What's on the SIE exam: the 2025 content outline

The Securities Industry Essentials (SIE) exam is built from FINRA's content outline, which splits everything into four sections with fixed weights. If you know how many questions each section gets, you know where to spend your study time. This post covers the 2025 outline and the format of the exam, as of 2026.

The format at a glance

• 80 items in total: 75 are scored and 5 are unscored pretest items that FINRA tries out for future exams.
• Every item is multiple choice with four answer choices.
• You get 105 minutes (1 hour 45 minutes).
• The passing score is 70 on a scaled score. That is not the same as getting 70 percent of the items right.
• There is no penalty for guessing. An unanswered item and a wrong guess both earn no credit, so answer everything.

You can't tell which items are the unscored ones, so treat all 80 as if they count.

The four sections and their weights

12 + 33 + 23 + 7 = 75. Sections 2 and 3 together are 75 percent of the score, so most of your time belongs there.

Section 1: Knowledge of Capital Markets (12 items)

This is the "how the system works" section. It covers the regulators and market participants (the SEC, self-regulatory organizations such as FINRA and the MSRB, the Federal Reserve, SIPC, broker-dealers, issuers, underwriters, transfer agents), market structure (primary and secondary markets, exchanges versus over-the-counter, dealer versus auction markets), economic factors (monetary and fiscal policy, the business cycle, indicators) and offerings (IPOs, firm commitment versus best efforts, shelf registration, Regulation D, Rule 144, blue sky laws).

Section 2: Understanding Products and Their Risks (33 items)

The biggest section. It covers:

• Equity securities: common and preferred stock, rights, warrants, ADRs.
• Debt securities: bond terms, price and yield, Treasuries, agencies, corporates, ratings, and municipal securities.
• Options: calls, puts, moneyness, covered and uncovered positions, exercise and assignment.
• Investment companies and annuities: open-end and closed-end funds, unit investment trusts, NAV, sales charges, variable annuities.
• Other products: 529 plans, DPPs, REITs, hedge funds, ETFs and ETNs.
• Investment risks: capital, credit, currency, inflation, interest rate, liquidity, market and others.

This is also where most of the calculation questions live. See SIE exam math: formulas with examples and SIE options basics with worked examples.

Section 3: Trading, Customer Accounts and Prohibited Activities (23 items)

This section covers how orders and trades work (order types, bid and ask, principal versus agency, long and short positions, best execution), what happens after a trade (dividends and their key dates, yields, settlement, splits, mergers, tender offers, proxies), customer accounts (cash, margin, options, discretionary and retirement accounts, registrations), anti-money-laundering, records and privacy, communications and best interest, and the prohibited activities (manipulation, insider trading, fraud, misuse of customer funds).

Settlement and dividend dates are a favorite place for date-counting questions, covered in T+1 settlement and dividend dates for the SIE.

Section 4: Overview of the Regulatory Framework (7 items)

The smallest section covers registration and continuing education (registered versus associated persons, exams, statutory disqualification, fingerprinting, Forms U4 and U5) and employee conduct and reportable events (complaints, outside activities, private securities transactions, gifts, political contributions). It is only 7 items, but some of its rules changed recently. See FINRA rule changes 2026 SIE candidates should know.

Who can sit it, and what passing gets you

Anyone aged 18 or older can take the SIE. You do not need to be associated with a firm, and no U.S. citizenship is required. A passing result stays valid for four years. Passing the SIE alone does not register you or let you do securities business: you also need a top-off qualification exam such as the Series 7 and a sponsoring firm. Series 7 vs SIE: what each exam covers lays out the difference, and what the Series 7 covers goes through the next exam.

Fees and waiting periods can change, so confirm them on FINRA's SIE page before you schedule.

How to use the weights

Match your effort to the score. A rough rule: about a sixth of your time on capital markets, close to half on products and risks, nearly a third on trading and accounts, and a tenth on the regulatory framework. Then add extra time to whatever you personally find hard. How to study for the SIE exam turns this into a weekly plan.

Encodr's free FINRA SIE course follows the same weights: the share of cards in each section tracks the section's share of the exam. It starts with a foundation unit for people with no securities background, then works through the outline in a teaching order, and finishes with a short unit on the exam itself. To check your bond yield math as you go, try the bond yield calculator.