CFA Level 1 Topic Weights Explained (2026 & 2027)

Five topics sit at the top of CFA Level 1 — Quantitative Methods, Financial Statement Analysis, Equities, and Fixed Income at 11–14% each, and Ethical and Professional Standards at 10–15%. Those five are roughly half your score, or about 100 of the 180 questions.

Here are the current weights as published by CFA Institute, and then the part almost no one does: converting them into question counts and study hours you can actually plan around.

The current CFA Level 1 topic weights

Two things to notice, because a lot of prep sites haven't caught up. Quantitative Methods is now an 11–14% topic, not the 6–9% afterthought it used to be — that's roughly a doubling, and it's the single biggest change to how you should budget hours. And Ethics is now published at 10–15%, not the 15–20% you'll still see quoted in older guides and forum posts. Ethics still matters more than its band suggests, for a reason covered below, but it is no longer the largest topic outright.

CFA Institute also assigns topics to a specific session, which the table above reflects. Session 1 is Ethics, Quant, Economics, FSA, and Corporate Finance; Session 2 is Equities, Fixed Income, Derivatives, Alternative Investments, and Portfolio Construction. That's worth knowing on exam day — if Quant goes badly, it went badly in the morning, and Session 2 is a fresh 90 questions on entirely different material.

These are ranges, not fixed values — CFA Institute publishes bands because the exact composition varies between exam windows. Your exam won't be identical to your friend's. The question counts above are just each band applied to the 180-question exam.

One thing the ranges make clear: the gap between the top and bottom of a band is real. Ethics can swing by nine questions. Portfolio Construction can swing by eight. Planning to the midpoint is fine; planning to the bottom of a band is how people get ambushed.

What the weights actually mean for your study plan

The naive move is to allocate study hours in direct proportion to the weights. Don't. Weight tells you how much the exam tests a topic, not how long it takes you to learn it. Two adjustments matter:

Adjust up for difficulty and volume. Financial Statement Analysis is 11–14% of the exam but a much larger share of the curriculum's page count, and it's cumulative — inventory, long-lived assets, income taxes, and leases stack on each other. Most candidates need more than 12% of their hours here. Same for Fixed Income if you've never priced a bond.

Adjust down for topics you already know. If you work in accounting, FSA is partly free. If you have an economics degree, the 6–9% Economics block is a review, not a first pass. Weights are a map of the exam, not a map of your gaps.

A reasonable starting split for someone with a general business background, out of 300 hours:

• FSA: 45–50 hours
• Quantitative Methods: 40 hours (front-loaded — it's now a top-weight topic and it feeds everything else)
• Fixed Income: 35 hours
• Equities: 32 hours
• Ethics: 32 hours (and re-read it near the end)
• Portfolio Construction: 25 hours
• Economics: 22 hours
• Corporate Finance: 20 hours
• Alternative Investments: 20 hours
• Derivatives and Risk Management: 20 hours

CFA Institute's own guidance is that successful candidates report studying over 300 hours per level. If you want the fuller version of how to sequence that, we broke it down in the CFA Level 1 study guide.

Why Ethics is weighted more than its 10–15%

Ethics carries a second, hidden weight. CFA Institute reviews the Ethics performance of candidates whose total score lands in a narrow band around the minimum passing score, and that review can move a borderline result either way. CFA Institute doesn't publish the width of that band or how many candidates it affects, so treat the specifics with skepticism — but the policy itself is real and long-standing.

The practical implication is one-sided in your favor. If you are going to be borderline (and statistically, a lot of candidates are — 39% passed Level 1 in May 2026), Ethics is the only topic where extra effort has a second payoff. It is also the cheapest topic to improve: there's no math, the Standards are finite, and the difficulty is entirely in application, which comes from doing hundreds of scenario questions rather than re-reading.

Most people leave Ethics for the last two weeks and then discover the questions are all judgment calls between two defensible answers. Start it early enough that you get a second pass.

Where the weights are quietly misleading

Quantitative Methods punches above even its new 11–14%. Time value of money, discounting, and return calculations show up inside Fixed Income, Equity, Corporate Finance, and Portfolio Construction questions. It was already the topic that quietly earned points elsewhere; now it's a top-weight topic in its own right. Skipping Quant to protect something else is a trade that loses points in five places.

Derivatives is the most skipped topic. At 6–9%, some candidates write it off entirely. That's 11 to 16 questions — enough to be the whole margin between a pass and a fail, and the Level 1 treatment is conceptual (what a forward is, how arbitrage links a derivative to its underlying) rather than the pricing-heavy version at Level 2. It's a poor topic to punt.

Alternative Investments is cheap points. At 6–9% it's largely definitional — hedge fund structures, private equity, real estate, commodities, and now digital assets. Low conceptual difficulty, no heavy math, high points per hour. It's the best-value block on the exam for a candidate who's short on time.

What changes in 2027

A lot changes, and the topic names in the table above are the 2027 names — Corporate Issuers is now Corporate Finance, Portfolio Management is now Portfolio Construction, Equity Investments is now Equities, and Derivatives is now Derivatives and Risk Management. Be careful with older guides here: many still publish the pre-2027 weights, in which Ethics was 15–20% and Quantitative Methods was 6–9%. If a study plan you're following puts Quant near the bottom of the priority list, it's working from the old table.

CFA Institute's official 2027 curriculum update confirms that the Equities topic (previously "Equity Investments") has been substantially rebuilt around practical application — financial statement forecasting, scenario analysis, Porter's Five Forces tied to valuation, and new modules on analyst research reports. Quantitative Methods has been reorganized around real-world applications, with expanded coverage of historical simulation, bootstrapping, and Monte Carlo methods, plus a new reading on financial data science, AI, and large language models. The Quant prerequisite reading is retired. Ethics is now split into one module per Standard, aligned to version 12 of the Standards of Practice Handbook.

February 2027 is the first window tested on the new curriculum. If you're testing before then, confirm your weights against your own candidate resources in the Learning Ecosystem rather than any third-party table, including this one — CFA Institute is the only source that governs.

The fastest way to find out where you actually stand

Weights tell you what the exam values. They don't tell you what you know. The gap between "I read the Fixed Income chapters" and "I can answer 20 Fixed Income questions in 30 minutes" is where most failed attempts live, and you can only measure it one way.

Certus has a free full-length CFA mock exam — no signup, no card, no email — built to the official topic weights so your score breakdown maps directly to the table above. Take it early, before you feel ready. A bad score in week three is information; a bad score in week twenty is a problem.

If you want the full track after that, Certus is the Duolingo-style way to pass the CFA — bite-sized lessons, spaced repetition, and boss-battle mock exams, at a fraction of what the big providers charge. See how it compares on price, or start on the CFA Level 1 track.