You failed
FAR
If you failed the FAR CPA exam you are in the majority, and so is “I keep failing FAR” if this is your second or third attempt: a failed FAR CPA exam attempt is the modal outcome, not the exceptional one. The 2025 cumulative pass rate was 42.12%, so roughly six in ten attempts do not pass. That fact is not comfort. It is the reason the next decision has to be made on evidence rather than on how the exam felt.
Source: UWorld Accounting, “CPA Exam Pass Rates”, compiling AICPA quarterly reports · checked 2026-08-15 · 2025 cumulative FAR pass rate
What your score already tells you
A score in the high 60s or low 70s is not a message about whether you know financial accounting. It is a message that whatever the gap is, it is small and it is not obvious — because if it were obvious, you would have felt it during the exam. Candidates who fail at 71 and then re-study the same way tend to be re-treating a diagnosis they never made.
The three things worth separating before you re-book:
- Coverage. Which Blueprint groups did you never actually test yourself on? Not “read about” — tested. Untested is not the same as weak, and it needs a different response.
- Simulation exposure. How many simulation cells did you answer under time, start to finish, in the whole of your preparation? Not how many you read through. Simulations carry about half the score.
- Pacing. Was there a specific simulation that ate a quarter of your time? If so, the cost of that cell was almost certainly paid by the cells after it, not by the cell itself.
Retaking is harder, and that is all we can say
Repeat candidates pass at a lower rate than first-time candidates. We are not going to tell you by how much: the published AICPA tables report one rate per section per quarter across all candidates, and the first-time-versus-repeat split is in a priced NASBA publication we have not bought. It is also worth not over-reading even when you do see a figure: repeat candidates are by definition the group that did not pass, so a gap would be expected even if nothing about method mattered. The useful conclusion is narrow — a re-sit is not a coin flip in your favour, and it does not get easier because the material is familiar.
Why the retaker gap gets misused, and where the split is actually published →
“I keep failing FAR” — what a second or third fail changes
If you have failed FAR twice, or failed FAR 3 times, the honest reading is different from the reading after one fail — but not in the direction most people assume. It is not evidence that you cannot pass FAR. It is strong evidence that the method you have repeated is not the variable that needs repeating. One fail is compatible with bad luck at a 42.12% base rate. A third is a measurement of a process.
Three things actually change, and it is worth being precise about which:
- The base rate you sit against moves down, not up. Repeat candidates pass at a lower rate than first-time candidates, so familiarity with the material does not show up as an advantage. We do not print a size for that gap, because no free primary source publishes one. (As above: the gap would be expected from how the repeat pool is assembled, so read it as a base rate, not as a cause.)
- The credit clock starts binding. Passed sections expire on a rolling window — commonly 30 months, but the length and the start date are set by your state board, not nationally. After a third attempt on one section, the constraint on your plan is usually calendar, not content.
- Nothing limits the number of attempts. NASBA states there is no cap on how many times a section can be taken; the practical constraints are re-registration and scheduling. Whatever a third fail is, it is not disqualifying.
Failed FAR 3 times: the number we will not print
There is no third-attempt pass rate, and we are not going to estimate one. The only breakdown anyone publishes is first-time against repeat, not attempt number, so nobody outside NASBA can put a figure on the third attempt specifically — and a number invented for that slot would be the most quotable wrong thing on this page.
The practical move after a repeat fail is to change what you are measuring rather than how long you study. Count simulation cells answered under time, not hours logged. Count Blueprint groups you have actually tested yourself on, not chapters read. Both counts are usually far lower than the candidate expects, and that gap — not resolve — is the thing a fourth attempt has to fix.
How many times you can sit, and whose 30-month rule → · The 22 Blueprint groups, so “untested” is countable →
Source: NASBA, “CPA Exam FAQ” · checked 2026-08-15 · no limit on attempts; re-registration and scheduling
Re-plan on numbers, not on resolve
Two things are worth doing in the first 72 hours, and both take about ten minutes.
One. Put your actual practice counts into the pass-probability estimator. It starts at 42.12% and moves in proportion to evidence, so if your number is disappointing after a full preparation cycle, that is the estimator telling you something specific: either the evidence is thinner than it felt, or it is concentrated in the multiple-choice half.
Two. Do the simulation time budget once, on paper. Most re-sit plans allocate more study hours without changing the allocation inside the exam — which is the part that actually failed if your problem was pacing.
Neither of these requires buying anything, from us or anyone else.
What we are building for this
Exam Copilot is FAR practice, diagnosis and tutoring, built around the estimate above rather than around a content library. When you miss a question, it opens by asking you one thing about the specific wrong choice you made, rather than pasting the explanation. You get the full walkthrough within a few exchanges either way — and if you would rather just have it, ask three times and it is yours.
It is not open yet — no question in the practice bank has been reviewed by a licensed CPA.