SIE Exam Cheat Sheet 2026: Everything to Memorize

The Securities Industry Essentials (SIE) exam is defined by four numbers, and almost every smart test-day decision falls out of simple arithmetic on those four. This sheet keeps only figures verifiable against FINRA's official pages — no folklore, no recycled forum stats — and turns them into pacing checkpoints, a raw-score target, and the traps that catch first-time takers. If you want the condensed version to keep at your desk, grab the printable SIE cheat sheet.

The four numbers that define the SIE

75 scored questions. FINRA's phrasing is deliberate: these are the scored questions. Treat every item on your screen as if it counts, because you will not know which ones do.
105 minutes — that is 1 hour and 45 minutes, not the two hours many candidates mentally budget.
70% to pass. The bar is fixed; your cushion is not.
$80 exam fee. Modest as licensing exams go, but it is per attempt.

Everything below is arithmetic built from those four figures.

Pacing math: 84 seconds per question

105 minutes divided by 75 questions works out to 1.4 minutes — 84 seconds — per question. That average is generous for definitional questions and brutally tight for multi-step ones, so the working rule is: answer, flag, move. A single three-minute stall on one stubborn question consumes the time budget of more than two average questions.

Clock checkpoints to memorize

Question 25 by 35:00 on the clock.
Question 50 by 70:00.
Question 75 at 105:00 — ideally with minutes banked from easy items to revisit whatever you flagged.

Check yourself at those two mid-points only. Checking the clock every question costs focus; checking it twice costs nothing.

Scoring math: what 70% really demands

On a straight-percentage basis, 70% of 75 questions is 52.5 — so 53 correct answers is the raw planning benchmark. Flip it around and it is genuinely reassuring: you can miss as many as 22 questions and still clear the bar. Treat 53 as a planning number, not a scoring promise — FINRA reports your result as a percentage, and how it maps to raw questions is FINRA's business, not a guarantee this sheet can make.

The skip trap, quantified: leave 5 questions unanswered and you now need those 52.5 correct answers from only 70 attempted questions — your required accuracy on everything you do answer jumps from 70% to exactly 75%. Every blank raises the difficulty of the rest of your exam. Put something down.

The $80 line item

The $80 fee buys one attempt. A retake means paying it again, which makes thorough preparation the cheapest insurance you can buy for this exam. The practical implication: do not schedule the real exam while your practice scores hover at the passing line. The 70% bar does not move on test day, but nerves, an unfamiliar testing environment, and the real clock all push your performance down, not up — build your cushion before you spend the fee.

Common traps

Treating 70% as your practice-test target. Passing practice exams at exactly the bar means a coin-flip on test day. The bar is the floor, not the goal.
Budgeting two hours in your head. The exam is 1 hour and 45 minutes. Candidates who rehearse at a two-hour pace discover the deficit around the two-thirds mark, exactly when fatigue hits.
Assuming some questions "don't count" and coasting. FINRA counts 75 scored questions — you cannot identify which items those are, so the only rational strategy is full effort on all of them.
Leaving blanks. As shown above, every unanswered question mathematically raises the accuracy you need on the remainder. An educated elimination-and-guess beats a blank you never returned to.
Grinding one hard question. At an 84-second average, stubbornness is the most expensive habit in the room. Flag it, move, and come back with your banked time.

What is deliberately not on this sheet

You will notice no content-outline section weights here. Those belong to FINRA's official SIE content outline, and quoting stale or secondhand percentages is exactly how cheat sheets go wrong — pull the current outline directly from finra.org and pair it with this page. Same policy for waiting periods, corequisite rules, and enrollment-window details: get those from the official source at registration time. This sheet carries only the numbers we can pin to FINRA's own pages, so every figure above is one you can act on without double-checking.