KPMG Online Assessment 2026: Numerical, Verbal & SJT Guide

KPMG UK is one of the Big Four professional services firms, recruiting approximately 1,000 graduates and school leavers annually across service lines including Audit, Tax, Consulting, Deal Advisory, and Technology & Engineering. Competition is intense — the online assessment is where the majority of candidates are screened out before any human at KPMG reviews your application in depth.

The standard KPMG graduate recruitment journey runs through four stages:

The online assessment (Stage 2) is typically sent within a few days of submitting your application, and you usually have five to seven days to complete it from the invitation date. You complete the tests at home in your own time — but unlike a supervised test, you will be sitting it alongside potentially thousands of other applicants, so the competition is still intense.

KPMG uses psychometric assessments developed by specialist providers. The specific platform may vary by service line and intake year, but the format has consistently included numerical reasoning, verbal reasoning, and a situational judgement element. The total assessment typically takes between 60 and 90 minutes to complete, though some service lines may have longer or shorter versions. Always check the invitation email for the specific format and timing for your application.

The numerical reasoning section is the most demanding component of the KPMG online assessment and the one where most candidates lose ground. It tests your ability to interpret numerical data presented in tables, charts, and graphs — not your ability to do complex arithmetic from memory.

What the Questions Look Like

Each question presents a data exhibit — typically a bar chart, line graph, pie chart, or multi-column table — followed by a multiple-choice question. You must extract the relevant figures, apply a calculation, and select the correct answer from five options. The calculations required include:

• Percentage change: How much has revenue grown from Year 1 to Year 2?
• Ratio and proportion: What is the ratio of Product A sales to Product B sales in Q3?
• Fractions of totals: What fraction of total expenditure is allocated to marketing?
• Rate calculations: If output increased by 12% and workforce fell by 8%, what happened to output per employee?
• Currency conversion and index numbers: Convert figures between currencies or scale an index to a new base year.

Common Traps to Avoid

KPMG's numerical questions — like most SHL-style tests — are designed with plausible distractors. The wrong answers are not random; they correspond to common calculation errors. The most frequent traps are:

• Percentage change vs. percentage point change: If market share rises from 20% to 25%, the percentage point change is 5, but the percentage change is 25%. Many candidates confuse these.
• Wrong base year: When calculating growth, make sure you are dividing by the starting figure, not the ending figure.
• Unit confusion: Data may be presented in thousands or millions. Missing a scale factor produces an answer that is in the wrong answer list — by design.
• Approximation errors: Rounding intermediate calculations too aggressively can push you to a wrong answer. Use the on-screen calculator for all multi-step problems.

For a deeper dive into numerical reasoning question types and strategies, including worked examples of percentage change and ratio problems, see our dedicated knowledge guide.

The verbal reasoning section tests your ability to understand written information and draw logical conclusions from it — a core skill for any professional services role where you will need to analyse reports, client documents, and regulatory guidance quickly and accurately.

Question Format

You will be presented with a short passage of text — typically 100–200 words on a business, financial, or general topic — followed by a statement. Your task is to decide whether the statement is:

• True: The statement is directly supported by the information in the passage.
• False: The statement directly contradicts information in the passage.
• Cannot Say: You cannot determine whether the statement is true or false from the information in the passage alone — neither supported nor contradicted.

Strategies That Actually Work

Unlike the numerical test, the verbal reasoning test rewards a disciplined mental approach more than any specific knowledge. The following habits separate high scorers from average scorers:

• Locate the relevant sentence before answering: After reading the statement, go back to the passage and find the sentence or clause that is most directly relevant. Do not answer from memory — reread that sentence carefully before choosing.
• Flag absolute language: Words like "always", "never", "all", "none", "the only" in a statement are almost always False or Cannot Say, because the passage rarely contains equally absolute support for them.
• Separate inference from statement: If the statement is a logical inference that could follow from the passage but is not explicitly stated, the answer is Cannot Say — not True. The test is about what the passage says, not what it implies.
• Keep pace — do not linger: At roughly one minute per question, you cannot afford to spend three minutes on a difficult item. Make your best assessment, flag it mentally, and move on. Coming back rarely helps and costs time you do not have.

For detailed worked examples of the True/False/Cannot Say format, including the most common types of tricky statements, see our guide: Verbal Reasoning: Mastering True, False and Cannot Say.

