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When you’re trying to conceive, the two-week wait to take a pregnancy test can feel like the most excruciating time of your life. Suddenly, 14 whole days feels like an impossible length of time, with minutes and seconds crawling by more slowly than you ever thought possible.
Maybe you’re the type to exhibit excellent self-control and can wait exactly until the day your period is due, and maybe you’re the type more like me — who buys pregnancy test strips in bulk on Amazon and starts testing as early as possible. Either way, you want to know how early you can take a pregnancy test, so here’s what to expect about testing early.
How Early Can You Really Take a Pregnancy Test?
Here’s the scoop ladies: The absolute earliest possible time you can take a pregnancy test (based on pure science and, you know, biology) is six days after you ovulate. This is due to the fact that it will take that long for the fertilized egg to complete its journey to the uterus from the fallopian tube, implant into the uterus, and then start kicking out enough hCG to actually be detectable in a woman’s urine. In fact, a 2008 study in Human Reproduction explained that it can actually take as long as 14 days for hCG to be detected in a woman’s urine, so considering everything that has to happen just right for that egg to be fertilized, make it to the womb, and implant, six days starts to seem a little early.
To make matters even more confusing, that six day-mark is assuming that you already had sex before you ovulated, so that the sperm was just ready and waiting to fertilize your egg as soon as you ovulated. Because sperm can live for up to 7 or even 10 days (some people swear they can live as long as two weeks) and it’s very difficult to pinpoint the exact day of ovulation, there is a lot of discrepancy about that magical six DPO (days post ovulation) pregnant test.
Although, I can fully attest to it being possible to take a test that early and get a positive. With my most recent pregnancy, I was tracking my cycle and, based on the timing of our marital relations, I know without a doubt that I took a test at six DPO — and it was positive. It was a very, very faint positive, mind you, but it was still positive. If I hadn’t watched the test turn darker every day I retested, and if I was not sitting here currently 9 months pregnant, I wouldn’t have believed it myself.
How accurate is an early pregnancy test?
Most at-home pregnancy tests come with instructions that list the accuracy of the test, with some claiming to detect pregnancy earlier than others, but as one study proved, at-home pregnancy tests can vary widely. Some can produce a positive result with a very low amount of hCG, while others require a much higher level than hCG to actually make a positive result. Your best bet, when choosing an at-home pregnancy test to take early, is to choose a test strip (skip the digital, as it has more potential for error) with a low hCG threshold.
Should you take an early pregnant test?
The short answer is no, you shouldn’t. It is to your advantage in every possible way to wait as long as possible to your expected day of your period arriving before testing because it truly will be the most accurate. Even then, some women don’t test positive until after several days after missing a period.
The longer you have been trying to conceive, the harder it gets to not only wait to test, but to deal with the difficult emotions that a negative test can bring — not knowing if it’s because you really aren’t pregnant, or it’s just too early.
“By far the worst part about pregnancy tests is being so sure you feel pregnant only to have the test tell you, no, you're not,” says Darcy Zalewski. “It gets harder to see after trying for quite awhile. It's a huge letdown.”
The other difficult side of early pregnancy testing is that if you get an early positive pregnancy test, there is a chance that you may have what’s called a chemical pregnancy, when you have an egg that is fertilized and able to kick out enough hormones to be picked up by a test but is not a viable pregnancy, evidenced by starting your period shortly after.
For women who have miscarried, an early positive pregnancy test can mean additional days of worry, as was the case for Rebekah Henderson, who cautions her fellow women TTC against taking an early test. After experiencing one miscarriage and then receiving an early positive pregnancy test, she found herself terrified something would happen again.
“I was prepared for a negative pregnancy test but not for a false positive,” Henderson wrote. “I can just wait and see if my period starts, so here I am, nails digging into the cliff as I try to hang on for a few more days.”
The moral of the story is, before you take an early pregnancy test, carefully consider the pros and cons for yourself. For the most accurate result, it is always best to wait until the day of your expected period, or even after.
But if you absolutely can’t wait (and trust me, I get it), know that it’s understandable and you can test as much as you need to for your own peace of mind.
“For most women, there’s no harm in testing every day,” OB-GYN Ashley Gilman explained. But only you know what is best for you — so think before you pee on that stick.
