Series 24 Practice Questions: What to Drill, the Pace, 3 Worked Examples

Practice questions are most useful for finding what you do not know yet, not for collecting scores. This guide covers how to use practice questions on the Series 24, the pace the real exam asks for, what to drill in each of the five job functions in FINRA's content outline, and three practice questions you can try now, each with the reasoning behind the answer. FINRA's Series 24 Content Outline includes three sample items that show the question formats, and FINRA says they do not reflect the difficulty of actual exam items; the questions on this page are our own. ProSyllabus is an independent study site, not part of FINRA. The facts here are quoted or summarised from the official pages listed under Sources.

FINRA Series 24 page and the Series 24 Content Outline, read 25 Oct 2026.

The real Series 24 gives you 3 hours 45 minutes for 160 items, of which 10 are unscored pretest items you cannot identify. That is about 84 seconds an item (our arithmetic). The outline says there is no penalty for guessing, so FINRA advises answering every item. The outline says some items may involve calculations. Our suggestion: keep a steady pace and, if a calculation is slowing you down, mark it and come back to it on a second pass. A simple way to check your pace in a full mock is to note the clock at fixed points:

If you are well behind at the halfway mark, you are probably spending too long on items you cannot settle. Pick your best answer, mark it for review if your test lets you, and move on.

The outline sets how many scored items each function gets. Our drill list below picks rule points from the outline's task headings and rule lists. It is ours, not FINRA's list of what appears on any exam, and every rule named here is in the outline.

Notice what is missing: options and municipal securities. FINRA's Series 24 page says the general securities principal qualification does not cover them, so a Series 24 drill list should not spend time on options strategies or municipal underwritings.

To hold the General Securities Principal registration you also need the SIE and the Series 7 (FINRA's corequisites), so if you have studied at representative level, much of the vocabulary carries over, but the point of view does not. A representative question asks what the customer should be told or which order type fits; a principal question asks what the firm must have in place, who must approve it, what must be kept and for how long, and what must be reported to whom. The table below sets out the shift as we see it; it is our own comparison, not FINRA's.

A useful habit while practising: for every rule you meet, ask three questions. What must the firm do? Who signs off? What is the deadline? It is a habit we suggest, not a FINRA rule.

These three are original questions written to the outline. Try each before you open the answer.

A percentage on a practice test is not a Series 24 score. FINRA's passing score of 70 sits on a common scale after a statistical step called equating, which adjusts for small differences in difficulty between sets of exam items. The FINRA pages listed under Sources give no way to turn the scaled 70 into a number of correct answers, so treat any practice percentage as a rough guide to where you are strong and weak, not as a forecast. Score yourself by job function as well as overall: a strong total can hide a weak Function 4 or 5, which together carry 64 of the 150 scored items. Our Series 24 format and passing score guide sets out what FINRA publishes about the exam.