Becoming a hospice nurse and earning hospice certification

Three stretches add up. Nursing school is the longest of them, with the ADN quicker to finish than the BSN. The NCLEX and a first job follow. The last stretch is the one you control: the recent practice hours, with both thresholds in the comparison table below. For a full-time hospice nurse the shorter one is a matter of months; a part-time nurse can use the longer look-back.

Then the calendar adds a wait. As of Nov 11, 2026, there are four one-month testing windows a year, and each application period closes weeks before its window, so plan the application around the month you want to test.

The RN and APRN exams have a lot in common: one credentialing center, one testing vendor, identical windows, an identical scaled cut and one renewal model. They part ways on the license you hold, on exam length and on the kind of decision each question asks for.

Your license decides, not your years of experience. An RN with a decade in hospice still sits the RN exam: the advanced one requires an APRN license or certification plus a completed graduate nurse practitioner or clinical nurse specialist program, and every one of those applications is audited.

The content splits along the same line. The RN exam asks what the nurse assesses, does, teaches and reports: pain and symptom assessment, comfort measures, the family, the Medicare hospice benefit, care at the time of death. The APRN exam asks what the clinician diagnoses and decides: prognosis, drug choice and dose changes, palliative emergencies, sedation, and ethics when capacity or a surrogate is in question.

HPCC has posted 2027 outlines for both exams without saying when they take effect. The RN outline shifts questions toward clinical care; the APRN outline grows its management domain. The RN study guide and the APRN study guide show the numbers.

HPCC is the credentialing center: it writes, scores and renews the exams. The Hospice and Palliative Nurses Association (HPNA) is its affiliated membership organization; HPNA membership lowers the exam fee, and HPNA sells review courses, but searches for "HPNA certification" lead back to these same exams. ELNEC, the End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium, is a course: its certificate shows training, not board certification. University palliative care certificates work the same way.

Physicians have their own board route. For social workers, the same center offers APHSW-C, listed in the table above.