Lippincott Q&A Review for NCLEX-RN Review

Lippincott Q&A Review for NCLEX-RN is in its 14th edition, and on the publisher's own store it lists at $83.99 for the paperback, not the $50 that book roundups still quote. What that buys is 1,152 pages holding 37 practice tests organized by clinical topic plus 6 comprehensive exams, which is the largest stack of printed NCLEX practice on sale and also the most expensive NCLEX book we review.

Buy it if you have finished your content review and want raw volume to drill through. Skip it if you are still learning the material, because this book barely teaches: it tests, then explains the answer.

Two things to check before you click buy. The listing most search results still point at, ISBN 1975132106, is the 13th edition, and the publisher's own page for that ISBN now returns a not-found page. And the 14th edition was published on 27 February 2023, which means it was built for the test plan that expired on 31 March 2026.

Summary Table

The 14th edition on the publisher's own store, with both formats at the same price. Source: shop.lww.com (captured September 2026).

Lippincott Q&A Review Overview

This is a question book, not a review book. There are three short chapters at the front on the exam itself and on how to work through NCLEX items, and after that the book is practice tests and rationales the whole way down. If you want something that teaches nursing content, that is Saunders or HESI, not this.

The questions come with a provenance most books cannot claim. The publisher says they were tested and optimized against student performance data from Lippincott PrepU, its adaptive learning platform, so the items have been seen by real students before they reached the page.

What you get in the 14th edition:

• 37 topic tests across five clinical areas, so you can drill maternity or psych on its own rather than working front to back
• 6 comprehensive exams in Part 3, meant to be taken after the topic work as a readiness check
• Rationales for the wrong answers as well as the right one, which is the part that does the teaching here
• Next Generation NCLEX scenarios and case studies, added in this edition, plus every alternate item format on the exam
• A Content Mastery and Test-Taking Skill Self-Analysis worksheet that turns your results into a list of what to restudy
• A laboratory values tear-out sheet in both US Standard and International System units
• A study plan, a checklist and a table of risk factors for exam success at the front of the book

Lippincott Q&A Review For 2026

The practice is lopsided, and that is mostly correct

The 37 topic tests are not spread evenly. Seventeen of them cover adults with medical and surgical problems, nine cover children, five cover the childbearing family, five cover psychiatric and mental health nursing, and exactly one covers pharmacological and parenteral therapies.

Topic tests by clinical area, counted from the publisher's table of contents, September 2026.

The weighting toward adult medical and surgical nursing matches where most NCLEX items land, so that part is sensible. The single pharmacology test is the thing to plan around. Pharmacological and parenteral therapies is one of the largest client needs categories on the NCLEX-RN, and one test is not enough practice for it. Drug questions here are scattered through the clinical chapters instead, which is realistic, but it means you cannot use this book to drill pharmacology deliberately. Budget for that somewhere else.

The publisher will not tell you how many questions there are

Every roundup that covers this book, ours included until today, says it has more than 6,000 questions. That number appears nowhere on the publisher's product page. What Wolters Kluwer writes is "thousands of high-quality NCLEX-style review questions", and the cover says "thousands of questions appropriate for both U.S. and Canadian students". No figure, in either place.

The 6,000 claim traces back to marketing copy for older editions on retail listings. One verified purchaser on the publisher's own store puts it at 5,000 and more, and describes picking a subset because the full book was overwhelming, which is a fair warning about how a book this size actually gets used. We are not going to print a number the publisher does not stand behind. Count on 43 tests, and on more printed practice than you will finish.

This matters more than it sounds. When you are choosing between question sources, the count is the number everyone compares on, and here the honest answer is that the publisher has stopped making the claim. Our review methodology explains how we weight question volume when we score a resource, and an unverifiable count gets no credit.

Print only, so nothing scores you

A book cannot adapt, cannot track your accuracy over time, and cannot tell you whether you are tracking toward a pass. You mark answers, you read rationales, you fill in the self-analysis worksheet by hand. For some students that friction is useful and the worksheet is a genuinely good piece of design.

It is still a real limitation in 2026. The NCLEX stops somewhere between 85 and 150 items based on how you are performing, and no static book reproduces that. Pair this with something adaptive: UWorld and Archer Review both deliver computer adaptive practice, and our pass probability calculator shows how the stop rule works against your own results.

