On this page
For the latest CAIA® exam cycle, the result that matters to an individual candidate is the official outcome in their CAIA account and its Candidate Performance Report. CAIA Association's public guidance gives the usual release window and tells candidates how to retrieve and interpret that report; it does not provide an official current cohort pass percentage on the pages used here. A third-party percentage cannot be treated as CAIA's own published result, and a topic band cannot be converted into an exact mark.
What is current in the official guidance
As checked on 21 October 2026, CAIA Association's results FAQ says Level I results are usually released within five weeks of the last examination day and Level II results generally within eight weeks. These are usual intervals, not fixed result dates for a particular candidate. The Association explains that it sends an email when results are uploaded and directs candidates to their CAIA account. A reader should therefore distinguish a completed exam window, the expected release interval, the notification and the result actually visible in the account. None of those events can be inferred solely from a social-media post.
The most recently completed regular cycle at the time of this check is the September 2026 cycle. This article does not assert a precise release date or a cohort pass rate for that cycle because the opened CAIA pages do not establish either claim. In particular, Level II can take longer because its assessment includes written work. The FAQ's five-week and eight-week descriptions are useful for setting expectations, but it would be false precision to turn them into a promised date by adding weeks to a calendar. A candidate should follow the Association's notification and account record rather than an estimated deadline.
The phrase latest results can refer to two different things. An individual's pass or fail outcome and topic report are private. A cohort pass rate, if the Association publishes one for a defined window and level, describes the group. The former answers what happened to the candidate; the latter does not. The CAIA score-review policy says candidate responses and scores are not released. It follows that a public commentary page cannot reconstruct a candidate's exact mark from a report, and an unattributed rate elsewhere should not be presented as an official CAIA statistic.
Find the actual result before interpreting it
CAIA's FAQ says candidates receive email notification when results have been uploaded to their accounts. An email can tell you where to look; the result in the official account is the primary record. If a candidate has more than one sitting, matching the level and exam cycle matters. A historical result in the same account may be perfectly genuine while being irrelevant to the latest sitting. Record the status and the cycle before looking at the breakdown, since a detailed report should be read in the context of the overall outcome.
A candidate who has not received an email should not conclude that a pass or failure has been withheld. The usual release interval is not a personal delivery guarantee, and email delivery depends on the address and mailbox. CAIA encourages candidates to keep their contact information current. The practical action is to consult the official account and the Association's current guidance, then use its candidate support route if the official information does not resolve a genuine access problem. Guessing from other people's result posts is not a reliable substitute for one's own account.
The overall status and the performance breakdown answer different questions. A pass says the candidate met the standard set for that examination; it does not identify an exact score or confer a ranking. A fail means the standard was not met; it is not a precise distance from passing. The report can still support useful revision by pointing to relative strengths and weaknesses across topics. That is a diagnostic use, not a reverse-engineering exercise. Trying to add visual bands into a total percentage is tempting but unsupported unless CAIA explicitly supplies a rule for doing so.
Why a cohort rate cannot tell you your threshold
A pass rate is a fraction of a cohort that passed a specific exam window and level. It is not the minimum passing score. The threshold is a standard for candidate performance; the rate is an observed group outcome after assessment. Even if both numbers were publicly available, they would answer separate questions. A lower rate could reflect several changes in cohort composition or performance, and one figure alone would not identify the cause. Do not treat a reported percentage as evidence that the exam was harder, that a prep method worked, or that an individual's marks were close to the line.
The difference is especially relevant when comparing levels. The groups sitting Level I and Level II are not identical populations. The later level contains candidates who have already passed an earlier stage, and the assessment format differs. A simple comparison of two percentages, even if official and from the same year, would not isolate exam difficulty. The decision a candidate can make from their own report is more modest: identify which curriculum areas need better understanding and practise the relevant type of reasoning before the next attempt, if one is needed.
A worked reading example shows the limit. Imagine an entirely illustrative report in which a candidate passes overall but appears relatively weaker in institutional asset owners than in risk management. The correct conclusion is that the first area may deserve attention in future professional study or later revision. It is not possible to infer that the candidate scored, say, 58% in that area, or that a single additional question would have changed the outcome. Conversely, an overall fail with one relatively strong area does not prove that every other area was below a particular numerical cut-off. The report's relative information is useful precisely when it is kept within its stated meaning.
What to do with a disappointing or unclear report
First separate a scoring concern from a learning concern. If the issue is that the report's bands are hard to interpret, use CAIA's own guide accompanying the result and its candidate support information. If the issue is a suspected tabulation error, CAIA has a specific review process. Its published score-review policy says the review manually retabulates the score but does not re-grade responses. It states a US$100 fee and a request deadline within 30 days of receiving the Candidate Performance Report; the fee is refunded if the reported score was incorrect. Those are the Association's policy terms as opened on 21 October 2026, so a candidate contemplating a request should recheck the live policy and their own receipt date.
A request for retabulation is therefore a narrow tool, not a way to obtain the exam paper, a detailed mark or a second judgement on every answer. The same policy says questions, candidate responses and scores are not released. Before paying for a review, identify the actual suspected error and what a retabulation could change. For a candidate whose main need is to study more effectively, the report's topic pattern and the official curriculum are better starting points. CAIA's curriculum page says the curriculum is updated for each calendar year's exam cycles, so an old set of notes should be checked against the material for the intended sitting.
A useful revision plan begins with a small number of concrete errors rather than a sweeping claim that a topic is impossible. Revisit the learning outcomes in a weaker area, explain a concept without notes, then test whether the explanation survives a changed example. For a calculation topic, recompute an invented case and check units and assumptions. For a judgement topic, state why an attractive alternative is wrong under the case facts. This is a way to act on diagnostic information; it is not a claim that a particular number of hours or questions produces a pass. The CAIA programme page and Omni's methodology page give readers relevant internal context without replacing CAIA's official result record.
The careful conclusion for October 2026
The defensible report is limited: CAIA provides private candidate outcomes and performance reports via the candidate account, describes usual result-release intervals by level, and sets out a narrow score-review process. The official pages opened for this article do not establish a current September 2026 cohort pass percentage or an exact passing mark. A candidate can use the official outcome to decide what to do next and the topic report to choose where to work, while keeping relative feedback separate from a numerical score. If CAIA later posts a dated public cohort figure, it should be identified by level and exam window before anyone draws a comparison.
Sources
- Frequently Asked Questions | CAIA Association · caia.org · Retrieved
- CAIA Association Examination – Exam Irregularities and Score Reviews · caia.org · Retrieved
- Explore the Curriculum | CAIA Association · caia.org · Retrieved
