Series 7 exam prep course cost: Kaplan, STC, Achievable and Pass Perfect priced

A Series 7 exam prep course costs $139 to $966 in the United States, depending on the vendor, the tier and whether the package includes the SIE. Kaplan Financial Education runs $139 to $309 list for five months of access. Achievable is $199 for a full year. Securities Training Corporation starts at $273 for the Series 7 top-off alone and reaches $966 for its SIE, Series 7 and Series 66 Premier Plus bundle. All prices were read from each vendor's own enrollment page on September 16, 2026. The $395 FINRA exam fee is separate and is charged on every attempt.

Almost every roundup you will find on this query is written by a company selling one of these courses, and most of them are quoting prices that are one or two increases out of date. The figures below came off the vendors' own checkout pages this week. Where a vendor loads its prices with JavaScript and we could not read them, we have said so rather than repeat somebody else's number.

Series 7 exam prep course prices compared

Two things are worth pulling out of that table before anything else. The spread is nearly seven to one, $139 against $966, for products that prepare you for the same 125-question exam. And the cheapest headline number in the table, STC's $273, is not a complete course for most of the people who click it. That is the next section, and it is the expensive part.

The top-off trap: why STC's $273 is not what a first-timer needs

Since October 2018 the Series 7 has not been a standalone qualification. FINRA split it into the Securities Industry Essentials exam, which anyone can sit without a firm, and the Series 7 top-off, which requires firm sponsorship. You need both to register as a General Securities Representative. FINRA's own exam page states the SIE as a co-requisite.

Vendors price these separately, and STC's product naming reflects that honestly, but it is easy to misread. Its $273 Standard package is the Series 7 top-off only. If you have not already passed the SIE, the package you actually need is the SIE and Series 7 top-off bundle at $372 Standard, $559 Premier or $645 Premier Plus. Buying the $273 product first and the SIE material separately afterwards is the single most common and most expensive mistake on this purchase.

Read from stcusa.com on September 16, 2026. The STC Pass Guarantee applies to Premier and Premier Plus, not to Standard. If you already know you will need the Series 66 as well, and most people heading into an advisory seat do, the three-exam bundle at $518 is genuinely cheaper than buying the pieces. We have written separately about whether you need the Series 7 before the Series 66, which decides whether that bundle makes sense for you.

Kaplan Financial Education: the cheapest brand name

Kaplan sells four Series 7 packages: Basic Self-Study, Essential Self-Study, Premium OnDemand at $279 and Premium Live Online at $309. The page shows a range of $139 to $309 at list, currently discounted across the line to $118.15 to $262.65, so the Basic package is the $139 entry point. Access runs five months on every package and an extension costs $49.

The Premium packages include the License Exam Manual, a SecuritiesPro QBank that builds custom exams by topic and length with unlimited randomized attempts, Checkpoint Exams, a Midterm, a Mastery Exam, a Performance Tracker, a study plan and an AI tutor. The difference between the two Premium tiers is only how the instruction is delivered, scheduled live online classes against recorded on-demand video, which is a $30 decision about your calendar rather than about content.

What Kaplan does not publish is a pass guarantee. For a $139 self-study package that is reasonable, but it is worth knowing before you compare the $309 Live Online tier against STC's $479 Premier, which does carry one. Note also that five months is a real constraint if your sponsoring firm has you studying around a full desk job. At $49, the extension is cheap, but budget for it.

Achievable: a full year for $199

Achievable sells one Series 7 course at $199 as a one-time payment, with a full year of access, more than 3,700 quiz questions, over 35 full-length practice exams and a pass guarantee. On the two variables that actually decide value here, price per month of access and question volume, that is the strongest number in this comparison: $199 for twelve months against Kaplan's $279 Premium OnDemand for five.

The trade-off is that Achievable is a smaller company with no live instruction, no printed manual and no classroom option. If your firm reimburses the course and expects you in a scheduled class, this is not the one. If you are self-funding and disciplined, it is hard to argue with a year of access and 3,700 questions for less than the price of one Kaplan Premium term.

Pass Perfect, and what happened to Solomon Exam Prep

If a study group or an older forum thread told you to buy Solomon Exam Prep, that recommendation now points somewhere else. CeriFi acquired Pass Perfect in 2018 and Solomon Exam Prep in 2022 and merged the two under the Pass Perfect brand, with combined courses from July 2023. solomonexamprep.com now serves Pass Perfect. The content lineage is real, so this is not a warning, but you should know you are buying a different product from the one those reviews described.

Pass Perfect loads its pricing client-side, so it is not in the page source and we are not going to guess at it or repeat a figure from a competitor's comparison page. Its Series 7 page does advertise a bundle discount of up to $99 when you buy the SIE alongside it, which is the same structural point STC's bundles make.

The $395 exam fee is separate, and you pay it every time

None of the course prices above include the exam. FINRA charges $395 for the Series 7, which is 125 scored questions over three hours and forty-five minutes with a passing score of 72. The SIE is billed separately. If you fail, you wait 30 days for the first two retakes and 180 days after a third, and the $395 is charged again on every attempt.

That retake arithmetic is the real reason to think about guarantees and access terms rather than shaving $50 off the sticker. A single failed attempt costs you $395 plus at least a month, which is more than the gap between the cheapest and the most expensive self-study package in this article. We have covered how hard the Series 7 actually is and what the pass rate looks like in practice. It is also worth remembering that most candidates are studying for this because a firm is bringing them on, and the licensing budget, the study time and the base and bonus are all things you can negotiate when the offer lands rather than accept as fixed.

Which Series 7 prep course should you buy?

Whichever course you buy, the failure pattern at the end is the same one we see on every licensing exam: candidates finish a fixed question bank three weeks out, start recognizing items instead of reasoning through them, and watch their percentages climb for the wrong reason. That is the point to add a second source. Our Series 7 practice questions are generated rather than drawn from a fixed bank, so they do not run out, and every answer choice is explained rather than just the correct one. The same is true of our SIE exam practice questions if you are sitting both, and the Series 66 practice questions if the advisory registration is next.