“Which financial or insurance licensing paper is actually the hardest?” Most answers online carry no data — because the two examination bodies differ completely in transparency. HKSI publishes real pass rates for every paper, every month. PEAK, which runs the IIQE and MPFE, has never published a pass rate at all. This guide puts both sides of the evidence together: official monthly pass rates for all 17 HKSI papers, plus topic-level difficulty measured from 154,261 real answers in our apps.
The short answer
Of all papers with official data, HKSI Paper 1 (Fundamentals of Securities and Futures Regulation) is the hardest — averaging just 51.9% over the last 12 months, meaning fewer than half of candidates pass. The easiest is Paper 15 at 87.12%. On the insurance side, although no official figures exist, our 76,458 real practice answers show IIQE Paper 1 is also the hardest of the five (65.4% practice accuracy), with Paper 3 the easiest (75.4%).
In other words: on both the securities and the insurance track, the entry-level paper is the hardest one on the route. That is not a coincidence — both are regulation and principles papers that test applied judgement rather than recall.
1. HKSI: official pass rates for all 17 papers
Figures below come directly from the HKSI Institute's official pass-rate page, covering 2025-07 to 2026-06, snapshot 2026-07-28. ★ marks papers we publish a dedicated practice app for.
| # | 卷別 | 科目 | 平均合格率 | 逐月區間 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 卷一（Paper 1） ★ | 基本證券及期貨規例 | 51.9% | 47.4–61.84% |
| 2 | 卷十九（Paper 19） | 集體投資計劃存管服務 | 55.56% | 100.0–100.0% |
| 3 | 卷九（Paper 9） | 衍生工具 | 55.73% | 28.57–73.33% |
| 4 | 卷五（Paper 5） | 機構融資規例 | 56.09% | 40.54–78.57% |
| 5 | 卷十（Paper 10） | 信貸評級服務 | 60.0% | 100.0–100.0% |
| 6 | 卷六（Paper 6） | 資產管理規例 | 60.67% | 50.0–80.77% |
| 7 | 卷三（Paper 3） | 衍生工具規例 | 65.57% | 46.15–92.86% |
| 8 | 卷十七（Paper 17） | 公司收購及股份回購規例 | 65.78% | 46.67–85.71% |
| 9 | 卷二（Paper 2） | 證券規例 | 66.64% | 59.2–75.0% |
| 10 | 卷八（Paper 8） ★ | 證券 | 67.05% | 55.56–88.89% |
| 11 | 卷七（Paper 7） ★ | 金融市場 | 68.11% | 61.64–87.5% |
| 12 | 卷十八（Paper 18） | 存管服務規例 | 68.33% | 50.0–100.0% |
| 13 | 卷十六（Paper 16） | 保薦人(代表) | 69.09% | 56.59–82.32% |
| 14 | 卷十一（Paper 11） | 機構融資 | 74.01% | 50.0–100.0% |
| 15 | 卷四（Paper 4） | 信貸評級服務規例 | 75.0% | 50.0–100.0% |
| 16 | 卷十二（Paper 12） | 資產管理 | 77.07% | 52.94–100.0% |
| 17 | 卷十五（Paper 15） | 保薦人(主要人員) | 87.12% | 57.14–100.0% |
Note: HKSI publishes a rolling 12-month window only; older months are removed and no official archive exists. Papers with fewer sittings show a shorter window.
The gap between Paper 1 and Paper 15 is 35 percentage points. So “is HKSI hard?” is the wrong question — the right one is “which paper?”
2. IIQE / MPFE: no official data, so we measured it
PEAK runs the IIQE and MPFE but has never published a pass rate for any paper. Figures circulating online — “Paper 1 is 44%”, “Paper 5 around 53%” — trace back to no official source, and some refer to paper structures that no longer exist.
Official data may not exist, but difficulty can still be measured. The table below is drawn from 76,458 real practice answers across our five insurance apps.
| # | 卷別 | 練習正確率 | 最多人做錯嘅章節 | 作答樣本 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 卷一（Paper 1） | 65.4% | 香港保險業的結構 56.4% | 24,862 |
| 2 | 卷二（Paper 2） | 66% | 核保及保單措詞 64.1% | 12,869 |
| 3 | 卷五（Paper 5） | 66.8% | 投資相連長期保單簡介 57.5% | 4,581 |
| 4 | MPFE | 70.7% | 強積金制度簡介 61.4% | 9,224 |
| 5 | 卷三（Paper 3） | 75.4% | 人壽保險及年金的種類 72.6% | 24,922 |
3. Why the two tables cannot be compared directly
- The HKSI table is an exam pass rate — real candidates, one attempt, pass or fail.
- The IIQE table is practice accuracy — performance inside a practice app, where questions can be retried, explanations are visible and there is no time pressure. It therefore always reads higher than real exam performance.
One figure shows the size of that gap. For HKSI Paper 1 we happen to have both: an official pass rate of 51.9% against a practice accuracy of 65.6% (73,863 answers) — a 13.7 point difference. If your practice accuracy only just clears the pass mark, you are not yet safe.
Use the ordering within each table — which paper is relatively harder, which topic is relatively weaker — not absolute numbers across tables.
4. The useful signal is which topic drags you down
- HKSI Paper 1 — weakest topic “發牌及註冊與附屬法例” at 59.6% (15,134 answers).
- IIQE Paper 1 — weakest topic “香港保險業的結構” at 56.4%.
Topic names above follow the Chinese chapter labels used in our question banks; both examinations are set bilingually.
Most guides simply copy the syllabus weighting from the official handbook and tell you to focus on the highest-weighted chapters. But high weighting does not mean high loss. What deserves extra time is the intersection: chapters that are both heavily weighted and where candidates actually perform badly — something the handbook alone cannot tell you.
5. Detailed data by paper
- HKSI pass rates and difficulty ranking, all 17 papers
- HKSI Paper 1 detailed pass-rate data
- IIQE / MPFE difficulty ranking
- IIQE Paper 1 detailed difficulty data
Sources and method
- HKSI pass rates: HKSI Institute official pass-rate page, 2025-07 to 2026-06, snapshot 2026-07-28. Only a rolling 12-month window is published; we archive a snapshot monthly.
- Practice accuracy: real answer records in the PickMyQuiz apps — 76,458 for IIQE/MPFE and 77,803 for HKSI.
- Sample rules: topics with fewer than 100 answers are not published; papers under 3,000 answers are flagged as a small sample.
- Excluded: the “attempts” figure shown in-app is display-only and is not a real answering statistic; it is excluded throughout.
- Pass rates are reproduced from HKSI for reference only and may be revised at any time. Practice accuracy is not an exam pass rate.
