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 study strategies around misconceptions of how it works. This article 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.
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 they have confirmed they will not do so. What they have 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
Tells you exactly which sub-topics to study next — and in what order.
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 they design 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 they do not target a specific pass rate — they set 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: "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.
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 — the band where the outcome could go either way — 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 the overall, the score band reporting — which candidates receive at the topic level — 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 framework is exactly what the diagnostic engine in our Clevency mock exams automates. Every wrong answer is mapped to its specific sub-topic, and the AI 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 on investment.
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 morning 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 morning and afternoon sections, and the weighting between them is approximately equal. Candidates who perform very well in the afternoon item sets can partially compensate for a weaker morning essay performance — but only partially. The essay section must be practiced specifically, not as an afterthought.
Common MPS Myths, Debunked
Myth: "The MPS is always 70%"
Not true. 70% is a reasonable heuristic but not a fixed number. The MPS varies by exam window and level. In a particularly difficult exam window, it may be meaningfully lower than 70%. In an easier window, it may be at or above 70%.
Myth: "CFA Institute targets a specific pass rate"
CFA Institute explicitly denies this. The pass rate is an output of the MPS and the score distribution of the candidate cohort — it is not an input to the MPS-setting process. This is consistent with the use of the Modified Angoff Method, which is specifically designed to set a competence-based rather than norm-referenced threshold. The CFA Institute's exam results page provides the most authoritative information available on how scores and pass/fail decisions are made.
Myth: "If I hit 70% overall I'm safe"
Not necessarily. An overall average can mask dangerous topic-area weakness. A candidate averaging 70% overall who scored 40% in FRA (a 17% topic area) has a very different risk profile from a candidate also averaging 70% but with no topic area below 60%. The second candidate is much safer.
Myth: "The MPS adjustment for Ethics can save a candidate who failed significantly"
The Ethics adjustment is a borderline tie-breaker, not a rescue mechanism. It applies to candidates who score just below the MPS — not candidates who fell substantially short. Do not build a strategy around banking on the Ethics adjustment to save you.
Putting It All Together: A MPS-Aware Study Strategy
Here is how to incorporate MPS awareness into your preparation in a way that is both practical and strategically sound:
- 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.
- Weight Ethics heavily — aim for 75%+ in Ethics specifically to build the maximum possible buffer for borderline scenarios.
- 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.
- 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 exam performance.
- Use diagnostic data to drive revision. Your mock exam results should tell you not just your score but your score by sub-topic. Revision that is not guided by diagnostic data is inefficient — you cannot afford to spend time on topics where you are already strong if other topics are below the passing threshold.
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.
If you're ready to get a realistic picture of where you stand against the MPS right now, our full-length mock exams with diagnostic reporting are designed to give you exactly that — a topic-level and sub-topic-level view of your current performance against the passing benchmark, so your remaining study time is spent in the right places.