To know for certain how early you can take a pregnancy test, there are some things that you need to understand both about conception, as well as how exactly it is that pregnancy tests work to tell you whether or not you are going to be expecting a bundle of joy. Knowing these things can help you decide when it is that you should take a pregnancy test.

The first thing that you need to be aware of is exactly what a pregnancy test does. A pregnancy test is designed to check your urine for the presence of hCG, or Human Chorionic Gonadotropin. HCG is a hormone that is produced only after you have become pregnant. Your levels of hCG will rise during the first trimester of your pregnancy. Some pregnancy tests are very sensitive, and will be able to measure hCG at lower levels, whereas other pregnancy tests are not nearly as sensitive.

You also need to know at what point in pregnancy it is that your body starts to produce hCG. Your body does not start to produce hCG once the egg has been fertilized. Rather, your body starts to produce hCG after the fertilized egg has been implanted in the wall of the uterus. This implantation takes place somewhere between 7 and 10 days after you ovulate. Depending on when it is that you had sexual intercourse, this may be as many as 12 to 15 days after you attempted to conceive. From there, it takes a couple of days for levels of hCG to be high enough to register, even for the most sensitive tests.

Based on all of this, you can take a pregnancy test as early as 8 days after you ovulate. Having said that, you are still likely to receive a negative result, even if you are pregnant. Most of the time, the most sensitive tests will be able to pick up a pregnancy by the time you hit your 12th day of pregnancy, and almost all tests will be able to detect your pregnancy once you have actually missed your period.

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