Series 22 Pass Rate 2026: No Official Rate Exists

There is no official Series 22 pass rate. FINRA writes, administers and scores the Direct Participation Programs Representative Qualification Examination, so it holds every candidate result there is — and it publishes none of them. Its qualification exams index gives a duration, a question count and a fee for every exam in the catalog, and a pass rate for not one of them. The absence is a policy rather than an oversight, and the pattern gives it away: the one pass-rate figure in wide circulation for any FINRA exam — roughly 74% for the Securities Industry Essentials (SIE) exam — attaches to the single test anyone aged 18 or over may sit without a sponsoring firm. Every sponsorship-gated qualification exam above it, the Series 22 included, is a closed cohort with nothing reported. What FINRA does publish about the Series 22 is precise and more useful than a percentage: 50 scored questions, five unscored ones, 90 minutes, a passing score of 70, and a $100 fee.

How the Series 22 is actually scored

Everything below comes from FINRA's Series 22 exam page and the official Series 22 content outline.

What FINRA publishes	Series 22
Scored questions	50
Unscored pretest items	5
Questions you actually answer	55
Time allowed	1 hour and 30 minutes
Passing score	70
Fee	$100
Corequisite	SIE exam
Eligibility	Sponsorship by a FINRA member firm or other SRO member firm
Format	Multiple choice, four answer choices, no reference materials

The passing score is where most write-ups go wrong, but in the opposite direction from the usual warning. On many certification exams a "passing score" is a scaled number with no relationship to how many questions you got right. On the Series 22 the 70 is a real percentage of the 50 scored questions. Thirty-five correct answers pass; thirty-four is a 68 and fails. Each scored question is worth exactly two points, so one item is the entire margin. FINRA adds a single qualifier: scores are placed on a common scale through equating, "a statistical adjustment process" accounting for slight differences in difficulty between the sets of items candidates receive, so the raw count can move a little between forms.

The pretest items are what break the arithmetic. The content outline states that "each candidate's exam includes 5 additional, unidentified pretest items that do not contribute toward the candidate's score," randomly distributed, for "a total of 55 items (50 scored and 5 unscored)." Two consequences follow. You cannot treat an unanswerable-looking question as a freebie, because you have no idea which five don't count. And your pacing is 90 minutes across 55 questions — about 98 seconds each, not the 108 you get planning against 50. Those ten seconds a question add up to the last nine minutes of the exam. There is no penalty for guessing, so leave nothing blank.

What the registration actually lets you sell

FINRA Rule 1220(b)(8) limits a Direct Participation Programs Representative to "the solicitation, purchase or sale of equity interests in or the debt of direct participation programs" — programs "that provide for flow-through tax consequences," which the rule enumerates as "oil and gas programs, cattle programs, condominium securities, Subchapter S corporate offerings and all other programs of a similar nature." FINRA's exam page describes the same territory commercially: real estate, oil and gas and equipment leasing programs, limited partnerships, limited liability companies and S corporations.

What that excludes is everything else. A Series 7 General Securities Representative, in FINRA's words, "is qualified for the solicitation, purchase and/or sale of all securities products, including corporate securities, municipal fund securities, options, direct participation programs, investment company products and variable contracts." The Series 7 already covers DPPs; the Series 22 does not cover the reverse. A DPP-only rep cannot sell a customer a mutual fund, an ETF, a corporate bond, an option or a variable annuity. What you buy for that narrowness is a far smaller exam: 50 scored questions in 90 minutes at $100, against the Series 7's 125 questions in 3 hours 45 minutes at $395 with a passing score of 72.

The SIE is a corequisite, not a prerequisite. You may sit the two in either order, but neither alone registers you — FINRA requires both the Series 22 and the SIE for the Direct Participation Programs registration. Above representative level the sequencing tightens: the Series 39, the DPP principal exam, lists its corequisites as "SIE + S7 or SIE + S22" (100 questions, 2 hours 15 minutes, passing score 70, $200). The Series 22 is therefore a complete path to the principal registration on its own; you never need to detour through the Series 7 to get there.

Why the figures you find online disagree

None of them originate with FINRA, so there is no authoritative figure to reconcile them against. Four things drive the spread:

• Small, closed cohorts. The Series 22 is sponsorship-gated to a single-purpose role. A provider quoting "our candidates pass at X%" is describing its own customers, who are not a random sample of anything.
• Different denominators. Some sources describe first attempts, others every sitting including retakes. Those numbers are never the same and are almost never labeled.
• Opposed incentives. A low quoted rate sells a course; a high one advertises the course's effectiveness. Both are marketing figures pulling in opposite directions.
• Borrowed rates. Estimates for the Series 7 and the SIE get quietly reassigned to the Series 22 because it sits in the same catalog.

There is a quick tell for whether a page read the source material: if it says the Series 22 is "50 questions," it read the exam page and not the content outline. You answer 55.

Where the questions come from, and what sinks candidates

Function	Percentage of exam	Scored questions
1. Seeks business for the broker-dealer from customers and potential customers	34%	17
2. Opens accounts after obtaining and evaluating customers' financial profile and investment objectives	8%	4
3. Provides customers with information about investments, makes recommendations, transfers assets and maintains records	54%	27
4. Obtains and verifies purchase instructions and agreements; processes, completes and confirms transactions	4%	2

Function 3 is the exam. Twenty-seven of the 50 scored questions sit there, and since you can only afford to miss 15 in total, Function 3 can fail you by itself.

Inside it, the reliable killer is the tax treatment of DPPs. The outline asks for the conduit nature of the entity, Form 1065 informational returns, allocation of profits and losses to partners, adjusted tax basis, passive income offset by passive losses (deductible only to the extent of income, carried forward but not back), credits versus deductions, depreciation, depletion and amortization, phantom income, Section 1031 exchanges, the "at risk" limitation (capital contribution plus the portion of liabilities the partner is liable for, with qualified non-recourse real estate financing exempt), and DPP preference items that can trigger the alternative minimum tax. Almost none of this appears on the SIE, so candidates arriving from a general securities background usually meet it for the first time here.

The second sink is program economics rather than product knowledge: evaluating a DPP's economic soundness, the sponsor's track record, use of offering proceeds, organizational and offering costs and their regulatory limits, and underwriting compensation in indeterminate forms such as carried interest. FINRA Rule 2310 appears in four separate subsections of the outline, which tells you how heavily it is tested.

Function 1 at 34% is no warm-up either — 17 questions on communications with the public under Rule 2210, on types of offerings including Regulation D, Regulation A and intrastate exemptions, and on due diligence. And do not write off Functions 2 and 4 because they are only 12% between them: six questions is twelve points, six times the margin separating a 68 from a 70.

The bottom line

No Series 22 pass rate exists, and no honest source can hand you one. The numbers that do exist are FINRA's, and they are specific: 50 scored questions plus five unscored, 90 minutes, 70 to pass, $100, the SIE as a corequisite, and firm sponsorship before you can enroll at all. Translated into things you can act on, that means 55 answers in an hour and a half, 35 of the 50 scored ones correct, roughly 98 seconds per question, more than half the paper drawn from one function, and pass-through taxation as the likeliest place to lose it.

The question worth answering before you enroll is not what percentage of strangers passed, but whether you can carry passive-loss limits, phantom income and depletion at 98 seconds a question rather than merely recognize them on a page. Work through a free Series 22 practice exam against the clock and score yourself out of 50 with 35 as the line — that is the only Series 22 pass rate you can actually do something about.