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. They are also the two authorities where where you hand over the money is not the booking screen at all: Abu Dhabi collects it in TAMM before Pearson VUE opens, and Oman blocks online card payment outright in six countries. That section is below, and it is the part most budgets get wrong.

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:

Where you actually pay — and the two places it is not the booking screen

“Pay the vendor at booking” is the right rule for most of the Gulf, and it is wrong in two specific ways that strand real candidates. Both are published by the vendor itself, and neither shows up in the fee round-ups.

Abu Dhabi: you pay DOH in TAMM before Pearson VUE will open

For a DOH exam the money does not start with the vendor. Pearson VUE's own DOH examinations page sets the order out plainly: once your application is approved for exam by the Health Professionals Licensing Department, you “will be able to initiate your pre-booking fees in TAMM”. Only then, “following the completion of the DOH payment in TAMM, a link to redirect candidates to Pearson page will appear under the action drop downand will be activated in your TAMM account”.

So the sequence in Abu Dhabi is approval → pay DOH in TAMM → the Pearson link appears → choose date, time and centre. A nurse who goes straight to Pearson VUE looking for a price, or who waits for a booking link that has not been unlocked yet, is stuck at a step that is not broken.

Oman: six countries cannot pay online at all

OMSB bills through Pearson VUE, and you can normally pay by card online or by phone. But the OMSB page carves out a list: “Online payment for the exam booking is not available for the below countries” — Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Lebanon, Nigeria, Pakistan and Tanzania — and tells candidates there to buy a voucher through the bank transfer option instead.

Read the trigger carefully, because it is the part people get backwards: the restriction attaches to the country you sit the exam in, not your nationality. A Pakistani or Nigerian nurse testing in Muscat, Dubai or anywhere off that list pays online like everyone else. The same nurse testing at home does not. If you are applying from one of those six countries, this is worth settling before you plan the trip — see the OMSB Oman process guide.

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 the DHA exam 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 DHA exam fee is non-refundable — and that is Dubai's rule, not the Gulf's

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.

Read that as the region's rule and it will cost you money in Oman, because Oman publishes the opposite.

Oman refunds in full if you cancel 48 hours ahead

OMSB bills through Pearson VUE, and Pearson VUE's OMSB programme FAQsets out the whole money policy in plain terms. Rescheduling “at least 48 hours prior to the exam datethrough Pearson website or by calling Pearson customer service helpline” is “free of charge”. And on cancelling: “If the exam is cancelled 48 hours prior to the exam date, a full refund will be issued to the same credit card used for booking the exam. The refund takes 10-14 business days.”

Inside that window the protection disappears — rescheduling or cancelling less than 48 hours ahead “may result in forfeiting your exam fees”. So the practical rule for an Oman candidate is the one no Dubai candidate has: if you already know you cannot sit it, cancel two days out and take the refund, rather than letting the seat lapse.

The point of the table is not that Oman is cheaper. It is that the refund rule travels with the authority, not with the Gulf, and the two authorities that publish one disagree completely. For the other six, the policy you are agreeing to is on the vendor's booking screen at the moment you pay — read it there, before you pay, not after you need it.

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 — except in Abu Dhabi, where you pay DOH in TAMM before Pearson VUE opens at all.
• Check how you are allowed to pay, not just how much. If you will sit the OMSB exam in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Lebanon, Nigeria, Pakistan or Tanzania, online card payment is off the table — and in Pakistan and Lebanon you must book at the centre in person, in cash, two business days ahead.
• 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 read your own authority's refund rule before you assume the money is gone. In Dubai it is: clause 4.24 covers reschedules, cancellations and no-shows alike. In Oman a cancellation 48 hours ahead is refunded in full.
• 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: you usually pay the vendor directly — though Abu Dhabi takes its pre-booking fee in TAMM first, and Oman refuses online card payment in six countries — and a retake is always a full fee. What is notstable across the region is whether the money comes back: Dubai puts non-refundability in writing and charges you to reschedule, Oman reschedules free and refunds a 48-hour cancellation in full, and the other six publish nothing you can plan around. Confirm the amount on the official portal, read the refund terms on the screen you pay on, 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 on all four nursing entries: Registered Nurse, Assistant Nurse, Registered Midwife and the in-active Assistant Midwife). Edition stamped Updated — Sep 2026 at the time of review; DHA republishes it at the same filename, so check the stamp on your copy.
• 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— the two Gulf nursing exams that are not on Prometric start here, and this page is also the source for Abu Dhabi's payment order: the pre-booking fee is initiated in TAMM after licensing-department approval, and the Pearson redirect link appears “under the action drop down” in TAMM only once that DOH payment completes.
• Pearson VUE — DOH CBT exam booking steps (PDF) — linked from the Resources block of the DOH page above, and the only place the click-path is written out: you pay from the Alerts tab and book from the My Requests tab, each behind its own three-dot Action menu.
• Pearson VUE — OMSB Oman— the source for the six countries where online payment for the exam booking is not available (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Lebanon, Nigeria, Pakistan, Tanzania) and the bank-transfer voucher route, plus the FAQ stating that in Lebanon and Pakistan booking is only possible in person at the test centre, at least two business days ahead, paying cash only. The same FAQ is the source for Oman's refund terms — free reschedule and full refund to the card if you act at least 48 hours before the appointment, the refund taking 10–14 business days; fees forfeited inside that window; the seat lost if you arrive more than 15 minutes late; and a new payment for every booking. Page stamped Last updated 2 September 2026 at the time of review.