Last verified: 2026-07-08<\/p>\n
In July 2025, the SQE pass rate did something it had never done before. It fell to 41%. That was the overall SQE1 figure for the sitting, the lowest since the exam launched in November 2021, and it meant nearly six in ten candidates walked out of two five-hour papers with a fail. The number went out on the results date and, within days, it was a headline in the legal press.<\/p>\n
The story most people told about that number was wrong, though. The obvious reading was that the exam had suddenly got harder, that the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) had tightened the screws. That is not what happened. The pass standard on the SQE is fixed by a formal statistical method (Modified Angoff, which we’ll unpack later), so the bar didn’t move. What moved was the cohort. July 2025 carried the highest share of resitting candidates the exam had ever recorded, and the SRA’s own analysis judged that group weaker on the anchor questions it uses to compare sittings.<\/p>\n
So the honest version reads differently. The exam is hard. And who sits it in any given window swings the headline by ten points or more. Both things are true at once, and almost no page explains that clearly, which is exactly why a reader who typed “how hard is the SQE” tends to leave more confused than they arrived.<\/p>\n
Here’s what that reader usually wants and rarely gets in one place. Every official pass rate, SQE1 and SQE2, every sitting, sourced. A plain explanation of how the exam is actually scored, so the swings stop looking sinister. The resit number that quietly decides most candidates’ fate before they’ve even booked. And the question no UK page touches, because no UK page is written for this reader: how hard is the SQE for an Indian lawyer, or any foreign-qualified lawyer coming in on a common-law background?<\/p>\n
That last one matters more than it looks. Roughly a third of the candidate pool now sits outside the traditional England-and-Wales law-graduate route, and the pass-rate data by ethnicity and first language shows a gap of around twenty points. If you trained in Indian law and you’re reading a BPP or ULaw difficulty page, you’re reading a page that assumes you already know English property practice and solicitors’ accounts. You don’t. Nobody does until they study it. That single blind spot explains a lot of the gap, and it’s fixable.<\/p>\n
This is the page that puts the whole picture in one place. Every SRA-sourced number, the mechanics behind them, the resit cliff, and the layer built for lawyers qualifying into England and Wales from somewhere else.<\/p>\n\n
The SQE is genuinely hard. SQE1 first-attempt pass rates have ranged from 46% to 60%, falling to a record 41% overall in July 2025, and resitters pass at under 10%. SQE2 runs higher, 69% to 84% first-attempt, only because its cohort has already survived SQE1. The SRA calls the SQE “more demanding than the LPC.”<\/strong><\/p>\n The numbers below tell the full story. Jump to the master table for the raw data, or read straight through for how hard the SQE really is and why the figure swings the way it does.<\/p>\n\n
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