Prometric Test Center Rules (2026): The Vendor Publishes Defaults — Your Exam Sponsor Publishes the Rules

Who actually writes the rules for your Prometric appointment

Prometric runs the building. It does not write the rules you will be held to inside it, and it says so — on the last line of a two-page PDF that almost nobody opens.

That single footnote is why this page cannot be a list of Prometric's rules, and why any page that claims to be one is guessing. Read in order, the vendor's document sets a floor and then hands each storey to somebody else: identification is "predetermined by your test sponsor", breaks happen "as determined by your test sponsor", and reference material is banned "except were allowed by your test sponsor" — the typo is Prometric's, printed as shown.

The practical consequence is a two-step. Find out who your sponsor is, then read that sponsor's page. For every securities exam on this site the sponsor is FINRA, whose test-centre page opens by telling you which vendor it is about; for the ASE line it is ASE. Both are quoted throughout, and both are linked in the sources at the foot of this page.

All four rows are the same two-page document, Version 1.0 of 1 November 2024. Read together they are less a rulebook than a table of contents pointing somewhere else.

What ID to bring, by sponsor

There is no Prometric ID rule to learn. There is a floor — original, unexpired, government-issued, carrying a photo and a signature — and then your sponsor's answer to the only question that matters at the door, which is how many.

The two answers below differ in a way that is easy to miss. FINRA asks for one document that does both jobs. ASE asks for one document too, and then adds a second only to supply whichever of the two elements your first document lacks — so an ASE candidate whose licence carries no signature needs a second piece of paper and a FINRA candidate in the same position needs a different licence.

The FINRA row covers all 32 securities exams we publish, because FINRA administers NASAA's, NFA's and MSRB's qualification exams as well as its own — a Series 63 candidate reads the same page as a Series 7 candidate. The ASE row is the only one on this page where a second ID can ever be required.

Thirty minutes, and what happens in them

The arrival time is the one instruction that holds across sponsors, and it holds because three documents say it independently rather than because one of them is authoritative: FINRA's test-centre page, ASE's testing policies, and Prometric's own test-day checklist from 2018.

What does not hold is the consequence of being late. FINRA turns you away past the 30-minute mark only when no seat can hold your full testing time — and then you or your firm buy the enrolment again. ASE leaves it to the centre's discretion, and forfeits your fees if the test cannot go ahead. Neither is the flat prohibition the SERP prints as Prometric's rule.

The check-in itself is more physical than the page you were sent to describes, and the section below quotes the documents that describe it.

• — Arrive 30 minutes early. FINRA and ASE both say so in their own words, and so does the vendor's own checklist.
• — Bring the ID your sponsor asks for, in its original form, in the name your appointment is under.
• — Leave time for a physical screening — see the next section for what it involves.
• — Everything you did not bring to the desk goes in a locker, including the coat.

The checklist is a one-page PDF created on 28 February 2018 and still served today. Its arrival sentence has aged well because both sponsors independently agree with it; the rest of it has not — see the last section.

The screening, and where it is actually written down

This is the one part of the day where the vendor's own document is the most useful thing to have read, because FINRA's page does not describe it and ASE's describes it in a different order.

It also repeats. Prometric's wording is "prior to every entry into the test room", and ASE spells out the consequence: the whole sequence runs again each time you come back from a break. A candidate who takes two breaks is screened three times.

Neither sponsor page leads with this and the vendor page that would is unreachable, so a candidate who has read only their own exam's page meets the wand for the first time at the door.

What you may take to the desk

This is where the supersession clause stops being a governance footnote and starts costing people things. The vendor's default permits two items into the room. Both of our sponsors override it — in opposite directions and by different amounts.

FINRA's answer is a ten-item list plus still water, and anything not on it needs a phone call for pre-authorisation. ASE's is a locker for all jewellery except wedding and engagement rings, water on stricter terms than FINRA's, and one addition neither the vendor nor FINRA allows: a printed bilingual dictionary, if English is your second language.

Read the Prometric rows as a floor and the sponsor rows as the rule. An item absent from a sponsor's list is not thereby permitted: FINRA's own framing asks candidates to call for guidance or pre-authorisation on anything it has not named.

Breaks, and the clock that does not stop

Prometric's regulations say only that an exam may have breaks, that the sponsor decides, and that you sign out every time you leave the room. Everything a candidate actually needs — whether the timer pauses, whether you can reach your locker, whether you can leave the building — is somewhere else.

FINRA answers all three, strictly: restroom use only, no leaving the centre, no locker access, and the timer keeps running. That last clause is the one worth internalising, because it converts a break into questions you will not get to answer.

It is also the clause the stale documents on prometric.com happen to state most clearly — the 2017 sheet spells out that the timer counts down through an unscheduled break. It is right about the mechanism and wrong about whose exam it is describing.

Prometric's archived policies page says the opposite about signing out — that staff record the times, "removing the need for the test taker to sign the roster". We cite the current regulations rather than the archived page, and flag the disagreement rather than resolving it.

