Minnesota Road Signs and Their Meanings

Minnesota teaches sign color before it shows a single sign, and it groups the colors instead of listing them. Chapter 5 of the Minnesota Driver's Manual sorts them into three families: regulatory, where red prohibits and commands and white regulates; warning, where yellow warns, yellow-green warns in pedestrian, bicycle and school areas, and orange warns in construction zones; and informational, where green guides, blue describes services for motorists, and brown marks historic, cultural or recreational sites. Seven common shapes follow — octagon, triangle, diamond, rectangle, pentagon, crossbuck, circle — on the reasoning the chapter states outright: shape and color "give you a general idea of what the sign means, even before you can read it up close."

Minnesota does not score signs on their own. Sign identification is folded into the single Class D knowledge test, which the manual describes as multiple-choice and true-or-false questions on Minnesota traffic laws and road signs. The bar itself is published, in one sentence: "You may take only one written test per day and must score 80 percent to pass." What Minnesota leaves out is what the 80 percent is counted out of — no question count appears anywhere in the manual, and neither does a time limit — so the question total shown for Minnesota on this site is our own inference, while the 80 percent is the state's own number. Appointments are required, the online pre-application at the department's myDVS service has to be completed no more than 30 days before the appointment, and an applicant under 18 also brings a certificate of enrollment — the "Blue Card" — showing the classroom instruction is done.

Chapter 5, Signs, signals and pavement markings, begins on page 56 of the Minnesota Driver's Manual, published by Driver and Vehicle Services within the Department of Public Safety. Every Minnesota sign question in this bank is cited to that chapter, and the citations name a Chapter 5 heading and nothing else — no separate manual title, no page number — because Chapter 5 is where Minnesota keeps the sign material this bank draws on, down to the slow-moving vehicle emblem. DVS offers the manual itself two ways: a written manual and an audio manual, with other languages routed through its Driver's License for All resources.

Nearly every question in this Minnesota set carries a different heading from the chapter on signs, signals and pavement markings — regulatory signs, warning signs, common shapes, sign color meanings, construction signs, motorist services, guidance and information, school zones, the slow-moving vehicle emblem, railroad crossings, no-passing zones, wrong way, yield, reduced speed ahead — with only regulatory signs appearing more than once. That makes the set a breadth check rather than a drill: closer to a sweep across the chapter than to repeated attempts at a single category. Worked through honestly, it tells a candidate which headings they cannot yet explain, and each answer comes with an explanation, so a heading you miss points you at the part of the chapter to reread rather than at the whole of it.

15 published Minnesota 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