Series 4 Pass Rate 2026: Why No Official Rate Exists

There is no official Series 4 pass rate. FINRA administers the Registered Options Principal Qualification Exam and publishes an unusual amount about it — the item count, the time limit, the passing score, the fee, the corequisites, even the number of questions drawn from each of the six job functions — but not how many candidates pass. The absence is a policy choice rather than an oversight, and FINRA's own material shows it: the one exam in the line with a pass rate in circulation is the Securities Industry Essentials exam, cleared by roughly 74% of candidates, and that is the single test anyone aged 18 or over may sit without a sponsoring firm. No sponsorship-gated qualification exam above it gets the same treatment. Every percentage circulating in 2026 as "the Series 4 pass rate" was produced by someone other than the organization that writes and scores the exam.

How the Series 4 is actually scored

Vendor certifications report scaled scores on invented ranges, where a "700" has no fixed relationship to any number of correct answers. FINRA does not do that. Its passing score is a real percentage, stated flatly in the Series 4 content outline: "For the Series 4 exam, the passing score is 72%." Nothing to decode — but there is a denominator problem, because that percentage does not apply to the number of questions in front of you.

What FINRA publishes	Series 4
Scored questions	125, multiple choice
Unscored pretest items	10, unidentified, randomly distributed
Total items you answer	135
Time allotted	3 hours and 15 minutes (195 minutes)
Passing score	72% — of the 125 scored items
Fee	$200
Corequisites	SIE + Series 7
Eligibility	Sponsored by a FINRA or other SRO member firm
Published pass rate	None

The pretest line changes the arithmetic. FINRA's outline states that "each candidate's exam includes 10 additional, unidentified pretest items that do not contribute toward the candidate's score," that "the 10 items are randomly distributed throughout the exam," and that "each candidate's exam consists of a total of 135 items (125 scored and 10 unscored)."

Two consequences follow. First, 72% of 125 is 90. You need 90 scored items right and you can miss 35. A candidate who applies 72% to the 135 items on screen arrives at 98 and studies toward a bar eight questions higher than the real one. Second, the clock runs against 135, not 125 — about 1 minute 27 seconds per item, not the 1 minute 34 seconds you get by dividing 195 minutes by the scored count. That seven-second gap compounds across a three-hour sitting. Because the pretest items are unidentified and scattered, there is nothing to be gained by hunting for them. Answer all 135 as though every one counts.

Two smaller details are worth banking. FINRA states there is "no penalty for guessing," so nothing should be left blank. And the only calculator permitted is the basic electronic one the test center hands you — "only calculators provided by the test center administrators are allowed for use during the exam" — with no reference material of any kind in the room.

That 72% also sits at the top of FINRA's range. Most of the line passes at 70%: the SIE, the Series 6, the Series 9/10, the Series 24, the Series 26, the Series 39. The Series 27 and Series 28 are lower still at 69%. Only the Series 79 at 73% and the two-part Series 16 at 72% and 74% ask for more. Apart from that Supervisory Analyst exam, no FINRA principal exam sets a higher bar in a single sitting.

The corequisite structure matters more than any of it. FINRA's page is explicit: "The Series 4 has corequisite exam requirements. Candidates must pass the SIE and Series 7 exams to hold the Registered Options Principal registration." The Series 4 is not a standalone credential — it is the third exam in a stack, and passing it alone registers you for nothing. Separately, "candidates must be associated with and sponsored by a FINRA member firm or other applicable self-regulatory organization (SRO) member firm to be eligible to take FINRA principal-level qualification exams." Anyone over 18 can sit the SIE. Nobody sits the Series 4 without a sponsoring firm.

Why the figures you see online disagree

Three things are happening at once. The first is a simple misreading: 72 is a cut score, not a pass rate, and a surprising number of pages present "72%" as the share of candidates who pass. It is the share of scored questions you must answer correctly, published by FINRA, and it says nothing about anyone's odds.

The second is the cohort problem. Prep providers quote results from their own students, a self-selected population that paid for a course. The Series 4 makes this worse than most, because the pool is small and heavily filtered — everyone sitting it has already passed the SIE and the Series 7 and works at a firm that chose to put them up for a principal registration. A percentage measured honestly inside one vendor's cohort still describes that cohort, not you.

The third is conflation. The Series 9/10 also qualifies a supervisor to oversee options business, and figures written about one exam drift onto pages about the other. Both Series 9/10 parts pass at 70%; the Series 4 passes at 72%.

One published rule beats a pass rate for planning purposes. FINRA Rule 1210.06 sets the waiting period: a candidate who fails "shall be permitted to take that examination again after a period of 15 calendar days," except that anyone failing "three or more times in succession within a two-year period" waits 60 calendar days. A failed first attempt costs $200 and 15 days — expensive, but not a single shot.

Where the marks actually sit

FINRA publishes the item allocation by job function in counts rather than percentages. Converted to shares of the 125 scored items:

Major job function	Items	Share
(F1) Supervise the Opening of New Options Accounts	21	16.8%
(F2) Supervise Options Account Activities	25	20.0%
(F3) Supervise General Options Trading	30	24.0%
(F4) Supervise Options Communications	9	7.2%
(F5) Implement Practices and Adhere to Regulatory Requirements	12	9.6%
(F6) Supervise Associated Persons and Personnel Management Activities	28	22.4%
Total	125	100%

The supervision half is bigger than the options half. Function 6 — supervising associated persons and personnel management — is 28 items, second only to general options trading at 30. Candidates arriving straight from the Series 7 prepare the options content, which is familiar territory, and treat the personnel, hiring and internal-supervision material as filler. It is nearly a quarter of the exam.

Account supervision outweighs trading. Functions 1 and 2 together are 46 items, more than any single function. That is approval levels, options account agreements, disclosure document timing and the ongoing review of account activity — procedural material that rewards knowing the sequence and the deadline rather than the payoff diagram.

The small functions are not optional. Options communications and regulatory practices are 21 items combined, and it is tempting to write them off. You are permitted 35 misses in total. Conceding those two functions entirely spends 60% of your margin before you answer a single question in the areas you did study.

You are tested as a supervisor, not a trader. The product scope is defined — equity, foreign currency, interest rate and index options, plus options on government and mortgage-backed securities — but the question is always what the principal must review, approve or escalate, not what the strategy pays. Series 7 habits of mind produce confident wrong answers here.

The bottom line

Nobody outside FINRA knows the Series 4 pass rate, and FINRA has chosen not to say. What is official: 125 scored questions plus 10 unscored pretest items for 135 total, 3 hours and 15 minutes, 72% of the scored items to pass, $200, and the SIE and Series 7 as corequisites with firm sponsorship required to sit at all. The two figures that most often mislead are both fixable in a sentence — 72% is a cut score rather than a pass rate, and it applies to 125 questions while you answer 135. Ninety correct scored items is the target. Thirty-five misses is the budget.

The useful next move is finding out which of the six functions is quietly eating that budget, and personnel supervision is the usual answer. Work through a free Series 4 practice exam and check your function-by-function split against the weights above before your firm books the seat.