In the June exam, held on 5 June, some 237 candidates sat the exam and 66 per cent of them passed.
This is lower than the pass mark in the previous two sittings which stood at 73 per cent in March and 77 per cent in November 2024.
However, it is not as bad as the results in August 2024 where the pass mark stood at 62 per cent.
| Sitting | Pass rate |
| June 2025 | 66% |
| March 2025 | 73% |
| November 2024 | 77% |
| August 2024 | 62% |
| June 2024 | 70% |
| March 2024 | 70% |
Source: ASIC, July 2025
After strong results in March, this led to a substantial volume of new entrants coming onto the Financial Advisers Register (FAR). Almost 200 new entrants have joined since the results of March’s exam were released.
The next exam, which tests advice construction, ethics and legal requirements via practical scenarios, will be held on 7 August.
To date, 21,991 individual candidates have sat the exam and 92 per cent of them have passed successfully, ASIC said.
At the start of 2024, ASIC announced changes to the exam structure which saw the removal of the short-answer questions from the exam and increased the number of multiple-choice questions. It also removed the requirement limiting exam participation to new financial advisers who have completed an approved degree and existing providers.
Interesting that 22K candidates have passed the exam, but only 15K work as financial planners.
This underscores the stupidity of trying to “attract more people to the profession” or “lowering barriers to entry”. The real issue is that bad regulation makes financial planning too unattractive to work in. There are 7K people already qualified to be financial planners, who have chosen not to. Fix the bad regulation, and there will be no problem getting qualified people to work in the profession.
Yep, I’m one of them. Fully qualified, interested in finance, fifteen years experience, really enjoy helping people and in my early forties (lots of working years left) but the compliance and red tape these days makes it almost unbearable as a line of work. Left financial planning to get paid less to do work I’m less qualified to do but at least I’m happier. I’d get back into financial planning if the government toned the extreme regulation down.
Still the biggest waste of time and resources in the history of financial planning.