The best TMUA preparation in 2026: every option compared

The TMUA is the maths admissions test used by Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial, LSE, Warwick, Durham and UCL for maths-heavy courses. Start with the free official materials.

UAT-UK, which runs the TMUA, says:

"All necessary preparatory materials are available, free of charge, to all candidates." It also says it doesn't endorse any commercial preparation, ours included.

The free material is a real offer. There are eight years of past papers, each with worked answers, plus specimen tests on the real test software, and they are still the closest thing to the real test.

The catch is that each past paper only works once. You can sit a paper cold one time, and after that you know the questions.

There are 360 official questions in total, all from the paper-based era, so most serious applicants run out of unseen material before test day.

That's the gap seven self-serve platforms fill, GhostPrep among them:

Exams Ninja (TMUA Ninja), TMUA Academy, TMUA Guru, TMUA Pro (tmua.co.uk), Oxbridge Mentors and tmua.fyi. They sell more questions, timed mocks on a test-style screen, and feedback on where your marks are going.

What matters most when you compare them is accuracy. A question bank is only useful if its questions are as hard as the real TMUA and ask things the way the real TMUA does.

Practice that's easier than the test flatters your score, and you only find out on the day.

We've reviewed all seven the same way, ourselves included, and our take is that GhostPrep is the best all-round pick for self-directed practice, because every question is built and checked to match the real test's difficulty and style.

We also say exactly where the others beat us, and there's more on how to check accuracy for yourself below.

A tutor or a live course is the other route, for real-time teaching and one-to-one attention. We don't offer either, so if that's how you learn best, GhostPrep is unlikely to be the right fit for you on its own.

There's more on when that's worth paying for further down.

How to actually use whichever you pick is a separate question. Our guide to how to prepare for the TMUA covers the plan, the order to work through the past papers, and the pacing that decides most scores.

We included the self-serve TMUA platforms with published prices that applicants are most likely to come across.

Then we judged each one on the same seven things: how many practice questions it has, how many full mocks, whether the questions are original or official past papers resold, whether every question comes with a worked solution, whether the mocks run on a test-style screen and give you a score on the 1.0 to 9.0 scale, whether there's a usable free tier, and what happens if you want your money back.

Providers that sell TMUA preparation only inside a tutoring programme, with no published price, are covered under tutoring rather than in the table. UniAdmissions is the best-known of these.

GhostPrep is one of the seven platforms reviewed on this page. We've named exactly where the other six beat us.

The choice is yours to make.

UAT-UK's past-paper archive has every TMUA paper from 2016 to 2023, Paper 1 and Paper 2, each with a worked-answers booklet and an answer key, plus the original specimen papers.

UAT-UK is clear that they still apply:

"Although the TMUA is now computer-based, both the content specification and question style are unchanged, so this archive of past papers can be used when preparing for the test."

On its preparation page, UAT-UK also publishes the TMUA specification, the TMUA Specimen and Practice Tests on Pearson's own test software, Notes on Mathematics, and Notes on Logic and Proof for Paper 2.

The specimen tests open in the Pearson test player, the same software you'll sit the real test on.

Beyond UAT-UK, two more free resources are worth knowing about:

• Warwick's TMUA support page has video walkthroughs of the whole 2021 paper, partial sets for other years, and a logic worksheet by a Warwick associate professor.

• The AMSP's Preparing for the TMUA course is a seven-session live online course, free for students at state-funded schools in England.

Community papers

You'll also hear a lot about the TMUA community papers. They're free mock papers written by tutors, teachers and students to fill the gap the official papers leave, and there are more than 70 of them, by around 30 different authors.

The best known are the JZMaths sets, Jacqueline Tyler's papers, the Clavis sets and the Yotta and Zetta papers. Others come from Daniel J Smith, Euclid, DPiD, Gresty Academy, Thriving Scholars, TMUAmockz, Nabla Tuition, Asher Falcon and OxbridgeMind.

Some sit on their authors' own websites, often as PDFs, and others are shared between students online. Separately, Physics & Maths Tutor (PMT) hosts the official past papers, answer keys and solutions as free PDFs.

The best community papers are worth doing once you've used up the official ones, with three things to know first.

The quality is uneven: with so many different authors, some papers are close to the real standard, and plenty are easier or harder than any real sitting, or ask questions in a style the TMUA doesn't use.

The worked solutions tend to be weaker than the questions. By one count, only about half of the community questions in circulation have a full worked solution, and few tell you why each wrong answer is wrong, which is where a lot of the learning happens.

