CFP Board publishes exam statistics for each sitting. For July 2026, 2,388 of the 3,621 candidates passed, an overall rate of 66% (CFP Board exam statistics), and first-time candidates passed a few points above that.

CFP Board's public statistics don't break results out by prep provider. The provider numbers you'll find come in two kinds. Some education programs quote a first-time rate they attribute to a CFP Board report on their own students. The review-course figures I checked count something narrower: students who completed the review, or students who answered a survey afterward.

What the providers claim

Here's what candidates tend to search for, and what I found on each provider's site in October 2026:

  • Dalton Education advertises a pass rate well above CFP Board's for students who successfully complete The Dalton Review. The page I checked doesn't say how many students that covers or which sittings. Dalton also runs a Guarantee to Pass program. To qualify, you sign a contract that sets the date you'll sit the exam by, take it by that date, score at least 70% on Dalton's Exam Readiness Quiz, and send Dalton your CFP Board result documents within 30 days of results.
  • Kaplan, through the College for Financial Planning, quotes two different figures. For its CFP education programs, it quotes a first-time rate on the July 2026 exam that it attributes to a CFP Board report on those programs' students. For its Premium review package, it quotes a first-time rate from a March 2026 survey of 141 eligible students, 116 of whom had taken the exam for the first time after finishing the review.
  • Manhattan Prep doesn't run a CFP program. It's a Kaplan-owned brand for GMAT, GRE and LSAT prep, so if you searched for its CFP pass rate, you're probably thinking of Kaplan's.
  • Pearson is a test-delivery and education company, not a CFP review provider. The CFP exam itself is given at Prometric testing centers, so neither Pearson nor Prometric has a pass rate as a prep provider.

Providers aren't necessarily lying, but their figures count different groups (first-time takers or everyone, one sitting or a survey window, everyone enrolled or only people who finished and answered), so you can't compare their numbers with each other or with CFP Board's overall rate.

How counting only completers can raise the number

Here's a made-up example. Say 100 candidates sign up for a hypothetical review course. Sixty finish the full program and forty don't. Of the sixty who finish, 50 pass, which is an 83% pass rate for completers. Of the forty who don't finish, 15 pass, or 38%. Taken together the group passed at 65%, close to CFP Board's overall rate, but a rate that counts only completers would be 83%.

In that example, a course could truthfully advertise a pass rate well above CFP Board's while its students, taken together, passed at about the national rate. The provider pages I checked don't say how many enrolled students their figures leave out, so I can't tell how big this effect is for any real course.

What to look at instead

Here's what I'd look at instead:

  1. The official rate. About two out of three candidates passed the July 2026 sitting. The exam is passable with serious preparation and hard on shallow preparation. The CFP pass rate and study strategy guide covers what that means for planning.
  2. How well your practice matches the exam. The CFP exam is 170 scenario-based questions across 8 principal knowledge domains, and whether your practice looks like that matters more than a marketing number. FreeFellow's full CFP bank, 2,704 questions with step-by-step solutions, is free with an account, and the Dalton comparison goes through how it compares with the most heavily marketed paid option.
  3. Your own practice data. A diagnostic score and your accuracy by domain show you which areas still need work, which no group statistic can.

FreeFellow doesn't claim a pass rate, as a policy. The cross-exam pass-rate hub collects published rates for other credentials, with a source for each, and the periods and populations behind them differ from row to row.