SIE Exam Changes 2026: What's Different Now

One change to the SIE took effect on 27 October 2025, and a second landed with the 2026 fee schedule. Neither alters what you need to know, but both make older prep material wrong about the exam you will actually sit.

Does this affect you? If your test date is on or after 27 October 2025, you are sitting the current format — which is everyone testing now. If you are working from a book, a course or a forum post written before that date, the question count and the fee it quotes are both out of date.

What moved

FINRA announced the pretest reduction for three exams at once — the SIE, the Series 7 and the Series 79 — so if you are stacking qualifications, the same change applies further up the ladder.

What did not change, and this is the longer list

• 75 scored questions. The scored portion was untouched. Only unscored items were removed.
• 105 minutes. You get the same time for five fewer questions.
• 70% to pass. The standard did not move, so you can still miss 22 of the 75.
• Four-year validity. A pass is still good for four years.
• The content outline. The four sections and their weights are unchanged — Understanding Products and Their Risks is still 33 scored questions, Knowledge of Capital Markets still 12.

That last point is what your existing study material is still good for. A book written in 2024 describes the same syllabus in the same proportions; what it gets wrong is the administrative furniture around it.

What to study differently

Nothing, on the evidence. The scored content and its weighting did not move, so a study plan built on the outline is still the right plan. FINRA said the duration of these exams would not change, and it did not.

The one practical consequence is timing. With 80 questions in 105 minutes rather than 85, you have marginally more time per question than the pacing advice in older material assumes — about 79 seconds against about 74. That is a small cushion, not a licence to slow down.

Be careful with a claim you will see made about this change: that fewer unscored questions makes the exam easier. It does not follow. The five removed questions never counted toward your score in the first place, and FINRA has not said the scoring standard moved.

What to do about the fee

Budget $100, not $80. If a course or a comparison page quotes $80 as the current fee, treat it as a signal that the rest of the page was not checked this year either.

The fee is still the whole required cost, because association with a firm is not required to take the SIE and there is no prerequisite exam — that part of the exam's design is unchanged and is still the reason to sit it before you have an employer.

Sit a free SIE practice test built to the current outline before you buy anything, and you will find out quickly whether the material you already own is describing the right exam.