Moving the appointment, and missing it

There is no Prometric cancellation policy, and this is the clearest place to see why publishing one would be wrong. The two sponsors on this page use windows that differ by an order of magnitude, and one of them closes completely.

FINRA's window is ten business days for a free change, with a fee equal to the whole exam cost inside two business days or for a no-show. ASE's remote testing closes changes three days out and records a No Show if you do not appear — and an ASE test cannot be repurchased until that result posts.

A failed sitting has its own waiting period, and here too the sponsors part company. ASE's 30-day wait attaches to any scored result, a pass included, because the wait exists to stop the same test being bought twice in a week.

Neither window is Prometric's, and neither is transferable to the other exam. A page publishing one figure as "the Prometric cancellation policy" is quoting one client's contract.

The documents the internet calls “Prometric's rules”

Ask an answer engine what Prometric requires and you will get specifics: two forms of ID, no bottled water, a fixed late cut-off. Those specifics are real, and they are quoted from real documents on prometric.com. They are also not Prometric's rules, and two of them are more than eight years old.

Each of these files is live today under a generic title that does not name the client it was written for. You have to open the PDF and read the body to discover whose exam it describes — which is exactly what a page summarising it does not do.

The 2013 sheet's secondary-ID list still admits a credit card, an ATM card and a school identification card. The 2017 sheet describes an exam Prometric no longer delivers at all — the IRS Special Enrolment Examination moved to PSI in March 2026. Both are being quoted as current.

The exams on this site delivered at a Prometric test centre

Derived from our own evidence trail rather than from a vendor directory: an exam appears here when the facts on its page were verified against the sponsor document that names Prometric as the delivery vendor. FINRA administers NASAA's, NFA's and MSRB's exams alongside its own, which is why the securities list runs past the Series line.

This is the set we publish, not the set Prometric delivers — the vendor's full client list is far larger and we have no way to read it. It also does not claim exclusivity: it says the sponsor documents Prometric delivery, not that no other vendor is involved. The other two vendors do publish candidate-facing rulebooks, and both are taken apart the same way: our Pearson VUE guide and our PSI guide.

How we checked this

• — Every rule on this page was read on 5 September 2026 and is quoted verbatim, with the document's own label and its printed version stamp where it has one. Where two documents disagree, both are quoted rather than reconciled.
• — Prometric's material comes from PDFs served under prometric.com/files/: the Test Center Regulations (version 1.0, 1 November 2024), the Important Test Day Checklist (created 28 February 2018), an unlabelled Test Center Regulations stamped “Revised 01252017” whose body is written for the IRS exam, and an Identification Information sheet created 15 November 2013 whose body attributes its rule to the FSBPT.
• — We did not read a single Prometric web page. Every HTML URL on prometric.com returned HTTP 403 to every client we tried, including a headless browser that sat on a challenge until it timed out. Only the files directory and robots.txt served normally, so everything attributed to Prometric here comes from those PDFs.
• — Two of the pages FINRA's own guidance sends candidates to are among the ones we could not open — the closures page named in FINRA's inclement-weather paragraph, and the pre-approved medical items list linked from FINRA's personal-items page. We cannot tell you what a Prometric closure notice says.
• — FINRA's and ASE's material comes from their own pages, read in full. ase.com returns HTTP 403 to command-line tools, so those pages were read in a browser; if you spot-check our ASE citations with curl you will get 403 on live pages.
• — We publish no per-exam mapping of sponsors to rules beyond the two documented here. Extending this page to a third sponsor without reading that sponsor's own document is the mistake it exists to correct.

Questions

Does Prometric require two forms of ID?

No — Prometric does not set the number at all. Its Test Center Regulations, version 1.0 of 1 November 2024, state that the validity and the number of acceptable IDs are predetermined by the exam sponsor. For every securities exam FINRA administers the answer is one government-issued ID carrying both a photo and a signature; for ASE it is one such ID plus a second document only if the first is missing the photo or the signature. The widely quoted two-ID rule comes from a 2013 sheet on prometric.com written for a physical-therapy board.

What are Prometric's test center rules for 2026?

Prometric's current network-wide document is the Test Center Regulations stamped version 1.0, 1 November 2024, and its closing line says a client or test sponsor's policies supersede those regulations wherever the two conflict. That makes it a set of defaults rather than a rulebook, so the rules that decide your appointment are the ones your exam sponsor publishes — FINRA's test-centre page for securities exams, ASE's testing policies page for ASE certifications.

How early do you have to arrive at a Prometric test center?

Thirty minutes, and this is the rare instruction that holds regardless of exam: FINRA, ASE and Prometric's own test-day checklist each state it independently. What differs is the consequence of being late. FINRA refuses admission past 30 minutes only when no seat can hold your full testing time, and ASE says late arrivals may be turned away at the centre's discretion — but both treat a lost appointment as a forfeited fee.

