← All guides

Do you need to know USP 795, 797 and 800 for the PTCE?

No chapter number is going to be asked of you: the strings USP, 795, 797 and 800 appear zero times in the PTCE Content Outline effective January 6, 2026. The hazardous drug practices people associate with chapter 800 did stay, under Federal Requirements and Patient Safety, so the honest answer splits in two.

Published August 23, 2026

This question has two halves and they have different answers, which is why it gets muddled. Take the outline and search it for USP, for 795, for 797, and for 800. Each returns nothing. PTCB's outline names no USP chapter anywhere across its 24 knowledge areas, so a question asking which chapter governs what is not something the document supports.

The second half is about the practices rather than the numbering, and there the answer changes. Some of what those chapters cover left the exam with compounding. Some of it never depended on the chapters at all and is still listed.

What left

Compounding came off the exam entirely, and it took the procedural content of chapters 795 and 797 with it. Sterile and nonsterile technique, aseptic procedure, garbing order, cleanroom air classes, laminar airflow hoods, and beyond-use dating for compounded preparations are all outside the current scope. Like the chapter numbers themselves, none of those words appear anywhere in the outline, which you can confirm with a search in under a minute.

What stayed

Hazardous drug handling is still on the exam, and it is in two places. Knowledge area 2.1, under Federal Requirements, covers federal requirements for storage, handling, and disposal of non-hazardous, hazardous, and pharmacological substances and wastes, and it names the P-list explicitly. Area 3.6, under Patient Safety, covers infection prevention procedures and cleaning standards, including handwashing, personal protective equipment, and cleaning counting trays, countertops and equipment.

Read those two together and most of what a technician does about hazardous drugs is still fair game: which waste stream a container belongs in, what protective equipment a task calls for, how a surface is cleaned. What has changed is the framing. The exam asks about the requirement and the practice, not about which chapter number to attribute it to, and that distinction is worth carrying into every question in this area.

Drug stability is a separate area, and it is not compounding

Area 1.7 covers drug stability, with oral suspensions, insulins, reconstitutables, injectables and vaccinations given as examples, and our drug reference carries storage and handling notes per drug. That is where in-use dating sits now. How long an opened multi-dose vial is good for, or a reconstituted antibiotic suspension, is a stability question rather than a compounding one, and it survived the change intact.

This is the distinction most often reported wrongly. Beyond-use dating for something you compounded is gone. In-use dating for a manufactured product you opened or reconstituted is not, and the two get collapsed into one bullet point in a lot of study material.

How to use this

If your material has you memorizing which chapter number covers which activity, that is time you can stop spending. If it has you learning what protective equipment a hazardous drug calls for, or which container a partly full vial goes into, keep it. We have written up what left and what stayed in more detail, and the blueprint walkthrough lists all 24 areas with the weight attached to each domain.

PTCB publishes the outline free on ptcb.org and it is two pages long, which is short enough to search yourself rather than trust a summary of, including ours. What the outline does not tell anyone is how heavily area 2.1 or area 3.6 is sampled, because PTCB publishes no item counts beneath the domain level. We would rather you searched it yourself anyway, because each of the searches above takes under a minute, settles the question permanently, and leaves you relying on PTCB rather than on anyone's summary of it.

Related

• Is compounding still on the PTCE?
• What changed on the 2026 PTCE, and what you can stop studying
• The 2026 PTCE blueprint, domain by domain