The eight CFP knowledge domains, and how many questions each is worth

CFP Board publishes the weightings. It does not publish how many of the 170 questions each domain gets.

That distinction matters more than it sounds, because converting one to the other is where most study guides quietly go wrong.

The eight domains

How the question counts were derived, and why yours may differ

CFP Board publishes weights, not counts. To get from 18% to a number of questions you multiply by 170, and that is where the arithmetic gets interesting.

Round each domain's percentage independently and the eight numbers sum to 172. Two questions that do not exist. Every downstream figure built on that - how many practice questions to write per domain, how to build a mock form, how to report your performance - inherits the error.

We use largest-remainder apportionment instead, which forces the eight counts to sum to exactly 170. It is the same method used to allocate legislative seats, and for the same reason: you cannot have a fractional one.

Where the marks concentrate

Retirement and Investment together are 35% - around 60 of 170 questions. That is a substantial share and it is the part most candidates coming from financial services already half-know, which creates a trap.

The trap is that familiarity in these two domains produces confidence that does not transfer. Estate planning and tax planning are where people from an investment background actually lose the exam, and the weightings are not so lopsided that you can afford to treat them as secondary.

Retirement Savings and Income Planning - 18%

• Retirement needs analysis
• Social Security and Medicare
• Qualified plans - types and rules
• IRAs, SEP and SIMPLE
• Distribution rules, RMDs and the early-distribution penalty
• Plan selection for a business owner
• Retirement income strategies and sequence risk

Plan selection for a business owner is the subtopic that generates the hardest exam questions, because it is where retirement planning collides with tax planning and the answer depends on facts from both.

Investment Planning - 17%

• Risk, return and the risk measures
• Time value of money applications
• Asset classes and vehicles
• Portfolio theory and diversification
• Asset allocation and rebalancing

Familiar territory for anyone with a CFA background, and the domain where over-preparation is most common. The CFP exam asks these questions in a planning context, not an analytical one - the calculation is rarely the difficulty.

The exam does not respect domain boundaries

This is the thing the blueprint cannot show you. A large share of the 170 questions are scenarios and case studies where a single client situation requires you to apply rules from three domains at once.

A question about a small business owner's retirement plan is simultaneously a retirement question, a tax question and often an estate question. It gets counted in one domain for blueprint purposes, and studying domain by domain in isolation prepares you badly for it.

Which is a genuine argument against organizing your revision strictly by weighting, even though the weightings are the best guide to where the marks are.

A note on sources

About half this syllabus is not a text. Where an exam is built on a statute - the Food Code, or Hong Kong's Securities and Futures Ordinance - every claim can be traced to a provision somebody read. Roughly half the CFP domains work that way: Professional Conduct and Regulation, parts of Retirement, Tax Planning, parts of Estate.

The other half is professional practice rather than codified rule. There is no statute that says how to conduct a retirement needs analysis. We flag which is which rather than pretending the whole syllabus has the same evidentiary status, because it does not.