Can You Take the Patente B Exam in English? No. Here Is Why the Rumor Will Not Die
No. The Patente B theory exam is in Italian. Not in English, not in Urdu, not in Spanish. If you live in Italy and you need a license, you will take the quiz in Italian, and no amount of asking at the motorizzazione changes that.
We get this question every week, usually from someone who has been told the opposite by a friend, a driving school, or a Facebook group. So here is the whole story, once, so you can stop waiting for a version of the exam that is not coming.
Where the rumor comes from
It used to be true. Until the start of 2011, the theory exam was available in several foreign languages, and plenty of people who moved here before then took it that way. In January 2011 the Ministry of Transport rewrote the exam procedure and dropped the foreign-language versions. Since then the test has been Italian only, with French and German available on request because of Italy's official language minorities in Valle d'Aosta and Alto Adige. English was never one of the protected languages, so it went and it has not come back.
Fifteen years later, the memory of the old exam is still doing the rounds. Someone's cousin took it in English in 2009, so obviously you can too. You cannot.
"But there is a law coming"
There is a bill. There is always a bill. The current one, Senate bill 1543, would change article 116 of the Codice della Strada to let residents request the exam in English at their own expense. It was assigned to a Senate committee in August 2025. Bills like this get proposed, get a sympathetic newspaper article, and then sit in committee until the legislature ends. Nothing about this one suggests a different fate, and even if it passed tomorrow the ministry would need months to write the decree, translate 7,000 questions, and roll it out.
So the honest answer is: no, and do not plan your life around a bill.
The EU version of this rumor, the one about Brussels creating a single English-language driving test for every member state, is a separate story with the same ending. We covered it in EU Driver License Reform: The Truth About the "Universal" Exam.
What foreigners actually get
Nothing extra. There is no oral exam in English, no interpreter, no dictionary, no extra time because Italian is not your first language. You get the same 30 true-or-false questions, drawn from the same official bank of about 7,000, in the same 20 minutes, with the same limit of 3 errors, as everyone else.
Why this is less bad than it sounds
The theory exam is not a language test. It is a reading test on a closed set of sentences. Every question you can be asked already exists, word for word, in the official question bank. The vocabulary is limited and repetitive: precedenza, carreggiata, senso unico, sorpasso, the same 200 or so words over and over. And the questions are built on a small number of patterns designed to trip you up on a single word, which is a problem for Italians too.
That means an English speaker does not need to learn Italian to pass. You need to learn the exam's Italian. That is a much smaller job, and it is exactly the job our Patente B program does: every official question explained in English, the vocabulary that actually appears, the traps, and practice quizzes in the real exam format so that on the day nothing is new.
Monthly at €99 or three months for €249. Start here, and if you want the full picture of the process first, our Patente B exam guide covers it start to finish.
And the next time someone tells you the exam is coming in English, send them this. In the meantime you will be learning Italian with Ready Set Italia that not only helps you understand the Codice Della Strada, but also helps you integrate successfully into the culture you have chosen to reside within. We’re in your corner rooting for you all!
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