Built for the 2023 test plan, sold under the 2026 one

The product page says the questions are based on the latest NCSBN test plan. That was true when the book came out. The book came out on 27 February 2023, and NCSBN's current RN test plan took effect on 1 April 2026 and runs to 31 March 2029. The 14th edition is aligned to the plan that preceded it.

Keep this in proportion. Nursing content does not change when a test plan does, and the Next Generation item types this edition was rewritten for are still the item types on the exam. What shifts between plans is the weighting of the client needs categories and some wording of the activity statements. So the practice here is still good practice, but the book is no longer a guide to how the current exam is built, and at three and a half years old it is the second oldest edition on our NCLEX shelf, behind Made Incredibly Easy at ten.

Lippincott Q&A Review Pricing

One price, two formats, read on the publisher's store on 15 September 2026.

There is no cheaper tier and no subscription. Spread across 43 tests, $83.99 works out to $1.95 per test, or about 7.3 cents per printed page.

Two ways to pay less. The publisher's own page notes that your school may offer the title through Lippincott Direct at a lower price, so check with your program before buying retail. Retailers also discount independently, and the eBook and paperback being the same list price means there is no saving in going digital unless a seller makes one.

For comparison, on their publishers' own stores the HESI review lists at $80.99 in print and Kaplan at $54.99, both verified in the past week, and the other two books we cover sit lower still. Lippincott is the priciest of the five, and the only one that is mostly questions.

Who Lippincott Q&A Review Is Best For

• Students who have finished content review and want volume. This is the intended use, and 43 tests is a lot of runway
• Anyone who works better on paper. If screens wear you out and you want to write on the page, nothing digital matches this for printed question count
• Students drilling a weak clinical area. The topic tests are granular enough to hit "the child with neurologic health problems" specifically, which most question banks make harder than it should be
• Retakers who have already used the common digital banks and want a fresh set of items they have not seen

When You Might Look Elsewhere

• You are still learning the content. Saunders Comprehensive Review teaches the material and bundles questions with it, which is the better first purchase for most students
• You want the same idea in a friendlier format. NCLEX-RN Questions and Answers Made Incredibly Easy is the other big print question book from this publisher, and it puts rationales beside the questions rather than at the end. Its current edition is from 2016, so treat it as second hand drilling, not a replacement
• You want your practice scored and adaptive. UWorld is the standard answer here, and our NCLEX book roundup sets both against the rest of the shelf
• You want strategy rather than drills. Kaplan NCLEX-RN Prep is built around a decision framework for working through items and costs $29 less

Final Verdict

The practical advice is narrow. Buy the 14th edition, ISBN 9781975180386, and check whether your school offers it through Lippincott Direct first. Do not buy it as your only NCLEX resource, and do not buy it expecting the 6,000 questions the internet promises. Our NCLEX exam guide covers what the current test plan asks of you before you spend anything.

Lippincott Q&A Review FAQs

How much does Lippincott Q&A Review for NCLEX-RN cost?

$83.99 on the publisher's store, for either the paperback or the VitalSource Interactive eBook, verified 15 September 2026. There is no subscription and no cheaper tier. Your school may offer it through Lippincott Direct for less, and retailers discount independently.

How many practice questions does it include?

The publisher does not say. It describes "thousands" of questions without giving a figure, so the widely repeated 6,000 has no first-party source. What is documented is the structure: 37 topic tests plus 6 comprehensive exams, across 1,152 pages.

Is the 14th edition current for the 2026 NCLEX test plan?

Not quite. It was published on 27 February 2023 and built to the test plan in force then, while NCSBN's current RN test plan took effect on 1 April 2026. The content and the Next Generation item types are still relevant, but the category weightings it was written against have been superseded.

Is Lippincott Q&A better than Saunders?

They do different jobs. Saunders is a content review with questions attached and costs less. Lippincott is practice with almost no content teaching. If you buy one book, buy Saunders. If you have already reviewed the content and want to drill, Lippincott gives you more printed practice.

Is this book enough to pass the NCLEX on its own?

For most candidates, no. It has no content teaching, no adaptive delivery, no scoring and no pass guarantee. The normal plan is a content review to learn from, this or another question source to drill with, and adaptive practice before test day.

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