SIE Exam Cost in 2026: The Full Bill

The SIE exam costs $100. It was $80 through 2025, and FINRA's fee schedule moved it to $100 for 2026 — which is why a lot of what you will read about SIE costs is a year out of date.

That $100 is close to the whole bill, and the SIE is unusual in that respect. Most securities exams sit behind an employer; this one does not. Association with a firm is not required to take the SIE, and there is no prerequisite exam. There is no sponsorship to arrange, no firm paperwork, and nothing to pay anyone else before you can register.

What it costs

What a second attempt costs

The fee is the smaller half of a retake. The larger half is time: under FINRA's waiting periods in force today, a candidate who fails can retake after 30 calendar days, and a candidate who fails three times in succession within a 2-year period waits 180 calendar days before the next attempt. FINRA has amended Rule 1210 to cut these waits to 15 and 60 days, but says the reduced waits are not yet in effect for candidates and will announce the implementation date in a regulatory notice.

A third failure in succession within two years triggers the 180-day wait, so the cheaper plan is to treat the first failure as information: pull the section breakdown, fix the section, and sit it once more properly.

What you are paying for

The exam is 75 scored questions in 105 minutes, and the passing standard is 70% — so you can miss 22 and still pass. Five unscored pretest questions are mixed in, making 80 questions on screen; they do not count toward your score and do not cost extra.

The weighting is where the money goes, because it tells you what to prepare. Understanding Products and Their Risks is 33 of the 75 scored questions — nearly half the exam — against 12 for Knowledge of Capital Markets. Preparation spent on products returns more per hour than preparation spent anywhere else on this test.

The part that makes $100 good value

A pass is valid for four years. That is the feature worth paying for: you can sit the SIE while still studying, or while deciding whether the industry is for you, and the result waits for you to find an employer rather than expiring the moment you stop job-hunting.

What $100 does not buy is a registration. Passing the SIE alone does not qualify you for registration with FINRA — it is one half of a pair, and the other half is a representative-level exam like the Series 7, which does need a sponsoring firm. Budget the SIE as the step you can take alone, not as the finish line.

What to budget

$100, plus preparation. If you are disciplined, preparation can be $0 — free question banks and FINRA's own content outline cover the whole exam, and the outline is the authoritative statement of what is tested.

Set aside a contingency of one more exam fee only if you are sitting it cold. If you have worked through a full practice bank and are scoring comfortably above 70%, the second $100 is money you probably will not spend.

Start with a diagnostic rather than a course. Our free SIE practice test costs nothing and tells you which of the four sections is actually going to fail you — which is the only thing that should decide how much you spend next.