Maryland Road Signs and Their Meanings

Maryland sets a higher bar to pass its knowledge test than any other state on this site. The Motor Vehicle Administration states the passing standard for the noncommercial test outright — you must score 88 percent or higher — and that is the highest passing percentage any state on this site sets for its car knowledge test as a whole. On the twenty-five question Class C paper, with twenty minutes to work through it, that leaves room for three wrong answers and none for a fourth. The Maryland Driver's Manual names the three subjects the test draws on: motor vehicle laws, safe driving practices, and traffic signs. Signs are the third of those, and on a paper this unforgiving they are the part you can make certain of in advance, because a sign either is the shape you remember or it is not.

Nowhere does Maryland say how many of the twenty-five questions are about signs. The MVA's knowledge-test page comes close without ever committing: it lists the subjects, then breaks the sign subject into shapes — octagon, triangle, circle — and meanings — stop, yield, speed limits, warnings — and stops there. What that same page does commit to is everything around the test. The question count changes with the class you are applying for: twenty-five for Class C, Class M and a moped permit, twenty for Class A and Class B. One time limit and one passing score are listed for the noncommercial test. Tests are usually taken on a computer, and the noncommercial Class C test is offered in English, Spanish, American Sign Language and more than a dozen further languages, with spoken-language interpreters permitted. Fail, and the retake rule the MVA's own FAQ sets out has three parts, not one: the next business day after a first failure, only if an appointment is available, and at least seven calendar days once you have failed twice or more — a wait it applies to every noncommercial and commercial knowledge test alike.

The book the questions come from is the Maryland Driver's Manual, catalogued by the MVA as DL-002 and currently in its October 2025 edition. Signs live in Section 4, titled Signs, Signals and Pavement Markings, and its Traffic Signs part opens on color rather than on any individual sign. Maryland's color list runs well past the familiar ones: alongside red, yellow, white, orange, green, blue and brown it names fluorescent yellow-green for school, pedestrian and bicycle signs, fluorescent pink for emergency traffic incidents, and black, which it assigns to One Way signs and to signs that change messages. The shape list runs long as well, ending on a trapezoid the manual assigns to recreation and cultural interest areas and to National Forest Routes. That list teaches by name — Octagon: Stop — and the regulatory page that follows it switches notation for exactly three of its entries, counting sides instead of naming shapes: 8-Sided Sign, White Letters on Red; 3-Sided Sign, Red Letters on White; Rectangular (4-Sided) Signs, Black on White. Only those three. The rest of that page names its signs outright, fourteen of them, from No Right Turn and No U-Turn through Do Not Pass, Bike Lane and Wrong Way, and explains the two-way left-turn lane, the One Way and the HOV entries as it goes.

Notice where the Maryland manual stops explaining. Its warning-sign page offers a single sentence of definition and then hands you a wall of captioned pictures — stop ahead, slippery when wet, deer crossing, flagger ahead — with no accompanying text at all, so a reader who has never met those signs is left to work them out from the drawings. The published Maryland questions here sit where the manual actually argues its case: on the color list, on the shape list, and on the handful of regulatory entries the manual sets out and explains one by one. Each carries the section it came from and an explanation of why the answer is right, which means each of them lands on a part of the manual that explains itself rather than on a caption that only labels.

18 published Maryland road-sign questions, each with an explanation and a citation to the handbook section it came from.

Content reviewed against official driver handbooks · August 12, 2026