CPA exam guide
The complete CPA exam guide
By Joey Arnold, CPA · Last updated August 23, 2026
Four exams, four hours each, and a passing score of 75. That’s the whole thing — and it tells you almost nothing about what the next year of your life looks like.
What actually determines how this goes is a series of decisions you’ll make before you ever sit down at a testing center. This guide is organized around those decisions, in the order you hit them.
What the CPA exam is
You sit four sections. Three are fixed — Financial Accounting and Reporting, Auditing and Attestation, and Taxation and Regulation. The fourth is a Discipline you choose from three options.
Every section is four hours long, across five testlets, mixing multiple-choice questions with task-based simulations. You need a 75 to pass, on a scaled score from 0 to 99. That isn’t a percentage of questions answered correctly, and it isn’t a curve against the other people testing that week. It’s a weighted measure of how many questions you answered correctly and how hard those questions were, scaled so a 75 reflects the same level of skill on every version of the exam.
Testing is continuous — you schedule when you’re ready rather than waiting for a testing window.
The four sections
| Section | What it covers | Typical study hours | Q2 2026 pass rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| FAR | Financial accounting and reporting | 100–160 | 42.47% |
| AUD | Auditing and attestation | 80–140 | 49.38% |
| REG | Individual and entity taxation, business law | 70–120 | 66.87% |
| BAR — Discipline | Advanced accounting, cost, valuation, government | 120–140 | 45.62% |
| ISC — Discipline | IT, data, security, SOC engagements | 60–90 | 67.98% |
| TCP — Discipline | Tax compliance and planning at depth | 60–100 | 79.75% |
A surface-level look at the pass rates doesn’t tell the whole story — they describe who sat each exam as much as how hard it was. What the pass rates actually tell you →
Your decisions, in the order you face them
1. Is this worth doing at all?
Ask it honestly and early, because the answer shapes everything after it. The CPA is a large investment of time in a specific direction, and it pays off very differently depending on where you want to end up. Better to decide deliberately now than to discover the answer nine months in. Is the CPA worth it? →
2. Am I eligible?
This is the one to check first, and it’s the one nobody can answer for you in general terms. Education requirements, the experience you need, and how long your passed sections stay valid are all set by your state board, and several states have changed both their education pathways and their credit windows in the last two years.
Don’t take a number from a website — including this one. Look up your own board’s current rules, and if you’re planning to move states, look up both. What every state requires covers the general shape of it, but your board is the authority.
3. Which Discipline?
The only real choice the exam gives you, and most people make it in about the time it takes to read three names. Your background matters less than you’d think — what matters is which material you can get genuinely good at in the hours you actually have, and whether the section’s skill mix suits how you study. How to choose your Discipline →
4. What order do I take them in?
There’s no required sequence, but the order changes how much total work you do. Sections share material — REG and TCP overlap heavily, and what you learn for FAR feeds parts of BAR — so taking related sections close together saves real hours. The other factor is your credit window: the clock starts when you pass your first section, so what you sit first determines what’s under time pressure later.
5. What will it cost?
Exam fees themselves run a few hundred dollars per section, plus application and registration fees that vary by state, plus review course. The number people underestimate isn’t any of those — it’s the cost of retakes. A section you fail costs you the fee again and, more expensively, several more weeks.
How to study around a full-time job
This is the whole reason this site exists, so here’s the short version of what actually works.
Protect a small amount of time, every week. Not a lot of time — a consistent amount. The candidates who pass while working are almost never the ones who found more hours. They’re the ones who lost fewer of them to restarting.
Work problems instead of watching. Most sections weight application and analysis far above recall. Watching a worked example feels like studying and isn’t. Do the calculation before you look at how it’s done.
Let the Blueprint set your priorities. The AICPA publishes exactly what it tests and how heavily. When your time is limited, that document is the difference between studying and studying the right things.
Interleave once you’ve covered a few areas. Mixed review feels harder than blocked review and works better. It’s also closer to what exam day actually is.
Match your method to the section. ISC is mostly recall and rewards flashcards and retrieval. FAR, BAR and TCP are mostly application and reward problems. Studying all four the same way is a common and expensive mistake.
What happens if you fail
Most candidates fail at least one section. It’s the normal path, not the exception, and it isn’t a verdict on whether you’ll be a CPA.
Practically: you can retake the section, and if it’s a Discipline you can sit a different one instead. Your other passed sections keep their own clock running, so the real cost of a failure is time, not permission.
The useful thing after a failed attempt is working out which kind of gap cost you the points — whether you didn’t know the material, knew it but couldn’t apply it fast enough, or ran out of time. Those have completely different fixes, and guessing wrong means repeating the same preparation and getting the same result.
How Smarter CPA fits
This course is built for one specific person: someone passing the CPA exam while holding down a full-time job.
That constraint drives every decision in the course. Lectures are short enough to watch in the gaps in your day. The content is cut to what the Blueprint actually tests, so you’re not spending scarce hours on material the examiners don’t ask about. The practice looks like the exam rather than like a textbook. And there’s a day-by-day plan so you’re never deciding what to study at the end of a long workday.
Everything above is the map. The section pages are where the detail lives — what each one tests, why people fail it, and how to study it when your time is limited.
Where to start
Pick the decision you’re actually stuck on and start there. If you’re at the very beginning, that’s usually whether this is worth doing at all — and after that, which Discipline you’ll take.
No credit card, full access to Chapter 1 of every section. All six sections — $1,249 · See what’s included.
Still deciding how to approach it? A Coaching Circle Intro Call is exactly that conversation.