Medical Residency Entrance Exam (Algeria)Algeria résidanat

Overview

The Résidanat (Concours d'Accès au Résidanat) is Algeria's national entrance exam for specialist medical, dental and pharmacy residency training. It runs under the authority of the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, with the Ministry of Health as a partner in planning residency posts; day-to-day organisation is delegated to the Dean of each Faculty of Medicine, so the exam is held at every medical faculty in the country rather than at one central site.

Although the competition is organised faculty by faculty, all faculties run it to the same ministry-set structure and, within each profession (medicine, dentistry, pharmacy), on the same date nationwide. Passing does not by itself guarantee a residency place: the exam produces a score and a rank, and that rank decides which specialty and which faculty's posts a candidate can choose from once the available positions are allocated.

Who can apply

• Holders of a Doctorate in Medicine (Docteur en médecine), a Pharmacist diploma, or a Doctorate in Dental Surgery from an Algerian university, or an equivalent degree recognised by the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research.

• Algerian and foreign-trained candidates can both apply; a foreign-trained candidate needs prior authorisation from the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research to sit the exam.

• Each profession (medicine, dentistry, pharmacy) runs its own session of the competition, so a candidate applies for the session that matches their own degree.

Exam pattern

The medicine session is commonly described as three written papers of multiple-choice questions, each carrying the same weight in the final score:

Each paper commonly runs two to three hours. The pharmacy and dental-surgery sessions follow the same multiple-choice format, adapted to their own curricula, and are held on separate dates from the medicine session rather than on the same day.

Exact question counts, paper duration and the precise split of subjects can vary slightly between faculties and between years, since each Faculty of Medicine sets its own paper within the ministry's overall framework. Check the current year's notice from the faculty where you will sit the exam.

Marking and results

All papers are scored out of 20 and combined into a single average for ranking. A commonly reported qualifying threshold is an average of at least 10/20; candidates below it are not considered for residency placement that session. Reaching the threshold does not guarantee a place in a particular specialty or city — it only makes the candidate eligible to take part in the merit-order post-selection process described below, where the candidate's exact rank, not the raw score alone, decides which posts are still available when their turn comes.

Results are posted both at the faculty and in each candidate's personal account on the official registration platform.

Important dates

The competition runs once a year, with registration windows and an exam date set separately by each profession and republished for every session; exact dates move from year to year and can vary slightly between faculties. As examples from recent sessions:

• For the October 2025 session, exam dates were reported as 25 October 2025 (medicine), 26 October 2025 (dental surgery) and 27 October 2025 (pharmacy) — one profession per day rather than all three on the same day.

• For the October 2026 session, registration was reported to run in two windows ahead of the October exam date: an initial window opening in June 2026, followed by a second window in September 2026 shortly before the exam. The exact opening and closing dates differed slightly between faculties in the reports seen.

Always confirm the current session's registration and exam dates with your own Faculty of Medicine, Faculty of Pharmacy or Department of Dental Surgery rather than assuming they match a previous year or another faculty.

How to apply

1. Watch for your faculty's official notice announcing the session (medicine, dentistry or pharmacy) and its registration windows.

2. Pre-register online through the official residanat-dz.com portal for your own faculty's region (each faculty has its own subdomain, for example for Algiers, Annaba or Tizi Ouzou).

3. Prepare and upload the required documents as a single digitised file: an information sheet, your degree, identity card, birth certificate, academic transcript, photographs, a residence certificate and proof of payment of the registration fee.

4. Sit the written paper(s) for your profession on the scheduled date(s) at your assigned faculty.

After the exam

Once results and the ranked list are published, each faculty runs a public post-selection session, commonly held about a week after the exam, in which candidates are called in order of their rank to choose a specialty and posting from the vacancies open that session. The number and mix of available posts (by specialty, faculty and city) is set in advance from requests gathered across teaching hospital departments, and is published before the exam for candidates to plan around. Nationally, several thousand posts across medicine, dentistry and pharmacy are typically opened each year (reported at just over 4,600 for the 2025-2026 cycle); the split between specialties and faculties changes from year to year.

Reports on recent sessions describe candidates most commonly choosing specialties such as cardiology, ophthalmology, medical imaging, endocrinology, hepato-gastroenterology, dermatology, ENT and gynaecology-obstetrics first, when their rank allows it. A candidate who qualifies but ranks too low to get a preferred specialty or city can still be placed into a less sought-after post that remains open, or into a post left unfilled by a higher-ranked candidate who chose elsewhere.

Preparation tips

• Treat the three medicine papers as testing different skills: pure recall of basic sciences for Paper 1, applied clinical reasoning for Paper 2, and cross-discipline integration for Paper 3 — prepare each differently rather than revising everything the same way.

• Practise large volumes of multiple-choice questions under timed conditions, since each paper packs 100 or more questions into a few hours.

• Work through previous years' question banks where available, since question style and common topics tend to repeat from year to year even though exact items change.

• Follow your own faculty's published programme/syllabus for the session you are sitting, since faculties can set their own paper within the ministry's framework.

• Research the previous year's specialty and post allocation pattern for your target faculty before the exam, so you have a realistic sense of the rank you would need for your preferred choice.

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