What Is the CFA Minimum Passing Score (MPS)? How It's Actually Calculated

The CFA Minimum Passing Score (MPS) is simultaneously one of the most discussed and least understood aspects of the CFA exam. Candidates obsess over it, make assumptions about it, and sometimes build entire study strategies around misconceptions of how it works. This guide explains what the MPS actually is, how CFA Institute sets it, what we know and do not know about its historical values, and - most importantly - what it means for how you should prepare. For the aggregate picture this threshold produces, see our CFA Level 1 pass rate analysis.

What Is the CFA MPS?

The Minimum Passing Score is the score a candidate must reach or exceed to pass the CFA exam at a given level. It is set independently for each exam window and each level, and it is not a fixed percentage. You cannot say "I need 70% to pass" with certainty, because the MPS fluctuates.

CFA Institute has never published the exact MPS for any exam window, and it has confirmed it will not do so. What it has said is that the MPS is set after each exam using a process called the Modified Angoff Method, and that it reflects a judgment about the minimum level of competence a CFA charterholder should demonstrate.

How the MPS Is Set: The Modified Angoff Method

The Modified Angoff Method is a standard psychometric approach to setting pass/fail thresholds for high-stakes examinations. It works as follows:

A panel of subject matter experts - in this case, experienced CFA charterholders - reviews each exam question and estimates the probability that a "minimally competent" candidate (one who is just barely qualified to be a CFA charterholder) would answer that question correctly. These estimates are aggregated across all questions to produce an initial MPS estimate.

The panel then reviews the initial estimate and makes adjustments based on a holistic assessment of the overall exam difficulty and what they consider to be the appropriate threshold for the designation. The result is the final MPS for that exam window.

This process has several important implications:

• The MPS adjusts for exam difficulty. If a particular exam window had unusually difficult questions, the MPS will be lower to maintain a consistent standard. If the questions were relatively straightforward, the MPS may be higher.
• The MPS is set after the exam, not before. CFA Institute does not know the MPS when it designs the questions - it is a judgment made by the expert panel after reviewing the actual exam.
• The MPS reflects a standard of competence, not a pass rate target. CFA Institute has consistently stated that it does not target a specific pass rate - it sets the MPS based on competence, and the pass rate follows from the score distribution of that cohort.

What We Know About Historical MPS Ranges

While CFA Institute does not publish the MPS, there is a reasonable body of indirect evidence about the general range from candidate disclosures, statistical analyses of score distributions, and CFA Institute's own communications. The following is well-established in the CFA preparation community:

The MPS is broadly thought to fall in the range of 60% to 70%, varying by level and by exam window. The widely cited "70%" heuristic is a reasonable target - candidates who score above 70% across all topic areas are generally in strong passing territory - but it should not be treated as a precise threshold.

CFA Institute provides a score band that tells candidates approximately where their performance fell relative to the MPS. As of the 2026 exam windows, those bands remain "above 70%", "between 51% and 70%", or "50% and below" for each topic area. These bands confirm that the MPS is in the vicinity of 50-70% depending on the topic area, but the precise figure remains undisclosed.

What we know with certainty is that candidates who have received failing results sometimes had overall scores that appeared high - suggesting either that the topic-area bands are rough approximations, or that the weighting of topics in the final score calculation matters significantly. This reinforces the importance of not having catastrophically weak topic areas even if your overall average appears acceptable. (For how much each topic actually counts, see the Level 1 topic weights breakdown.)

The Score-Band System, Explained

CFA Institute reports your performance in each topic area as one of three bands rather than a precise percentage. Understanding what each band signals is the single most useful thing you can do with your results:

Because the bands are ranges rather than exact scores, you cannot back-calculate your precise total. What you can do is treat any "50% and below" band in a high-weight topic as the primary problem to fix, and treat the "51-70%" band as the zone where the MPS itself is hiding.

The Ethics Adjustment: A Critical Factor Most Candidates Overlook

There is one MPS-adjacent factor that CFA Institute has been more transparent about: the Ethics adjustment.

CFA Institute uses candidate performance on Ethics as a tie-breaker for candidates whose total score falls just below the MPS. Specifically, candidates who score just below the MPS may still pass if their Ethics score is sufficiently strong. Conversely, candidates who score marginally above the MPS but performed poorly in Ethics may not pass, though CFA Institute has been less explicit about this direction of the adjustment.

The practical implication is significant: if your total score is in the borderline zone, your Ethics performance can determine whether you pass or fail. This is not a small consideration. CFA Institute has a stated commitment to ethics as a defining characteristic of the designation, and the Ethics adjustment operationalises that commitment.

