Who Writes and Checks It
Everything here — the questions, their explanations and the guides — is written and checked in-house at The Mahlangu Elites (Pty) Ltd, the South African company that makes the app. There is no external review panel and no professional body behind this material, and we would rather say so than imply one. Nothing on this site has been reviewed or approved by the NHBRC, and no part of it is a professional engineering opinion or advice for a real building.
What we do claim is narrow and checkable: every factual statement we publish is traceable to a named source, and the ones that are not traceable are not published. The rest of this page is what that means in practice.
How a Practice Question Is Checked
Questions are written against the published SANS 10400 and SANS 2001 standards and the NHBRC Home Builders Manual, and each one records the part it was written from. Before a question appears on a public page here, it goes through the same three steps:
- Exported, not retyped. The question, its options and its answer come out of the app’s own question bank by script, so the website and the app cannot drift into disagreeing about what the answer is.
- Checked against the passage it cites. Somebody opens the part named, finds the clause, table, figure or definition, and confirms that it supports the answer marked correct.
- Explained from that passage. The “why” under each answer is written from the passage that was just read, not from memory and not from the question. It is our own wording; we do not reproduce the text of a standard.
The questions published on the questions page and in the free practice test were last exported and re-checked on 6 September 2026, and that date is printed on both pages.
What Fails the Check, and What Happens to It
A question that cannot be verified against the source it names does not get published, even when its answer looks obviously right. Of the first twenty questions in our bank, six are held back from the public pages today, for three reasons:
- No reference at all, so there is nothing to check the answer against.
- A part but no clause, table or figure — an address for the document but not for the passage, which is not specific enough to verify.
- A reference we could not confirm: one points at a standard we do not hold, and one points at a table that does not support the answer marked correct.
Those questions stay in the app’s bank, where they are flagged for review, and stay off the indexed pages read by people about to sit an assessment. It is a smaller public sample than we could otherwise show, and it is the trade we would rather make.
Official Facts, and Facts That Are Only Reported
Much of what circulates about the technical assessment — the number of questions, the time allowed, the mark needed to pass — is not published by the NHBRC at all. We keep the two apart everywhere, in these words:
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Official
Official means the NHBRC publishes it. Fees, the study material, the booking route and the two attempts within 30 days are official, and each page carrying them says when it was checked against nhbrc.org.za.
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Reported
Candidates report means exactly that: consistent accounts from candidates and preparation providers, useful for knowing what to expect, and not a rule. The 25 questions and the 13 needed to pass are in this category, and are labelled as such every time they appear.
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Our setting
Ours means it is a setting of this product and not a statement about the assessment — the 80% practice pass mark, the length of a practice paper, and the eight study areas we group questions into.
Every guide ends with the sources it was checked against, written out in plain words, including the ones that are only reports. Start at the guides hub if you want to see what that looks like.
What We Deliberately Do Not Publish
This is the part of an editorial policy that is actually testable, so it is worth being specific. As of 6 September 2026 we do not publish:
- The text of a standard. SANS is published and sold by the South African Bureau of Standards. We cite the passage and explain the reasoning in our own words; you read the passage in your own authorised copy.
- Topic-by-topic technical guides stating dimensions or requirements. Our guides explain how the assessment works, how to study for it and how to read the standards. They stop short of asserting what a specific requirement is, because that would need a competent person to confirm the applicability and the exceptions, and we do not have one.
- Pass rates or failure statistics. The NHBRC publishes none, and an invented one would be the most quotable thing on the site.
- “The actual exam questions”. Nobody outside the NHBRC has them, and an NHBRC tender of its own describes questions drawn at random per candidate. Anything sold under that description is a practice pack with a dishonest label.
- Any claim of NHBRC endorsement, affiliation or approval, or that passing here counts towards registration. It does not.
Corrections
If a question is wrong, or a page here disagrees with what your provincial customer care office told you, tell us. Report it through the support form or the app’s feedback option, and quote the question or the page.
A report is checked against the standard the question cites. If the question is wrong it is corrected; if it cannot be verified it is removed from the public pages rather than argued about. Where a correction changes what a page says, the reviewed date on that page moves with it — which is why those dates are maintained by hand and not stamped by the deployment.
We answer support mail within one working day. Who we are and how to reach us is on the about page.
When This Page Is Wrong
Standards are revised, fees change, and the NHBRC updates its own pages without telling us. Every dated claim on this site is a claim about the day it was checked, not a promise about today. If you find one that has gone stale, that is a correction too, and the same form reaches us.