Can you bring your own calculator to a Prometric exam?

There is no vendor-level answer: the word calculator does not appear in Prometric's Test Center Regulations at all. FINRA settles it for all of its exams by issuing a four-function calculator at the desk, along with erasable note boards, dry-erase markers and noise-cancelling headphones, all of which must be handed back at the end of the appointment. ASE's test-centre policies mention no calculator and issue scratch paper and pencils instead.

Can you drink water during a Prometric exam?

That depends on the sponsor, and Prometric's own documents disagree with both of ours. FINRA permits still or non-carbonated water in a clear container with a lid or cap and treats any other beverage as an accommodation request. ASE permits water on the same terms but additionally requires the labels removed and the container opened for inspection. A Prometric checklist still published from 2018 says bottled water may not be brought into the testing room at all.

Does the timer stop if you take a break during a Prometric exam?

Prometric leaves the question to the sponsor, stating only that exams may have scheduled or unscheduled breaks as the sponsor determines and that you must sign out each time you leave the room. FINRA answers it strictly for its own exams: breaks are for restroom use only, you may not leave the centre or access your locker, and the exam timer does not pause.

What happens if you miss a Prometric appointment?

There is no single answer, because the fee belongs to the sponsor rather than to the vendor. FINRA charges a fee equal to the cost of the exam for a no-show or for any change made inside two business days, and its free change window is ten business days. ASE closes changes three days out entirely, records the miss as a No Show result, and will not let you repurchase that test until the result has posted.

Are Prometric exams open book?

Only where the sponsor says so. Prometric's regulations prohibit written notes, published materials and other testing aids except where allowed by the test sponsor — and our two sponsors use that clause differently. FINRA states plainly that its exams are closed-book and that no reference material may be used for the duration of the appointment, while ASE permits a candidate whose second language is English to carry a standard published bilingual dictionary into the room.

Sources

Every rule above is quoted from one of these documents. A vendor or licensing authority can revise any of them without notice, so the retrieval date is part of the citation.

1. prometric.com Prometric Test Center Regulations · Version 1.0, 1 November 2024 · read 5 September 2026

   “Note: Client/test sponsor practice policies shall supersede these regulations if a conflict exists.”

2. prometric.com Important Test Day Checklist (Prometric) · PDF created 28 February 2018 · read 5 September 2026

   “Arrive at the testing center at least 30 minutes prior to your appointment.”

3. prometric.com Identification Information (hosted by Prometric, written for FSBPT) · PDF created 15 November 2013 · read 5 September 2026

   “You must present two (2) valid forms of identification at the Prometric Test Center prior to taking an exam - one primary and one secondary ID from the list below.”

4. prometric.com Test Center Regulations (hosted by Prometric, written for the IRS exam) · Stamped “Revised 01252017” · read 5 September 2026

   “Your test has no scheduled breaks. Unscheduled breaks are only permitted in order to access the bathroom or lockers. The test timer will continue to count down during an unscheduled break.”

5. finra.org Prepare for Your Test Center Appointment (FINRA) · read 5 September 2026

   “The information provided on this page is for candidates who have elected to take their exam(s) at a local Prometric test center.”

6. finra.org Test Center Security Guidelines: Personal Items (FINRA) · read 5 September 2026

   “Permitted Items: Asthma inhaler Cough drops – must be unwrapped and not in a container Eye drops Eyeglasses and hearing aids Insulin pump (attached to body) Wedding bands Neck brace Nitroglycerin pills Pillow for neck, back or injured limb support Sweater, sweatshirt, blazer, suit jacket”

7. finra.org Reschedule or Cancel Your Appointment (FINRA) · read 5 September 2026

   “If you need to reschedule or cancel your qualification exam appointment, you must do so a minimum of 10 business days in advance to avoid any fees. Appointments rescheduled or cancelled within 10 business days will incur the existing fee at the time the appointment is changed.”

8. finra.org Prepare for Your Online Test Appointment (FINRA) · read 5 September 2026

   “FINRA offers online delivery of the Securities Industry Essentials (SIE) exam. Please see the Schedule an Exam page for more information about the ability to take other exams online.”

9. ase.com Testing Policies and Procedures — Test Centers (ASE) · read 5 September 2026

   “If either a photo or signature is missing from your primary ID, an additional form of ID that includes the missing element is required.”

10. ase.com What to Expect at the Testing Center (ASE) · read 5 September 2026

    “If English is your second language, you may bring a standard, published English-to-foreign language dictionary to use during testing. If you speak Spanish, every ASE test features a button on the testing interface that launches an English-Spanish Glossary of Technical Terms.”

11. ase.com Online Remote Testing Policies and Procedures (ASE) · read 5 September 2026

    “No changes are allowed within 3 days of your scheduled appointment. … If you are within 3 days of your testing appointment, you cannot cancel the appointment or test. You will receive a No Show result if you do not go to the appointment.”