Deferred CFA Candidates Pass at 29%. First-Timers Pass at 50%. Here's Why.

Pass rates get all the attention. Candidate volumes get almost none, which is a shame, because the figures CFA Institute publishes alongside each result release contain the single most actionable statistic in the entire programme — and it is not the pass rate.

How many people sit CFA Level 1?

CFA Institute reports the number of candidates who sat each administration in its results announcements. Recent Level 1 windows:

• November 2024: 26,404 candidates, 43% passed
• February 2025: 19,848 candidates, 45% passed
• May 2025: 24,227 candidates, 45% passed
• August 2025: 26,192 candidates, 43% passed
• November 2025: 26,752 candidates, 43% passed

Level 1 runs across four windows a year, so annual sittings land somewhere between 95,000 and 105,000. February is consistently the smallest window and November the largest — an artefact of registration timing rather than anything meaningful about difficulty, since scores are equated across forms.

These are candidates who sat, not candidates who registered. Registration figures are higher, because a meaningful share of registrants defer or simply do not appear. That distinction is the whole subject of this article.

Scale, for context

The exams are delivered at over 500 proctored test centres across more than 110 markets. In the November 2025 window that meant 518 venues in 415 cities in 115 markets. This is a genuinely global cohort, which matters when interpreting pass rates: you are being measured against a standard, not against the candidates in your city.

The number that actually predicts your result

In each announcement, CFA Institute splits the cohort into first-time candidates and candidates testing after at least one deferral. The gap is large and remarkably stable:

• November 2024: first-time 49%, post-deferral 29%
• May 2025: first-time 52%, post-deferral 28%
• August 2025: first-time 50%, post-deferral 29%
• November 2025: first-time 49%, post-deferral 29%

Candidates who deferred pass at roughly three-fifths the rate of candidates who sat on schedule. Across four consecutive windows the post-deferral figure moved by one percentage point. That is not noise.

CFA Institute has repeatedly described staying on schedule as one of the strongest predictors of exam success, and the consistency of the split supports it. It is also, notably, the only candidate-level segmentation CFA Institute publishes — no country breakdown, no age breakdown, no background breakdown. They publish this one because they think it matters.

Why deferring costs so much

The correlation is not proof that pressing the deferral button causes failure. Three mechanisms explain most of it, and all three are within your control.

Selection. Candidates defer because preparation has already gone badly — work intensified, a study plan collapsed in month two, life intervened. The deferral cohort is pre-loaded with people who were behind before they deferred. Some of the 29% figure reflects who chooses to defer rather than what deferral does to them.

Decay. Deferring pushes the exam back three to six months, and most candidates do not maintain intensity through that gap. Material learned in month one has faded by the new date, and restarting costs weeks of re-learning. A three-month deferral rarely buys three months of extra study. In practice it buys three or four weeks of it, spread thinly, minus the time spent recovering ground already covered.

Momentum. This is the quiet one. A deferral converts a hard deadline into a soft one, and soft deadlines are where 300-hour study plans die. The exam date is the single strongest forcing function in the whole process. Removing it removes the thing making you open the book on a Tuesday evening after a ten-hour day.

Should you defer? A decision framework

The blanket advice "never defer" is wrong, and the blanket advice "defer if you're not ready" is worse. The useful question is what you would be trading.

Defer if any of these is true

• You have covered less than roughly half the curriculum. Below that threshold there is not enough foundation for a sitting to generate useful diagnostic information. You will fail, and the score report will tell you what you already knew.
• A serious personal, medical or family disruption has occurred. This is what deferral exists for.
• A known, time-boxed obstacle sits across the exam window — a project deadline, a relocation, a wedding — and it will genuinely be gone afterwards. The key word is time-boxed. "Work is busy" is not time-boxed; work is always busy.

Sit anyway if these describe you

• You have covered most of the curriculum but feel underprepared. Nearly everyone feels underprepared. Mock scores, not feelings, should drive this decision.
• You are eight weeks out and behind schedule. Eight weeks is enough to cover remaining material at pace and take two mocks. Deferring here trades a real chance for a hypothetical better-prepared future self who, statistically, does not show up.
• You want "more time to feel confident." Confidence is not a study milestone and does not arrive on a schedule.

The underappreciated benefit of sitting: you learn what the real thing feels like. Four and a half hours of concentration under proctored conditions, with the specific pressure of a countdown clock, is not fully replicated by any mock taken at your kitchen table. Candidates who fail their first sitting and retake often report the second exam felt substantially easier for reasons that had nothing to do with content. And the score report gives you a genuine diagnostic that no mock provides.

If you do defer, do this

The 29% figure describes candidates who drifted. It does not have to describe you, but avoiding it requires deliberate effort against the natural pull of a removed deadline.

1. Rebuild the plan within a week. Not a month. The dangerous period is the fortnight immediately after deferring, when relief turns into a habit of not studying.
2. Set artificial checkpoints. Book a mock for a specific date and treat it as immovable. Without an external deadline you need a manufactured one.
3. Do not restart from the beginning. The instinct is to re-read Ethics and Quant from page one. Instead, take a diagnostic mock first and let it tell you where the decay actually is.
4. Use the extra time on practice, not coverage. Most deferring candidates have a practice deficit rather than a reading deficit. Another pass through the curriculum feels productive and changes very little.

What this does to the headline pass rate

The 10-year Level 1 average sits around 41%. But that blended figure mixes two very different populations, and quoting it as "your odds" is misleading in both directions.

A prepared, on-schedule, first-time candidate is looking at roughly one-in-two odds. A candidate who has already deferred once is looking at closer to one-in-three. The headline number is the weighted average of those groups plus everyone who registered without a realistic plan.

This is the honest way to read CFA pass rates, and it is more encouraging than the "only a third pass" framing that circulates online. The exam is genuinely hard. But the headline is dragged down by candidates who deferred, under-prepared, or never really started. Sitting on schedule with 300 focused hours behind you places you in a materially better cohort than the average implies — which is also the argument the pass rate analysis makes from the other direction.