The Series 7 Exam

The Series 7 is not open to the public. To sit it you must be associated with and sponsored by a FINRA member firm, or by a member firm of another applicable self-regulatory organization. In practice the exam comes after you have joined a firm, not before.

The SIE is a corequisite. Registration as a General Securities Representative takes a pass on both exams; either one alone is not enough. The two differ in who may take them: the SIE is open to anyone aged 18 or older with no sponsor, so it is the part that can be done before joining a firm, and the Series 7 is the part that cannot.

FINRA's outline is organized by what a representative does, in four job functions: seeking business for the broker-dealer, opening accounts, giving customers information and recommendations and keeping their records, and taking and processing their orders. Products are not a function of their own. Equities, packaged products, variable contracts, options, corporate and municipal debt, direct participation programs, REITs, hedge funds, and asset-backed and government securities all sit inside the third function, as the knowledge a representative needs in order to recommend something to a particular customer.

That is why the weights are so lopsided. Out of the 125 scored questions:

130 multiple-choice questions with four options each, in a single sitting of 3 hours 45 minutes. 125 are scored and 5 are unscored pretest questions, which look like the rest and are not identified. The length is fixed; the exam is not adaptive.

That works out at about 104 seconds a question. It sounds generous until you meet the questions that need a position worked out on paper: an options strategy, a margin account, a yield. The time those take is paid for by the questions you can answer on sight.

Many sources still describe a 135-question exam with 10 unscored questions. FINRA's current outline, the one linked from its Series 7 page, states 5 unscored and 130 in total.

On a computer at a Prometric test center. We do not say it can be taken online, because we could not confirm that: FINRA's online-delivery pages name only the SIE as generally available online and say other exams have separate criteria. If remote delivery matters to you, FINRA's scheduling information and your firm are the places to ask.

At the test center you are handed a physical four-function calculator rather than given one on screen. Practice the margin, options and yield calculations with a calculator of that kind.

The passing score is 72, two points above the SIE's 70. Like the SIE's, it is a scaled score: FINRA equates results to a common scale across exam forms, so 72 is not simply 72 percent of the questions, and the number of correct answers it corresponds to can differ from form to form.

FINRA does not publish a pass rate for the Series 7. Any figure you see quoted is a prep provider's estimate. This site quotes none and publishes no pass rate for its own users.

The exam fee is $395. FINRA's site is the authority for the current fee; because a firm sponsors the exam, your firm is the place to ask how enrollment and payment are handled.

A failed attempt is followed by a waiting period: 30 days after a first or second failure and 180 days after a third or any later one. FINRA has amended its rules to cut those waits to 15 and 60 days, but the shorter periods had not been implemented when this page was last checked, so confirm the rule in force before relying on either set of numbers.