Series 14 Pass Rate 2026: No Official Rate

There is no official Series 14 pass rate. FINRA owns and administers the Compliance Official Qualification Examination, and it publishes a great deal about the exam — a current content outline dated 2025, a fee, a time limit, a passing score, and an item-by-item breakdown of all nine job functions the exam covers. What it does not publish, anywhere, is how many candidates pass. That figure appears neither on the Series 14 exam page nor in the content outline, and FINRA does not publish one for the Securities Industry Essentials exam either, despite the SIE having a candidate pool many times larger. Every percentage circulating in 2026 as "the Series 14 pass rate" was produced by someone other than the organization that scores the exam. This page is not going to add another one.

How the Series 14 is actually scored

Here is the useful correction, and for once it runs the opposite way from the vendor certifications. When a cloud or IT certification tells you the passing score is 700, that is a scaled score and it does not mean 70% of anything. FINRA's number is not scaled. The Series 14 passing score is a true percentage of the items you answer correctly, so the arithmetic is the arithmetic: 70% of 110 items is 77 correct answers. You can miss 33 questions and still pass.

That clean arithmetic depends on one thing worth checking, because it does not hold across FINRA's whole exam program. FINRA's qualification exams overview states that "Some exams have additional unscored (pretest) questions" and directs candidates to "each exam content outline for more information." Some, not all — and the Series 14 is one of the exceptions. Its 2025 content outline says simply that "the exam contains 110 multiple-choice items," and the allocation table beneath that sentence totals exactly 110. There is no pretest paragraph anywhere in the document.

Compare that with the SIE, whose outline is explicit in a way the Series 14's is not: each SIE candidate's exam "includes 5 additional, unidentified pretest items that do not contribute toward the candidate's score," so that "each candidate's exam consists of a total of 80 items (75 scored and 5 unscored)." An SIE candidate sits 80 questions and is graded on 75. On the published Series 14 structure, you sit 110 and are graded on 110. Nothing is padded on top, and the 77-correct figure stands as written.

Specification	Series 14
Scored questions	110 multiple choice
Unscored pretest items	None disclosed in the 2025 content outline
Time allowed	3 hours (180 minutes)
Passing score	70 — a percentage of scored items, not a scaled score
Exam fee	$350
Corequisite	None
Eligibility	Must be associated with and sponsored by a FINRA member firm or other applicable SRO member firm

The corequisite row is the single most useful line here, and it is the one most often reported wrongly. Most FINRA qualification exams now sit on top of the SIE, and the principal-level exams stack higher still — FINRA's co-requisite table lists the Series 24 as requiring "SIE + S7, S57, S79, S82, S86/87 or S16," the Series 9 and 10 as requiring "SIE + Series 7," and the Series 4 the same. The Series 14 requires none of that. FINRA's exam page states flatly that "the Series 14 does not have a corequisite exam," and its co-requisite table lists the Series 14's requirement as "None." There is no SIE corequisite and no representative-level registration to clear first. The only gate is sponsorship: you must be associated with and sponsored by a member firm, because this is a principal-level exam. If you are deciding what to sit next, that changes the sequencing entirely — the Series 14 is a door you can walk through directly.

At $350 it is also the most expensive exam in this group — three and a half times the SIE's $100, enough that a second attempt is a real budget line rather than a rounding error.

Why the numbers you see online disagree

Search for a Series 14 pass rate and you will be handed figures that cannot all be true at once, none of them citing FINRA, because there is nothing at FINRA to cite. Three things make this particular exam a magnet for invented numbers.

First, the candidate population is small. The Series 14 was created by NYSE Regulation and has been in continuous use since 1989. It qualifies a narrow group — the outline describes it as covering people "designated as having day-to-day compliance responsibilities for their respective firms or who supervise ten or more people engaged in compliance activities." A few thousand compliance officers do not generate the forum traffic that produces even a bad crowdsourced estimate, so writers fill the vacuum by analogy to better-known exams.

Second, it gets confused with the Series 24. Both are principal-level, both touch supervision, and figures written about one migrate to the other. They are not the same exam and they do not have the same entry requirements, as the corequisite table above shows.

Third, the incentive runs one direction. A course seller quoting a punishing failure rate has just explained why you need the course. That figure may be honestly measured inside their own student population and still tell you nothing about your odds, because their students are not a random sample of Series 14 candidates.

Where the marks actually sit

The content outline publishes exact weights, and they are lopsided enough to plan around:

Function	Content area	% of exam	Items
1	Regulatory Agencies	3%	3
2	Markets and Operations	18%	20
3	Broker-Dealer Operations	9%	10
4	Credit Regulation/Capital Requirements	6%	7
5	General Supervision	18%	20
6	Investment Banking	14%	15
7	Registration	8%	9
8	Sales Practice — Customer/Employee Accounts	15%	16
9	Sales Practice — Solicitations	9%	10
	Total	100%	110

Four functions carry two-thirds of the exam. Markets and Operations, General Supervision, Sales Practice — Customer/Employee Accounts, and Investment Banking together account for 65% of the items, 71 questions of 110. Against a 77-correct bar, you cannot pass while weak in two of those four. Regulatory Agencies, by contrast, is three questions. Candidates routinely over-prepare it because jurisdictional charts are easy to memorize, which is the wrong trade.

The format punishes recognition-level study. FINRA states that items "range from simple recall of basic facts to drawing conclusions from a set of facts," that many are "presented as job-related scenarios," and that others "require the evaluation of subjective information to arrive at decisions about the 'best' or the 'first' action to take." Knowing that a rule exists is not the same as ranking four defensible responses to a scenario and picking the one a regulator would take first. The outline also confirms an "except" format, where the task is to find the one choice that does not belong — a reliable source of avoidable errors under time pressure.

The clock is tighter than three hours sounds. One hundred and ten scenario items in 180 minutes is about 98 seconds each, with no time bought back by pretest items you could skip, because there are none.

No corequisite means no ramp. Candidates for most FINRA principal exams have already passed the SIE and a representative-level exam and have absorbed the house style of FINRA questions along the way. A Series 14 candidate can arrive having sat nothing. The exam does not adjust for that, and it spans nine functions of federal, state, and SRO rules.

The bottom line

Nobody knows the Series 14 pass rate, including the sites publishing confident numbers about it. What is official and verifiable is that the exam is 110 multiple-choice items with no pretest padding, that 70% means 77 correct, that you get three hours, that the fee is $350, that supervision and sales-practice content dominate the weighting, and that there is no corequisite of any kind standing between you and a seat. That last fact is worth more to your planning than a pass rate would be. A pass rate describes a population; the corequisite table tells you what to do on Monday.

The most useful next step is finding out which of the nine functions you are actually weak in before you put $350 on the table. Work through a free Series 14 practice exam and check your results against the weighting above — if you are losing items in General Supervision or Markets and Operations, that is where the exam is decided.