Series 26 Pass Rate 2026: What FINRA Actually Publishes

There is no official Series 26 pass rate. FINRA develops and administers the Investment Company and Variable Contracts Products Principal Qualification Examination, and it does not publish how many candidates pass — not on the Series 26 exam page, not in the Series 26 content outline, and not on the qualification exams index. What FINRA does publish is unusually precise, and more useful than a percentage would be: 110 scored questions, 10 unscored pretest items layered on top, 2 hours and 45 minutes, a 70% passing score, a $200 fee, and an exact registration chain you have to satisfy before you can sit.

How the Series 26 is actually scored

Here is everything FINRA states about the mechanics, drawn from the exam page and the Series 26 content outline.

Scored questions	110 multiple-choice items
Unscored pretest items	10 additional, unidentified items, randomly distributed through the exam
Total items you answer	120
Time	2 hours and 45 minutes (165 minutes)
Passing score	70%
Fee	$200
Corequisite	Securities Industry Essentials (SIE) exam
Prerequisite registration	Series 6 or Series 7 representative qualification
Sponsorship	Must be associated with and sponsored by a FINRA member firm

Now the part that trips people up. Unlike the vendor certifications that report a scaled score on an arbitrary point range, the Series 26's 70% is a real percentage — it is a straight proportion of questions answered correctly. But it is a percentage of the 110 scored questions only. Seventy percent of 110 is 77, so you need 77 scored items right.

The pretest items change what that feels like in the chair. You will answer 120 questions, and FINRA says the 10 pretest items are unidentified and randomly distributed, so you cannot tell which ones they are. Getting 77 correct out of the 120 you actually face is 64.2% of the questions in front of you. The arithmetic does not make the exam easier — the 10 extra items cannot help or hurt your score — but it does mean you have more margin than the raw count suggests. In the best case you could miss 43 of the 120 items on screen — 33 scored questions plus all 10 pretest items — and still pass.

Time works the same way. Candidates divide 165 minutes by 110 and get 90 seconds per question. The real figure is 165 divided by 120, or 82.5 seconds per item. That is a meaningful difference over a nearly three-hour sitting, and it is the single most common pacing error on principal-level exams.

One more thing FINRA states plainly: the passing score "is an absolute standard and is independent of the performance of candidates taking the exam." There is no curve. Your result does not move because the cohort you sat with did well or badly. This is precisely why a pass rate would tell you nothing actionable — the bar is fixed at 70% whatever anyone else scores.

Why the figures you see online disagree

Search for a Series 26 pass rate and you will find confident numbers ranging across a wide band. None of them are FINRA figures, because FINRA has not released one. A few things explain the spread.

• The SIE is the only FINRA exam anyone ever quotes a rate for. A figure of roughly 74% circulates for the Securities Industry Essentials exam and gets treated as a benchmark for the whole FINRA family. It should not be. The SIE is the entry-level exam, and its candidate pool bears no resemblance to the Series 26 pool — experienced representatives, already qualified through the Series 6 or Series 7 and sponsored by a member firm, being put up for a supervisory role. And that 74% figure does not appear on FINRA's own SIE exam page either, which tells you how far it has traveled from any source.
• Rates from other exams get borrowed. Numbers reported for the Series 6, Series 7, or Series 24 are quietly repurposed as Series 26 figures. They are different exams with different populations.
• Prep providers publish their own students' results. A course's internal pass rate measures people who bought and completed that course. That is a marketing statistic, not a population statistic.
• The 110 versus 120 confusion. Some sources describe the Series 26 as a 120-question exam and others as 110. Both are describing the same test — 110 scored plus 10 pretest. Any pass-rate arithmetic built on the wrong denominator is wrong from the start.

What the content outline weights, and what sinks candidates

FINRA publishes item counts rather than percentages. Here they are, with each function's share of the 110 scored questions calculated from those counts.

Job function	Items	Share of scored exam
Function 1 — Personnel Management Activities and Registration of the Broker-Dealer	16	14.5%
Function 2 — Supervises Associated Persons and Oversees Sales Practices	49	44.5%
Function 3 — Oversees Compliance and Business Processes of the Broker-Dealer and its Offices	45	40.9%
Total	110	100%

Functions 2 and 3 together are 94 of the 110 scored items — about 85% of the exam. If you are budgeting study time by weight, personnel management and CRD registration mechanics are worth roughly one question in seven, and everything else is supervision and compliance.

That distribution is the warning. The Series 26 is a supervisor's exam, not a products exam. FINRA states its purpose as assessing the competency of entry-level principals, and the outline is built around what a principal does: approving accounts and communications, reviewing correspondence and internal communications, conducting internal inspections, maintaining written supervisory procedures, and running annual compliance meetings. Product knowledge from the Series 6 or Series 7 is assumed, not retested. Candidates who study the Series 26 as "Series 6 again, but harder" find themselves answering questions about who signs off, on what schedule, with what documentation retained for how long.

The outline's reference list is dominated by the FINRA Rule 3110 supervision cluster and its supplementary material — designation of offices of supervisory jurisdiction, risk-based review of correspondence, delegation of review functions, retention periods, standards for reasonable review, and the presumption of a three-year inspection cycle. These are exactly the items where a plausible-sounding wrong answer is easy to write, and where guessing from general securities knowledge fails.

Two practical notes from the outline. There is no penalty for guessing, so answer every item; a blank is strictly worse than a coin flip. And FINRA says the item bank "changes constantly" as rules are amended, and that keeping current with rule changes is the candidate's responsibility — which is a real risk if you are studying from materials written several rule cycles ago.

The bottom line

Nobody outside FINRA knows the Series 26 pass rate, and FINRA has chosen not to say. What is official and verifiable is that you need 70% of 110 scored questions, which is 77 correct; that 10 unidentified pretest items bring your total to 120 and your pacing to 82.5 seconds per item; that you get 2 hours and 45 minutes; that the fee is $200; that the passing standard is absolute and uncurved; and that supervision and compliance make up about 85% of the scored content. You also need the registration chain in the right order — the SIE plus a Series 6 or Series 7 representative qualification, with firm sponsorship, before the Series 26 counts for anything. Those facts are enough to build a study plan. A pass rate would not change one decision inside it.

The number worth measuring is your own. Sit a timed set under the real constraint — 120 items, 165 minutes, no reference material — and see where the supervision and compliance questions actually fall for you. Start with a free Series 26 practice exam.