Series 3 Pass Rate 2026: No Official Rate Exists

There is no published Series 3 pass rate. Neither the National Futures Association, which owns the National Commodity Futures Examination, nor FINRA, which enrolls and administers candidates for it, reports the share of people who pass. The silence is policy rather than oversight: FINRA publishes a pass rate for exactly one exam in its catalog — the Securities Industry Essentials exam, which runs at roughly 74% — and publishes nothing of the kind for any qualification exam beyond it. What the two organizations do publish about the Series 3 is narrower and far more useful than a percentage: an exact scored-question count, an exact number of experimental items, a fee, a time limit, and a passing rule that ends more attempts than any single topic on the content outline.

How the Series 3 is actually scored

FINRA's exam page describes the Series 3 as "a National Futures Association (NFA) exam administered by FINRA." Every figure below comes from that page or NFA's study outline for the futures industry exams.

Item	Official value
Scored questions	120
Experimental questions	5 additional items that "DO NOT count toward their grades"
Total items delivered	125
Question types	True/false and multiple choice
Time limit	2 hours and 30 minutes (150 minutes)
Passing score	70% on each of the two parts — market knowledge and regulations
Fee	$140
Corequisite	None. The SIE is not required
Delivery	Test center; NFA exams "are required to be taken in a test center," with limited exceptions
Enrollment window	120 days to schedule and sit after enrolling with FINRA
Retake waits	30 days after a first failure, 30 days after a second, 180 days after a third and each one after that

Start with the corequisite line, because it is the most misread thing about this exam. Candidates who have worked through Series 7 or Series 79 material arrive assuming the SIE gates everything at FINRA. It does not gate this. The Series 3 is a futures credential, not a securities one, and FINRA lists its corequisite as None. You can sit it with no prior registration and no sponsoring firm — NFA states that "a sponsor is not required for any of the futures industry exams." What it feeds into is NFA Registration Rule 401, which requires associated persons of futures commission merchants, introducing brokers, commodity pool operators, and commodity trading advisors to satisfy a proficiency requirement, normally by passing the Series 3.

Now the scoring. Unlike the scaled scores used by most vendor certifications, 70% on the Series 3 is a real percentage of real questions — no scaling, no equating table, no conversion between raw and reported score. But it applies to scored questions only, and NFA adds five experimental items on top of the 120. Those five are not marked, not identifiable, and not counted, yet you still have to read and answer them. The arithmetic that matters is therefore 125 items in 150 minutes — about 72 seconds per question — while the grade is computed against 120 of them.

The rule that decides most outcomes is the two-part structure. NFA's wording leaves no room: "the candidate must receive a score of 70 percent on both parts of the exam (market knowledge and regulations) in order to pass." There is no averaging between the two. Score 88% on market knowledge and 66% on regulations and you have failed, even though your combined performance is well above 70%. And because NFA does not publish how the 120 scored questions divide between the two parts, you cannot calculate in advance how many regulations items you can afford to miss.

Why the figures you find online disagree

Search for a Series 3 pass rate and you will find confident percentages, usually in the 50s or 60s. None of them trace back to NFA or FINRA, because neither body releases the data. They come from prep companies quoting their own enrolled students — a self-selected group who paid for a course — or from someone's memory of a forum thread.

There is a specific reason the crowd-sourced numbers are worse than usual here, and it is buried in NFA's score-reporting policy. If you fail, "the overall percentage score and the percent of questions answered correctly in each section will appear." If you pass, that detail "will not appear." Candidates who pass walk out of the test center without knowing their score, so every self-reported Series 3 score in circulation belongs to someone who failed. Any "average score" assembled from candidate reports is, structurally, an average of failures.

Smaller discrepancies account for the rest. Sites disagree on whether the exam has 120 or 125 questions; both figures are official and describe different things — 120 scored, 125 delivered. "70%" is routinely quoted as a single overall threshold, producing study plans built around a total-score target the exam does not use. And the $140 is the exam fee, while the $70 attached to the Series 3 on NFA's fee table is the charge for canceling or rescheduling inside the three-to-ten business day window.

What the content outline covers, and what actually sinks candidates

NFA publishes "a general listing of the major subject areas covered by the examination" and explicitly notes that it "does not represent an exhaustive list of the actual test questions." Critically, NFA publishes no percentage weights and no per-part question counts — so any weighting table you see elsewhere was reverse-engineered by a prep vendor. Here is the official structure.

Subject area	Part	Representative topics in NFA's outline
Futures trading theory, basic functions, terminology	Market knowledge	The futures contract, clearinghouse function, delivery provisions, hedging and speculative theory, futures and options terminology
Margins, premiums, price limits, settlement, delivery, exercise and assignment	Market knowledge	Performance bond, initial and maintenance margin, intrinsic and time value, delta, limit up/down, first notice day, EFPs
Types of orders, customer accounts, price analysis	Market knowledge	Market, stop, stop-limit and MIT orders, GTC, fill-or-kill, MOC, OCO, charting, support and resistance, yield curves
Basic hedging, basis calculations, hedging futures	Market knowledge	Short, long and anticipatory hedges, the basis, net hedge results across grains, metals, energy, T-notes, currencies, stock indices
Spreading	Market knowledge	Carrying-charge spreads, intra-market and inter-delivery, bull and bear spreads, intermarket spreads
Speculating in futures	Market knowledge	Gross profit on speculative trades, effect of commissions, return on margin equity
Option hedging, speculating, spreading	Market knowledge	Long call and put substitutes, synthetic positions, covered calls, bull and bear spreads, calendar and arbitrage spreads, breakevens
Regulations	Regulations	CFTC registration categories and exemptions, NFA membership, Compliance Rules 2-4, 2-29, 2-30 and 2-13, discretionary accounts, position limits, FCM and IB requirements, CPO and CTA disclosure documents, arbitration and disciplinary procedures

Look at the shape of that table and the failure pattern becomes obvious. Seven of the eight published subject areas are market knowledge; one is regulations. Study time naturally follows the outline's proportions — and the pass rule does not. Regulations is a standalone 70% gate carrying exactly as much veto power as everything above it combined. Candidates who spend six weeks on basis calculations and one weekend skimming NFA compliance rules fail while knowing the futures market well.

The two parts also fail people in different ways. Market knowledge is arithmetic under a clock: net hedge price, breakeven on a long call, maximum loss on a bear spread, return on margin equity. Sessions are closed-book, you may not bring a calculator into the center (staff provide one on request), and you have roughly 72 seconds per item. Regulations is recall — rule numbers, registration categories, disclosure-document contents — material that rewards flashcards rather than reasoning, and exactly what candidates postpone.

The bottom line

No one publishes a Series 3 pass rate, and no credible crowd-sourced substitute can exist, because only failing candidates ever learn their number. What is published is more actionable anyway: 120 scored questions plus 5 uncounted experimental items, 150 minutes, $140, no corequisite and no sponsor required, and 70% on the market knowledge part and the regulations part separately, with no averaging. Treat it as two tests sharing one clock, and give the regulations part the preparation you would give a whole exam — in scoring terms, that is what it is.

The fastest way to find out which of the two parts is your weak one is to sit timed questions across both and compare — start with a free Series 3 practice exam.