is why the round number that circulates is worth nothing to you.

The exam fee is non-refundable

Clause 4.24 of the same DHA manual is blunt: exam fees are non-refundable, and this includes rescheduling, cancellation and/or no show up. A missed sitting does not count as a failed attempt against your cap — but you do not get the money back either. Other authorities set their own refund rules; assume nothing and check yours before you pay.

How to budget the exam fee properly

• Confirm your authority and vendor first.Abu Dhabi and Oman are Pearson VUE; the rest are Prometric. The fee lives on the right vendor's booking site.
• For the DHA, read your title's row in the CBT guideline. For everyone else, take the figure from the payment screen at booking, not from a summary.
• Budget a contingency for one reschedule or one retake — and remember neither the exam fee nor a no-show comes back.
• Do not fold the exam fee into a single “Prometric total” with verification, attestation or visa costs. Those are separate processes — the cost breakdown keeps them apart.

The bottom line

There is one Gulf nursing exam fee published in an official document — the DHA's USD 240 per nursing title — and for every other authority the real fee is the one on the booking screen at the moment you pay. What is stable, and worth planning around, is the structure: pay the vendor directly, a retake is a full fee against a capped number of attempts, a reschedule costs a centre-specific charge, and the money does not come back. Confirm the amount on the official portal, budget the retake you hope not to need, and ignore any total that quotes a single price for “the Prometric” across nine different regulators. Still deciding where to apply? Start with the authority comparison.

Sources

• DHA Healthcare Professional Licensing Assessment Guideline (CBT) — the only Gulf nursing exam fee published per title (USD 240 for Registered Nurse, Assistant Nurse and Registered Midwife). Edition dated May 2026 at the time of review.
• DHA Manual for Professional Assessment (Oral/CBT), version 1.1 — clause 4.24 (non-refundable exam fees, including reschedule, cancellation and no-show) and the five-calendar-day reschedule window with a centre-specific change charge.
• Prometric — Test Center Regulations (PDF) — the vendor rules common to its Gulf programmes; reschedule and cancellation terms are set per programme.
• Prometric — DHA, SCFHS, QCHP / DHP, MOHAP, NHRA Bahrain and Kuwait MOH — the Prometric booking programmes where each fee is charged and confirmed.
• Pearson VUE — DOH Abu Dhabi and Pearson VUE — OMSB Oman — the two Gulf nursing exams that are not on Prometric, billed through a different vendor.