The biggest drawback is that none of your performance is kept in one place. You mark each paper yourself, save the score somewhere yourself, and have to work out on your own which topics keep costing you marks and whether you're improving.

If you use them, pick a few papers that other students recommend, sit them timed, and keep a simple log of your scores and the questions you got wrong.

The quick-skim view, with full detail on each provider below. "Mix" means the provider sells official past papers alongside its own questions.

"Not stated" means its public pages don't say.

Here's how that breaks down:

Every platform on this page can tell you how many questions it has. Fewer can show you how close those questions are to the real TMUA, and that's the part that decides whether practice helps.

A bank that's easier than the test gives you scores you won't get on the day. Questions on the right topic in the wrong style train the wrong habits, like grinding through a long calculation where the real paper rewards a quick sketch or one line of logic.

Accuracy is what we spend most of our effort on. Every GhostPrep question is written to a question pattern catalogued by hand from the official past papers.

A reviewer then tries to break it, hunting for a shortcut to the answer that skips the maths it's meant to test, and any shortcut gets closed.

Its difficulty is scored blind, by a rater who never sees what the writer was aiming for, and it has to clear a floor and land within one band of its target, or it goes back. Nothing is softened to feel gentler than the real exam.

The full process is on our how we write questions page.

We can't measure another provider's difficulty from its public pages, so the table above doesn't score it.

You can check it yourself, though, ours included: sit an official past paper under timed conditions, then try a provider's free questions and ask whether they feel the same.

It depends what you're optimising for. Here's each of the seven, plainly.

1. GhostPrep

£6.99 a week or £19.99 a month, with a free tier of 10 practice questions a day and every TMUA past paper, and the same full access on either paid plan.

The bank runs to 1,800+ questions across both papers, every official past paper included, each new question built to the real test's difficulty and style, with 3 full-length mocks on a Pearson-style screen that estimate where you'd land on the 1.0 to 9.0 scale.

Every worked solution gives the method, a line on each wrong option, and your time against the average. Each question clears a published, staged review before it goes live, covered on our how we write questions page.

Good for: students who want practice that matches the real test, a large bank to drill by topic and difficulty, mocks scored on the real scale, revision notes on every topic in the specification, and a full refund within 14 days if it isn't the right fit.

Not so good for: anyone who wants live teaching, since we don't offer it, or anyone who wants a large stack of full mocks.

2. Exams Ninja (TMUA Ninja)

Sold as modules or as a full bundle, currently £79 for everything. The page quotes both 500+ and 700+ questions, and its per-paper figures add up to about 600.

The mock section is the official TMUA past papers on an exam-style screen.

Good for: students who want an established name, selling TMUA preparation since at least 2020 alongside a wide range of other admissions tests, with video tutorials included.

Not so good for: anyone who wants a refund if it doesn't work out: its terms make online resources non-refundable and cap access at 12 months. Its mocks are official papers that UAT-UK publishes free, with worked answers.

3. TMUA Academy (tmua.academy)

A TMUA-only platform with a free tier of 10 questions a day and a paid plan at £59, one payment, for 12 months. It lists 400+ questions and 20+ mock papers, made up of official past papers from 2016 to 2023 plus its own mock questions.

Good for: the cheapest one-off price for a full question bank, if you'd rather pay once than subscribe, with a Pearson VUE-style simulator and spaced repetition.

Not so good for: anyone who wants a large amount of new material. Much of what it sells is the official archive, which is free from UAT-UK.

Its pages don't set out a refund policy, and its terms rule out refunds for purchases made within 21 days of a TMUA test date.

4. TMUA Guru

A TMUA-only platform with a free tier (50+ questions and two past papers) and a paid plan at £89, one payment. It lists 500+ questions, every TMUA past paper, randomly generated exams and a Pearson VUE-style simulator.

Good for: students who want a one-off price and a simulator that claims to match the real test screen.

Not so good for: anyone who wants a refund if it doesn't work out. Its terms make online resources non-refundable and cap access at 12 months, and its public pages don't say how many full mocks there are.

5. TMUA Pro (tmua.co.uk)

A TMUA-only platform built by Cambridge maths students. TMUA Pro is £99, one payment, for 12 months, with an 8-question diagnostic free.

It lists 1,000+ original questions, 6 full timed mocks marked to a TMUA score, a note on why your answer was wrong, a score converter and a dedicated Paper 2 logic module.

