This paper proposes a U-test statistic for the problem of testing that a life distribution is exponential against the alternative that it is harmonic new better (worse) than used in expectation upper tail HNBUET (HNWUET), but not exponential on complete data. Selected critical values are tabulated for sample sizes n =5(1)60. The asymptotic normality of the statistic is proved and a comparison is made of the asymptotic efficiency between the statistic and other statistics. The power of the test is studied by simulation. A test for HNBUET in the case of randomly right-censored data is also considered. An application of the proposed test statistic in medical sciences is given.