The situational judgement test is the component most candidates underestimate — and the one that most clearly reflects KPMG's values and culture. Rather than testing cognitive ability, the SJT presents you with realistic workplace scenarios and asks how you would respond. There are no objectively correct answers in the way a maths question has one, but there are better and worse responses in relation to KPMG's competency framework.

What a Typical SJT Scenario Looks Like

Each scenario describes a situation you might plausibly encounter as a new KPMG graduate — a challenging client interaction, a team conflict, an ethical dilemma, a difficult deadline, or a situation where you have received confusing instructions from a manager. You are then asked to either:

• Rate each possible response: On a scale from "Highly Effective" to "Counterproductive" — you evaluate multiple response options independently.
• Rank the responses: Put the response options in order from most to least appropriate, which forces you to make relative judgements.

How to Approach Each Scenario

The SJT is not about choosing the most dramatic or impressive action — it is about demonstrating sound professional judgement. The following principles will consistently guide you toward the higher-scoring responses:

• Prioritise communication and transparency: In almost every scenario, responses that involve communicating with the relevant people (your manager, the client, your team member) score higher than those that involve acting unilaterally or ignoring the issue.
• Ethical situations: always flag upward: If a scenario involves anything that could be an ethical breach — a colleague cutting corners, a client asking for something inappropriate, a discrepancy in figures — the correct response is always to escalate to a more senior person, not to handle it yourself or stay silent.
• Avoid extreme responses: Responses that are either completely passive ("do nothing, hope it resolves itself") or aggressively confrontational ("immediately report the colleague to HR") are almost never the highest-scoring option. Measured, professional, constructive responses score best.
• Consider the client and the firm: KPMG is a client services firm. Responses that protect client relationships and the firm's reputation alongside individual integrity will typically score above those that consider only one stakeholder.

For a comprehensive overview of the situational judgement test format — including the difference between rating and ranking formats — see our SJT knowledge guide.

KPMG does not publish its specific scoring methodology or cut-off thresholds. What is publicly known — from KPMG's own recruitment communications and candidate feedback — is the following:

• Each test component is scored separately. Your numerical, verbal, and SJT scores are evaluated independently. A strong SJT score does not compensate for a very low numerical score — you need to perform adequately across all three components.
• Scores are standardised against a norm group. Like all major psychometric assessments, your raw score is converted into a percentile rank or standardised score that reflects your performance relative to a relevant comparison population — typically graduate-level candidates.
• Cut-off scores are not shared publicly. KPMG does not publish the specific threshold scores required to progress. Based on candidate reports and the competitive level of KPMG's intake, you should aim to perform above the 65th percentile on each component as a minimum target, and ideally above the 70th–75th percentile to give yourself a comfortable margin.

The SJT Scoring Mechanism

For the situational judgement test specifically, scoring works differently from the cognitive tests. Rather than a simple right/wrong count, SJT responses are typically scored against an "expert key" — the responses that a panel of experienced KPMG professionals agreed represented the most and least effective professional behaviour. The closer your ratings or rankings are to the expert key, the higher your SJT score.

Because the SJT is designed to assess values alignment and professional judgement — not numerical ability — there is less variance between candidates on this component than on the cognitive tests. The cognitive tests (numerical and verbal) tend to be the primary differentiators in the screening process.

The core format — numerical reasoning, verbal reasoning, and SJT — is broadly consistent across KPMG's graduate service lines. However, there are some differences in emphasis, and it is worth being aware of how the role you are applying for may shape what the assessment is testing for.

KPMG's school leaver and apprenticeship programmes use the same core assessment format as the graduate scheme but may be calibrated to a different norm group. If you are applying as a school leaver, the cognitive content is the same type — but you are being compared against a school leaver population rather than a graduate population, which changes the percentile implications of your raw score.

Four weeks of structured preparation is enough to produce meaningful improvement on all three components of the KPMG online assessment — provided the practice is deliberate, timed, and followed by honest review. Here is a week-by-week plan:

For a broader overview of what to expect across the full graduate assessment process — including the virtual assessment centre — see our Big Four assessment centre guide, which covers the group exercise, written exercise, and interview formats common to KPMG and the other Big Four firms.

You can also benchmark your current level with our free SHL-format practice tests, which use the same numerical and verbal reasoning question types as the KPMG online assessment.