New Jersey Road Signs and Their Meanings

The MVC's own Knowledge Test page tells you what to study, which thirteen languages the written test comes in, how to book an interpreter and what a certified interpreter for a deaf applicant has to be — and never gives a question count or a pass mark. The numbers are in the manual that page sends you to. Chapter 2 of the New Jersey Driver Manual, New Jersey Driver Testing, states that the knowledge test consists of 50 questions, and the Test Requirements table on the following page sets the written standard at 80 percent, or 40 of the 50 questions answered correctly. If you have been hunting the MVC website for those figures and coming up empty, that is where they went.

None of that 80 percent is set aside for signs. New Jersey publishes a single written standard covering the whole test, sets no separate sign threshold beneath it, and never breaks the 50 questions down by subject. There is one wrinkle in how the manual counts, and it works in your favor: an organ-donation survey item rides along with the paper without belonging to the fifty the standard is measured against. Everything that does count is scored together, which means a driver who is strong on rules and vague on signs is relying on the sign questions being a small slice of a paper whose composition New Jersey has never described.

New Jersey keeps its sign reference at the back of the book. Chapters one through ten of the New Jersey Driver Manual cover the license system, driver testing, driver responsibility, safe driving rules, defensive driving, drinking, drugs and health, privileges and penalties, sharing the road, vehicle information and a complete motorcycle manual; the signs, signals and road markings are in the first of the manual's two appendix chapters, Chapter 11: Driver Safety, beginning on page 211. The manual divides signs into three basic categories — Warning, which warn of hazards ahead that are difficult to see; Guidance, which identify the route to a destination; and Regulatory, which regulate traffic speed and movement — then treats Road Work Signs and Special Warning Signs alongside them, and the citations on this bank use those headings because they are the manual's own. One consequence of the layout is worth knowing before you start reading: the sign reference sits nearly two hundred pages behind the chapter that tells you the knowledge test exists, so a driver working front to back reaches the signs last.

The framework these questions lean on is a grid, not a paragraph. New Jersey's manual lays out color, shape, number of sides and message together in one table, and the column that does the work is the third one: an octagon has eight sides and is used for STOP signs only, a red triangle has three and is YIELD, a yellow pennant has three and warns of a no-passing zone, a yellow pentagon has five and means school, and the railroad crossbuck is simply listed as an X with no side count at all. A driver who can count sides can place an unfamiliar sign before reading a word of it, which is exactly the skill the table is built to teach — and it is why several questions in this set turn on shape rather than on wording.

34 published New Jersey road-sign questions, each with an explanation and a citation to the handbook section it came from.

Content reviewed against official driver handbooks · August 12, 2026