Every candidate should treat Ethics as a top-priority topic, not just because it represents a meaningful percentage of the exam but because strong Ethics performance provides insurance against a borderline total score. This applies at all three levels.

What the MPS Means for Your Study Strategy

Understanding the MPS correctly changes how you should approach preparation in several specific ways:

Target 70% as Your Study Benchmark, Not Your Ceiling

The "approximately 70%" heuristic for the MPS is useful as a study target because it builds in a buffer. If you are consistently scoring around 70% in your mock exams, you are in competitive territory - but the variance in mock exam difficulty and the stress of the real exam mean you should aim to score above this level in practice.

Think of 70% as the floor, not the target. Aim for 75% in your mock exams. If you are hitting 75%+ consistently across all topic areas, you have a meaningful margin of safety against exam-day variance.

Avoid Topic-Area Catastrophes

The MPS framework does not operate purely at the overall level. While CFA Institute has not confirmed that candidates can fail by performing poorly in specific topic areas while passing overall, the topic-level band reporting suggests that topic-area performance matters independently.

More practically, the math is straightforward: if you score below 50% in a high-weight topic like FRA (13-17% of Level 1) or Equity Valuation (10-15% of Level 2), you are handing back a significant percentage of the exam before you answer a single question in other areas. This makes it arithmetically very difficult to pass even if you perform well elsewhere.

The practical implication is that your study plan should include explicit floor targets for every topic, not just average targets. Being average everywhere is better than being excellent in some places and catastrophically weak in others.

Use Mock Exam Diagnostics to Track MPS Distance

The most actionable use of the MPS concept during preparation is tracking your distance from it in your mock exam results. After each mock exam, identify the gap between your score in each topic area and the 70% benchmark. Topics where you are more than 10 points below this benchmark - below 60% - represent your highest-priority study targets.

This gap-based prioritisation is exactly what the diagnostic report in our Clevency mock exams produces for you. Every wrong answer is mapped to its specific sub-topic, and your personalised study plan is built around your largest gaps relative to the passing benchmark - so your remaining study time goes exactly where it has the highest return.

How the MPS Differs Across Levels

While the fundamental mechanics of MPS-setting are the same across all three levels, there are differences in how the standard is applied that reflect the different nature of each exam:

At Level 1, the exam is entirely multiple choice and the scoring is binary - right or wrong. The MPS is a straightforward percentage of questions answered correctly (adjusted for the expert panel's competence threshold).

At Level 2, the vignette format means the MPS still applies to item-set answers, but the complexity of the questions typically makes it slightly harder to assess "minimum competence" - a candidate who gets a vignette wrong may have misread one key data point rather than not knowing the underlying concept.

At Level 3, the constructed-response (essay) section introduces a different scoring dynamic entirely. Essays are graded by human scorers using a rubric, and partial credit is awarded. The MPS at Level 3 reflects performance across both the essay and item-set sections, with roughly equal weighting between them. Candidates who perform very well in the item sets can partially compensate for a weaker essay performance - but only partially. The essay section must be practised specifically, not as an afterthought.

Frequently Asked Questions About the CFA MPS

Putting It All Together: An MPS-Aware Study Strategy

Here is how to incorporate MPS awareness into your preparation in a way that is both practical and strategically sound:

1. Set 70% as your minimum floor target for every topic area, not just your overall average. If any topic falls below this in your mock exams, it becomes a priority regardless of how well you are doing overall.
2. Weight Ethics heavily - aim for 75%+ in Ethics specifically to build the maximum possible buffer for borderline scenarios.
3. Track your topic-area scores across multiple mocks. A single mock is noisy; the trend across four or five mocks gives you a reliable signal about where you actually stand.
4. Build a 5-point buffer into your targets. If the MPS is approximately 70%, aim to hit 75% in practice. Exam-day stress, unfamiliar question phrasing, and cognitive fatigue typically cost candidates a few percentage points relative to their mock performance.
5. Use diagnostic data to drive revision. Your mock results should tell you not just your score but your score by sub-topic. Revision that is not guided by diagnostic data is inefficient.

Understanding the MPS is ultimately about understanding what the exam is measuring: not exceptional knowledge, but consistent competence across a broad curriculum. The candidates who pass are not necessarily the deepest experts in any one area - they are the ones who built reliable competence across all areas and avoided catastrophic topic-level weakness.

That is the bar. It is achievable. It requires strategy, not just effort.