Series 52 Pass Rate 2026: What FINRA Publishes

There is no published pass rate for the Series 52. The Municipal Securities Representative Qualification Examination is written and owned by the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board and administered by FINRA on the MSRB's behalf, and neither body publishes how many candidates pass — not on FINRA's Series 52 exam page, not on the MSRB's Series 52 page, and not in the MSRB's own content outline, the most detailed document either has released about this exam. What they do publish is exact: 75 scored questions, five unscored pretest questions, two hours and 30 minutes, a passing score of 70%, a $260 fee, and the SIE as a corequisite. That is the whole official record, and it is more useful than a pass rate would be — provided you read the arithmetic correctly.

The absence is a disclosure posture, not an oversight. FINRA's 2026 Industry Snapshot, its annual statistical report on the brokerage industry, fills dozens of tables with counts of registered representatives and reports no qualification exam outcomes at all. The regulators count who is registered, not who passed.

How the Series 52 is actually scored

Here the Series 52 differs from most IT and vendor certifications, and the difference runs the opposite way from what you might expect. Vendor exams usually quote a scaled score — a 700-out-of-1000 bar matching no particular number of questions. The Series 52's 70% is not scaled. The MSRB content outline states it plainly: "Each multiple-choice question is worth one point and the passing grade set by the MSRB is 70%."

So the percentage is real. The catch is the denominator. Seventy percent applies to the 75 scored questions only, and the MSRB adds five unscored pretest items on top: "Each candidate exam includes 5 additional, unidentified pretest questions that do not contribute toward the candidate's score. The 5 questions are randomly distributed throughout the exam. Therefore, each exam consists of a total of 80 questions (75 scored and 5 unscored)."

You need 53 correct, not 56. Seventy percent of 75 is 52.5, so 53 correct scored answers clears the bar and 52 does not. You can miss 22 and still pass. Candidates who take 70% of the 80 questions they saw arrive at 56 and aim unnecessarily high.

Your real pace is 1:52 per question, not 2:00. The 150-minute clock covers all 80 delivered items, not the 75 that count. Divide by 75 and you budget two minutes each; divide by 80 and you get one minute 52 seconds — a gap that compounds on a closed-book exam full of yield and accrued-interest calculations. Because the pretest items are unidentified and scattered at random, there is no way to spot them and skip them — five questions you sweat over will earn you nothing.

There is no penalty for guessing: the MSRB states that "an unanswered question is considered an incorrect answer," so leave nothing blank.

What the official pages publish	Series 52
Scored questions	75
Unscored pretest items	5, unidentified and randomly distributed
Total questions delivered	80
Time allowed	2 hours 30 minutes (150 minutes)
Passing score	70% of scored questions — 53 of 75
Fee	$260
Corequisite	SIE (Securities Industry Essentials)
Eligibility	Association with an MSRB-registered dealer, per MSRB Rule G-3(a)
Format	Closed book, multiple choice; calculator supplied by the test center or in the exam
Published pass rate	None

That corequisite line is the most decision-relevant entry in the table. FINRA lists the SIE under Corequisite(s), not Prerequisite(s) — the Series 52 is not gated behind passing the SIE first, but the MSRB requires both before you can register as a municipal securities representative. Eligibility differs too: FINRA states that association with a firm is not required to sit the SIE, while the MSRB requires Series 52 candidates to be associated with an MSRB-registered dealer.

The Series 52 is itself a gate. FINRA's Series 53 page — Municipal Securities Principal, 100 scored questions plus 10 pretest, three hours 15 minutes, 70%, $265 — lists its corequisites as "SIE + S52TO," so the principal credential stays closed until the Series 52 is done. The Series 51 (Municipal Fund Securities Limited Principal) is a different track: its corequisite is the Series 24 or Series 26.

Why the figures you see online disagree

Search for a Series 52 pass rate and you will find confident numbers across a wide range. None share a source, because no source exists. Four things generate the spread.

Every number is a sample, not a census. Training providers see only their own students; forum polls capture only people motivated to post. Neither can see the MSRB's score records.

SIE figures get borrowed. A pass rate circulates widely for the SIE, and because the SIE is the Series 52 corequisite it gets attached to Series 52 pages by association. Even if accurate, it describes a different exam with a different candidate population — one anyone can sit without a firm sponsor.

First-attempt and eventual pass are different measures. A low figure and a high figure may describe the same cohort counted differently. Without a stated definition, they are not comparable.

Even the official weights carry a date. The MSRB content outline was last updated June 2018, and the MSRB notes that questions "are reviewed and updated on a regular basis and reflect current market practices." The topic weights are authoritative; the specific rules tested move underneath them.

What the content outline weights, and what actually sinks candidates

The MSRB assigns three topic percentages. Applied to 75 scored questions, they work out as follows.

Content area	Weight	≈ scored questions
Part 1: Municipal Securities	60%	~45
Part 2: Economic Activity, Government Policy and the Behavior of Interest Rates	14%	~11
Part 3: Securities Laws and Regulations	26%	~20

The math is closed book and priced in minutes

Section 1.5 of the outline lists yields to early redemption, yield to maturity, current yield, after-tax and taxable equivalent yield, duration, dollar value of a basis point, convexity, accrued interest on odd first coupons, level debt service, amortization of premium, and accretion of original issue discount. No reference materials are permitted. At 1:52 per question, any calculation you reason out rather than recall costs you two or three questions elsewhere.

About twenty questions, thirty-one named rules

Part 3 is 26% — roughly 20 scored questions — and the outline enumerates 31 separate MSRB rule line items under it, running from G-2 and G-3 through G-48, plus the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and its 1975 amendments, and SEC Rule 15c2-12. You cannot learn all of that to question-level depth for 20 points. Learn what each rule governs, then go deep only where there are hard numeric or procedural triggers: G-37 political contributions, G-32 primary offering disclosure, G-34 CUSIP requirements, G-17 fair dealing, G-47 time-of-trade disclosure.

Primary market mechanics are the hidden bulk of Part 1

Within the 60% block, the outline spends more space on underwriting procedure than most study plans allow for: syndicate account formation, divided versus undivided accounts, determination of the syndicate bid, net interest cost versus true interest cost, bond years, order periods, concessions and takedowns, and priority provisions for retail, group, designated and member orders. That is process knowledge, not concept knowledge, and it does not reward skimming.

The economics section is small enough to skip, and shouldn't be

Part 2 is only 14%, about 11 questions, and it is narrow: Fed policy inputs, fiscal policy, yield curve analysis, credit spread behavior. Eleven questions is half your entire error budget. Candidates who write it off as a rounding error hand back points cheaper to earn than anything in Part 1.

The bottom line

No one publishes a Series 52 pass rate, and any figure you find is someone's estimate. The official numbers make better targets anyway: 53 correct out of 75 scored questions, 80 questions delivered in 150 minutes, 60% of the weight on municipal securities themselves. The SIE is a corequisite rather than a gate, but you need both — and a sponsoring MSRB-registered dealer to sit this one at all. Aim at 53, pace against 80, and treat Part 2 as free points.

The best read on your readiness is a full-length timed run at the real question count — take a free Series 52 practice exam and score it against 53 out of 75, not 70% of everything you saw.