Good for: the most original full-length mocks of any platform here, and a feature list close to ours.

Not so good for: anyone expecting a simple money-back guarantee.

It refunds you if you score below 6.5, but only if you have completed every mock, answered 95% of the bank, studied on 21 separate days and met an accuracy target, and you must claim within 14 days of your results. There's no free tier beyond the diagnostic.

6. Oxbridge Mentors

A question bank sold in tiers, one payment each, for 12 months:

£69 for 500 questions, £99 for 1,000 with timed mocks, or £199 for 2,000+. There's a 7-day free trial with no card, and a refund on request within 7 days, as long as you've viewed fewer than 50 questions.

Good for: one of the biggest banks on this page, 2,000+ questions at the top tier, and simple pricing by size.

Not so good for: anyone who wants to practice on a test-style screen, since its pages don't mention one, or who wants to compare mocks, since it doesn't say how many there are.

7. tmua.fyi

A TMUA platform with a free sign-up and paid plans at £20 a week or £94.99 for lifetime access. It offers a question bank, timed mocks on a Pearson VUE-style screen, worked solutions with staged hints, adaptive practice, progress analytics and revision guides.

It lists 1,000+ questions, which it says are drawn from human-written PDFs and reviewed before release.

Good for: students who want lifetime access for a single payment, and a wide set of features.

Not so good for: anyone who might want a refund, since its terms make payments non-refundable, or who wants to know how many full mocks there are before paying.

There are about a dozen TMUA-specific books on Amazon UK.

Our own TMUA 9.0 Blueprint runs to 510 pages and 39 chapters, with 500 original questions, three full mock exams (six papers), a full course in Paper 2's logic and proof, and a worked solution for every question that includes a line on each wrong option.

Every practice question has its difficulty band printed beside it, measured against all 360 official questions. It's £19.99.

The others worth knowing about:

• The Ultimate Cambridge TMUA Collection (UniAdmissions, 2024 edition): syllabus guide, practice questions, mock papers and past-paper solutions, £41.03. The Cambridge in the title is a sign of its age: the TMUA is now used by Oxford, Imperial, LSE, Warwick, Durham and UCL as well.

• The Comprehensive TMUA Guide (Sarin and Reddibathini, 2022): 350+ exam-style questions, written to the 2022 specification, £29.99.

• TMUA Preparation Guide 2027 to 2028 (Greyminster Academic Press, October 2026): 600+ practice questions and 6 mocks, £22.99.

• STEP, MAT, TMUA: Skills for Success (Hodder Education, 2021): a general guide across three maths tests, £29.00.

Prices are Amazon UK's on 3 November 2026. If you want full mocks, difficulty bands and a solution that tells you which slip each wrong option was built to catch, we think the Blueprint is the best book.

None of the question banks above can do what a live course or a tutor does. A course lets you ask questions as you're taught.

A tutor goes further, working on your specific gaps and answering the exact questions you have. For some students that's how they learn best, and self-serve practice doesn't replace it.

It's also much more expensive. Published TMUA tutoring runs from about £40 an hour for a large block of hours up to £150 an hour, and the large admissions firms mostly sit between £86 and £150.

Package-based providers charge from about £595 for four hours. Named examples with published rates include The Profs, Keystone Tutors, Dukes Plus, TutorChase and TMUA Pro's own tutoring.

UniAdmissions sells TMUA preparation as part of a wider programme with tutoring included, and its pages don't publish prices.

If you're at a state-funded school in England, check the AMSP's free Preparing for the TMUA course first. It's live, taught online, and costs nothing.

Worth weighing against the cost:

UAT-UK says the TMUA "uses mathematics that you are likely to have already learned in your school studies", and that the best way to prepare is to get familiar with the format and style of questions.

A tutor's value is the live teaching and the personal attention, and for some applicants that's worth it whatever the price.

"Best" depends on what you need, so here are scoped answers rather than a single ranking.

Here's the detail:

Starting price is the cheapest way in. Full access is what it costs to unlock everything on offer.

Prices as listed on 3 November 2026.

Here's how that breaks down:

GhostPrep's £6.99 a week, cancel any time, is the lowest-commitment way into a paid TMUA question bank on this page, and it suits a short push before a sitting.

Past about three weeks, £19.99 a month works out cheaper at £4.61 a week, and both plans unlock the same thing.

If you're starting early, TMUA Academy's £59 costs less than our monthly plan after about three months, Exams Ninja's £79 after about four, and tmua.fyi's £94.99 after about five.