Most guides tell you what the ACT contains. Far fewer tell you what the three days are actually like: the fitness tests and the 2km run standard for your role, the medical, the interview, where the centres are and what to pack. This page covers all of it, says which details nobody official will confirm, and where every claim comes from.
The Army Cognitive Test is not a standalone exam you book. It sits inside the recruitment process, and you reach it after your initial application and eligibility checks rather than at the start.
The test itself is delivered by Mindmill, an external assessment provider the Army uses. If mindmill.co.uk appears during your application, that is expected - it is not a phishing attempt or a broken link.
Community-reported, and consistent with the Army's own recruitment portal.
This is the part candidates most often arrive unprepared for, and it is officially confirmed. Army staff answering on the Army's own careers Q&A state that you will take literacy and numeracy tests depending on your GCSE Maths and English grades, or the equivalent.
For Scottish applicants, Army staff confirmed that National 5 is treated as the GCSE equivalent.
Their advice for that part is refreshingly ordinary: brush up your Maths and English using GCSE revision material, and they specifically name BBC Bitesize. That is the Army's own recommendation, not ours.
Official - ask.jobs.army.mod.uk, answered by named Army staff.
Three days and two nights. That is the Army's own description of soldier assessment, and it is the first thing to get straight, because a lot of candidates still turn up expecting a single day. You travel up the day before your start date, the Army books your train tickets for a first visit, and you are assessed throughout your stay, not only during the formal tests.
You find out your result before you leave. There is no waiting for a letter.
Official - jobs.army.mod.uk, soldier assessment page, and Army staff on ask.jobs.army.mod.uk.
A recruiter answering on the Army's own Q&A laid the visit out like this, top to bottom: the medical, a short five-question brief, the cognitive test, then the literacy and numeracy tests if you need them, a command task, the three fitness tests, and a final discussion and interview before you depart.
Nobody makes you do press-ups for getting something wrong. But the same recruiter was blunt about the other side of it: it is in effect a two-day interview, and a poor showing anywhere feeds into your final grade.
Official staff answer, ask.jobs.army.mod.uk. The exact order can vary by centre and intake.
There are three tests and they can be done in any order. Mid-thigh pull: stand at a bar set to mid-thigh height and pull up as hard as you can for five seconds, two attempts, best force counts. Medicine ball throw: sit with your back against a wall and throw a 4kg ball as far as you can, three attempts, longest counts. 2km run: after an 800m warm-up, a continuous 2km on a flat course, in all weathers.
The standard depends on the role you are applying for, and it is the same regardless of gender. The Army publishes it on each role page, so check yours. To show the range: Infantry Soldier is a 76kg pull, a 3.1m throw and 2km in 10 min 15 sec. A Royal Logistic Corps Driver is 50kg, 2.7m and 11 min 30 sec. A recruiter gave Army Air Corps as 50kg, 2.7m and 12 minutes. Most non-infantry roles sit at the 50kg and 2.7m end; the run time is what moves.
Your BMI is checked too. The usual window is 18 to 28, with males up to 32 sometimes considered, and a waist measurement taken where the number is high because of muscle.
The assessors are watching effort as much as the numbers. If you do not pass the run, Army staff say you are given the chance to come back and re-attempt it rather than being out.
Official - jobs.army.mod.uk fitness page and role pages (Infantry Soldier, RLC Driver), read 12 Oct 2026; Army staff on ask.jobs.army.mod.uk for the AAC figures and the re-attempt. Standards change; the role page wins if it differs from this.
A doctor sees you in person. It is a full health review: your medical history, your current health and a head-to-toe examination, for which you undress to your underwear. No needles and no blood tests on the day. Even where some of your records were reviewed in advance, the decision is only made once the doctor has seen you, and in some cases a second opinion from the senior Army doctor is sought.
One thing happens before you go: a family origin questionnaire for Sickle Cell Trait. Depending on your answers you may be asked for a blood test ahead of assessment. The trait does not stop you joining, but the Army asks anyone at risk to wait to hear before starting fitness training.
Official - jobs.army.mod.uk soldier assessment and getting-ready pages.
The interview comes at the end, after the tests, and it is a discussion about you, your reasons and your choice of role, not a quiz. By then the staff have watched you for two days, including a command task done with the other candidates, and that is what the interview draws on.
