MRCEM revision is normally a paid affair. The dedicated emergency-medicine banks — FRCEMtutor chief among them — charge a subscription, and other providers price monthly packages on top. iatroX's MRCEM bank is free, with no subscription, built around an adaptive engine and a Socratic tutor, plus clinical AI and calculators that are useful on the emergency shop floor. This guide is honest about what the free bank does well and where the paid specialists still lead. Figures are as of mid-2026 — confirm current details on each provider's site.
The exams, briefly
MRCEM is sat in stages. The MRCEM Primary is a single three-hour paper of 180 best-of-five questions covering the basic sciences underpinning emergency medicine, with a pass rate typically around 50%. The MRCEM Intermediate SBA is 180 single-best-answer questions delivered as two 120-minute papers of 90 questions each, again with a pass rate of roughly 45 to 50%. New eligibility criteria apply for sittings from 2025 onwards, and candidates have a maximum of six attempts at each component (confirm current rules with RCEM). Both exams reward the same instinct the job demands: ruling out the dangerous diagnosis first.
What iatroX's free MRCEM bank gives you
iatroX's MRCEM bank is free to use in full — not a trial or a locked taster. It is built around five things: a Socratic tutor that works back through the reasoning behind a wrong answer; questions mapped to the RCEM blueprint; spaced repetition that returns missed material at widening intervals; an adaptive engine that targets your weakest learning outcomes and looks across topic boundaries; and native iOS and Android apps for revising between shifts. Because MRCEM is one of iatroX's free core banks — alongside MRCP Part 1, the PSA and PARA — there is nothing to pay for it; the platform's other banks sit on a £29-a-month or £99-a-year subscription, and every exam has free sample questions regardless.
The combination of a Socratic tutor and clinical AI suits emergency medicine particularly well, because the exam reasoning and the day-job reasoning are closely linked: working back through a missed question reinforces both the exam answer and the clinical instinct behind it. For a trainee juggling shifts, that overlap means revision time and clinical learning compound rather than compete. The Primary in particular spans the basic sciences — anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, microbiology, pathology, and evidence and statistics — applied to emergency presentations, and that breadth is exactly where candidates lose marks unevenly: strong on the clinical feel, weaker on, say, the pharmacology of a drug they rarely reach for. An adaptive engine keeps surfacing those specific gaps rather than letting them hide behind the topics you already know, which is the difference between revising efficiently and simply doing more questions.
How the paid specialists compare
The dedicated banks are strong. FRCEMtutor markets the most comprehensive MRCEM Primary resource, with over 6,500 questions split between its SBA bank — around 3,500 questions — and a knowledge-tutor tool of roughly 3,000 quick-fire items, plus illustrated teaching notes, peer benchmarking against other candidates, daily-updated score histograms and timed mock tests; its Intermediate SBA bank holds in the region of 1,000 to 1,250 questions. Other providers, such as a Bromley Emergency package at around £24.95 a month, bundle video webinars, model OSCE scenarios and question banks. BMJ OnExamination also offers an MRCEM Primary SBA bank, sometimes available through an institution.
The honest position is that FRCEMtutor's MRCEM-specific pools are larger than iatroX's, its illustrated notes are written specifically for emergency medicine, and its peer benchmarking is a genuine readiness signal. What iatroX adds is free adaptive sequencing and a Socratic tutor — the interactive, weakness-targeting layer a large static bank does not provide — together with clinical AI and calculators a pure question bank lacks.
Where paid still wins
If MRCEM is your immediate hurdle and you want the deepest dedicated pool, EM-specific teaching notes and peer benchmarking against other candidates, FRCEMtutor is a sound primary resource. If you prefer learning from video webinars and model OSCE walk-throughs, a package such as Bromley's is built for that. Neither is a reason to begin with a paid product, given the free adaptive bank covers the daily drilling. It is also worth saying that the dedicated banks' benchmarking only becomes meaningful once you are well into revision; early on, when most of your answers are wrong, a percentile against other candidates tells you little you do not already know, whereas adaptive targeting is useful from the outset.
A sensible, low-cost setup
A common and economical approach is to use the free adaptive bank as your daily engine across the months of revision — targeting weak learning outcomes, debriefing each miss through the Socratic tutor, and letting spaced repetition keep earlier topics warm — and then add a short subscription to a dedicated specialist near the exam for extra volume and benchmarking, if you want it. Because the MRCEM written exams sit around a 50% pass rate, an adaptive engine that keeps returning you to your weakest areas makes better use of limited revision time than working linearly through a fixed pool, and it keeps any later spend to the period when extra volume genuinely helps.
A few common questions
Is iatroX's MRCEM bank really free? Yes — MRCEM is one of iatroX's free core banks, with no subscription required.
Does it cover both Primary and Intermediate SBA? Check the platform for current coverage across the MRCEM components; the bank is mapped to the RCEM blueprint.
How does it compare with FRCEMtutor? FRCEMtutor's pools are larger and its notes EM-specific; iatroX's advantage is free adaptive sequencing, a Socratic tutor and clinical tools.
Can I use both? Yes — many trainees use the free adaptive bank for daily practice and add a specialist for volume and benchmarking near the exam, which keeps any spend to that final stretch rather than the whole revision period.