The SIE® Exam

Anyone aged 18 or older. That is the whole eligibility rule, and it is what separates the SIE from a representative-level exam such as the Series 7: you do not have to be associated with a FINRA member firm, and no firm has to sponsor you. A student, a career changer or someone working in an unrelated job can sit it.

The practical effect is that the SIE can come before the job rather than after it. A pass is valid for four years, so an early pass comes with a clock attached; it is worth taking when a move into the industry is a plan rather than a possibility.

Passing the SIE does not qualify anyone for registration by itself. Registration takes a second exam matched to the job, and that one is sponsored.

For a General Securities Representative the second exam is the Series 7. FINRA treats the SIE as its corequisite: both must be passed to register, and the Series 7 can only be taken by someone associated with and sponsored by a member firm. So the SIE is the half of the requirement you can complete on your own.

80 multiple-choice questions, each with four options, in a single sitting of 105 minutes. 75 are scored. The other 5 are unscored pretest questions; they are mixed in with the rest and not identified, so every question has to be treated as if it counts.

The exam is not adaptive: its length is fixed and does not change with how you are answering. 105 minutes for 80 questions is about 79 seconds each. Definition questions take less than that and calculation questions take more.

If you have read that the SIE is 85 questions with 10 unscored, that figure comes from older material. FINRA's current content outline, the one linked from its SIE page, states 5 unscored pretest questions and 80 in total.

FINRA's outline divides the exam into four sections of very unequal size. The percentages are FINRA's; the question counts are what those percentages come to out of the 75 scored questions.

FINRA delivers the SIE through Prometric, and you have a choice: in person at a Prometric test center, or online with remote proctoring through Prometric's ProProctor service.

The calculator depends on which you choose. At a test center you are handed a physical four-function calculator. For exams delivered online, FINRA describes an on-screen calculator instead. The exam's calculations are arithmetic, and it is worth practicing them on a plain four-function calculator rather than on a phone.

The passing score is 70. It is tempting to read that as 70 percent, but FINRA equates scores to a common scale so that a result means the same thing whichever form of the exam you were given. A harder form and an easier form do not call for exactly the same number of correct answers.

That is why nobody can tell you precisely how many questions you must get right, and why a percentage on a practice set is a guide to readiness rather than a predicted score.

FINRA does not publish a pass rate for the SIE. Figures quoted elsewhere are estimates made by prep providers; this site does not repeat them and publishes no pass rate for its own users.

The exam fee is $100. FINRA's own site is the authority for the current fee and for how to schedule an appointment.

If you do not pass, you wait before sitting again: 30 days after a first or second failed attempt, and 180 days after a third or any later one. FINRA has amended its rules to shorten those waits to 15 and 60 days, but the shorter periods had not been put into effect when this page was last checked. Confirm the rule in force with FINRA before you plan around it.