You leave with a result and a grade. What the Army does not publish is the grading scale itself or how the parts are weighted, so treat any confident breakdown you read elsewhere as someone's guess. What is official is that the whole stay counts towards it.
Interview placement and "assessed throughout": official. The grading scale: unpublished, deliberately not invented here.
Regular soldier assessment runs at four centres: Lichfield in Staffordshire, Pirbright in Surrey, Glencorse near Edinburgh, and Belfast. You are invited to the one closest to you; you do not choose.
For a first visit the Army's travel team books your train tickets to the nearest station, and candidates report that at Lichfield the station is the meeting point from which you are collected. If you would rather drive, ask your recruiter before the day rather than turning up in a car.
Centres and travel: Army staff on ask.jobs.army.mod.uk. Details are confirmed in the joining instructions on your candidate portal, which take precedence.
Your joining instructions on the candidate portal carry the definitive list, including which forms of ID to bring. Until then, this is what Army staff tell candidates: arrive in smart clothing; bring clothes and toiletries for two nights; bring sports kit and trainers, because you will be tested outdoors in whatever the weather does; and bring something casual for the evenings, because candidates are usually together then. Everything else is provided.
Eat a proper breakfast, take cereal bars or fruit rather than crisps and chocolate, drink water through the day, and aim for seven to eight hours' sleep in the weeks before. That is the Army's own advice, not ours.
Official - ask.jobs.army.mod.uk (Royal Military Police soldier's answer) and the Army's getting-ready page.
This deserves its own section, because it matters more than it sounds and because nobody official has answered it.
A candidate asked the Army directly, on the Army's own Q&A, whether you are given plain paper for the number reasoning section. The question is still sitting there unanswered.
Meanwhile people who have actually sat it consistently say you are given paper and a pen, and that it is close to essential for the Orientation section - where the usual technique is to sketch the arrangement rather than hold it in your head.
Our honest position: practise as though you will have paper, but do not build a method that collapses without it. Ask your Army Careers Adviser to confirm before the day. If you get a definitive answer, we would genuinely like to hear it.
Community-reported. Asked of the Army and unanswered.
The ACT measures trainability rather than knowledge - how quickly and accurately you take in new information and act on it under time pressure. That is the quality being selected for, because trade training is intensive and time-limited.
It also explains something that frustrates a lot of candidates: the Army does not publish an official practice test. The reasoning you will hear from people close to the process is that the assessment is meant to be somewhat unfamiliar, because coping with unfamiliar information at speed is precisely what is being measured.
That does not make preparation pointless, and it is worth being clear why. You cannot revise the answers, because there is nothing to memorise. What you can remove is the part of the difficulty that comes from never having seen the format - the seconds lost working out what a question is even asking. That is a real and legitimate advantage, and it is the only one on offer.
Test purpose is officially described. The reasoning for withholding practice material is community-reported.
Officially, re-attempts exist in some form: the Army's own Q&A states that if you do not pass an element during assessment, you are given the opportunity to return and re-attempt it at a later date.
What is not officially published is how many attempts you get, or how long you wait between them. You will find confident numbers online - three attempts, twenty-eight days, scores valid for twenty-four months. We are not repeating them, because when we checked, those figures appeared only on third-party prep sites and several of those pages were describing the older BARB test, not the ACT.
Your Army Careers Adviser is the only reliable source for your own situation. Ask them.
Re-attempts: official. The specific numbers: unverified, and deliberately left out.
A resit before you join is one thing. Once you have enlisted, the score on your record is the score you keep - there is no sitting it again in service.
That matters years later rather than on the day. Soldiers looking at a transfer find they are held to the GTI they joined with, so a score that was just enough for your first role can quietly close the door on your second. Scoring higher than you strictly need costs you nothing now, and keeps options open for the rest of your career.
Post-enlistment finality is published on the basis of first-hand professional knowledge, not a public official source. Treat it as such.
Get familiar with all five section formats so none of them is a surprise on the day. Practise against a clock, because the time pressure is the difficulty. Work on your weakest section rather than the one you enjoy - the GTI reflects overall processing, so one slow section drags the whole number down.
And take the Army's own advice on the literacy and numeracy side seriously, because it is the part most people forget is happening at all.
Practise all five sections free →Five free questions per section. No account, no sign up.
Army ACT Prep