📅 Daily Practice
A mixed set picked just for you — due topics and a few new ones, 10 questions.
📄 Past Papers
Real SATs papers back to 2000, organised by year — free, no sign-up, no cost.
About the KS2 arithmetic paper
Arithmetic is Paper 1 of the Year 6 maths SATs. It is a page of calculations with no word problems: about 36 questions worth 40 marks, done in 30 minutes, with no calculator. The questions start easy and get harder as the paper goes on.
What comes up
Looking at the last five real papers, the most common question types are:
- Addition and subtraction, including big numbers and decimals.
- Multiplication and division: times tables facts, short division, and multiplying or dividing by 10, 100 and 1,000.
- Long multiplication and long division: usually four questions, each worth 2 marks.
- Fractions: adding, subtracting and multiplying them, and dividing a fraction by a whole number.
- Percentages of amounts, such as 10% of 450 or 35% of 600.
Tips that get marks
- Show your method on the 2-mark questions. A correct long multiplication or long division method can still earn 1 mark even if one small slip makes the answer wrong.
- Fractions can be left in any equivalent form unless the question asks for the simplest form.
- Check with the inverse: if 912 ÷ 8 = 114, then 114 × 8 should be 912.
The practice above picks the topics you find hardest more often, so a few minutes a day goes a long way. There is no timer. Speed comes from practice, not pressure.
Ready for a full practice run? Try the free SATs mock papers, which have answer booklets, or the real government papers on the past papers page.