Most MRCP Part 1 revision costs money. The established banks — Pastest, Passmedicine, Quesmed — charge per sitting, and trainees routinely spend £95 to £180 for a few months' access, on top of an exam fee that is already £489 for UK candidates (as of mid-2026; confirm current fees with the Federation). iatroX takes a different approach: its MRCP Part 1 bank is free, with no subscription, built around an adaptive engine and a Socratic tutor. This guide explains what the free bank gives you, how it compares with the paid market, and where paying still makes sense. Prices and figures are as of mid-2026 — confirm current details on each provider's site.
What "free" actually means here
iatroX's MRCP Part 1 bank is free to use in full — not a time-limited trial or a locked sample set. You can drill the whole bank, use the adaptive sequencing and see your performance dashboard without paying. MRCP Part 1 is one of iatroX's free core banks, alongside MRCEM, the PSA and PARA; its other banks — UKMLA, the MRCGP AKT, the MSRA, PLAB, the diplomas, the SCEs and international boards — sit on a single subscription at £29 a month or £99 a year, and every exam has free sample questions regardless. So for MRCP Part 1 specifically, there is nothing to pay, and nothing held back behind a paywall.
The exam, briefly
MRCP(UK) Part 1 is the opening exam of the three MRCP assessments, usually taken after at least a year of postgraduate clinical experience. It is sat as two three-hour papers of best-of-five questions, with no negative marking, covering a broad medical syllabus across more than a dozen specialties. Because the content is so wide and the pass mark unforgiving, efficient revision — concentrating on weak areas rather than re-covering strengths — matters more than raw hours. That is precisely the problem an adaptive bank is built to solve.
How iatroX's free bank is built
iatroX leads with five things. A Socratic tutor works back through the reasoning behind a wrong answer rather than just showing the model answer, which suits Part 1's single-best-answer style, where the challenge is often spotting why the other four options are wrong. Questions are mapped to the Part 1 specialty blueprint, so your dashboard reflects the exam's own structure. Spaced repetition returns missed material at widening intervals to interrupt forgetting. A genuinely adaptive engine surfaces your weakest topics first and looks across topic boundaries, so a gap in acid-base balance will pull in related renal and respiratory items rather than leaving them siloed. And native iOS and Android apps make it usable in short bursts on the ward or the commute. Alongside the questions, Ask iatroX offers guideline-grounded lookup and there are clinical calculators — useful extras, though the questions are the core of Part 1 preparation.
How the paid banks compare
The paid banks are strong, and for some candidates worth the spend. Pastest markets the largest MRCP Part 1 bank — in the region of 5,400 best-of-five questions — plus tailored past papers reflecting recent exam themes, video courses and 34 past papers, priced from about £94.99 for three months to £179.99 for twelve, with a short free trial. Passmedicine is the high-volume, low-cost default with a large Part 1 bank and an integrated spaced-repetition feature. Quesmed bundles questions with notes, flashcards and mocks from a low monthly price. BMJ OnExamination offers a smaller but rigorously written bank, often available free through a university, NHS Trust or BMA membership — worth checking before you pay for anything.
The honest summary is that Pastest and Passmedicine offer more raw volume than iatroX, and Pastest's past-paper-themed mocks and video content are genuinely useful in the final weeks. What iatroX adds is adaptivity and a Socratic tutor at no cost, which is exactly the part most static banks do least well.
Where paid still wins
If you want the largest possible question pool, exam-themed past papers and video lectures, a paid Pastest or Passmedicine subscription earns its place — particularly in the last month, when full-length timed mocks and pattern recognition against recent themes matter most. If you are resitting and want a fresh, harder set of stems, BMJ OnExamination's curated bank is a sensible change of stimulus. None of that is a reason to start with a paid bank, though, when the free adaptive bank can carry the months of daily drilling.
A sensible, low-cost setup
For most candidates the efficient approach is to make the free adaptive bank your daily engine for the months of revision — drilling weak areas, debriefing every miss through the Socratic tutor, and letting spaced repetition keep earlier topics warm — and then, in the final two to four weeks, add a short paid subscription for volume, past-paper themes and full mocks if you want them. That keeps the total spend to a short burst at the end rather than several months of overlapping subscriptions, and puts the expensive resources where they add the most: the run-in to the exam. Many capable candidates overspend simply by buying a large bank early and using it as undifferentiated volume; anchoring on the free adaptive bank avoids that, because the engine keeps steering you back to where you are actually losing marks.
A few common questions
Is iatroX's MRCP Part 1 bank really free? Yes — MRCP Part 1 is one of iatroX's free core banks, with no subscription required; the adaptive engine and Socratic tutor are included.
Is it enough on its own? For many candidates a free adaptive bank plus disciplined review is sufficient; others add a paid bank for volume and mocks near the exam.
How does it compare with Pastest on volume? Pastest's bank is larger; iatroX's advantage is free adaptive sequencing and a Socratic tutor rather than raw question count.
Does iatroX cover MRCP Part 2? The free core is Part 1; check the platform for current Part 2 coverage.