Unofficial. Any practice question on this page is original material written by Assize Careers. SQE and SOLICITORS QUALIFYING EXAMINATION are trade marks of the Solicitors Regulation Authority, used here only to identify the assessment this page is about. Assize Careers is not authorised, accredited, endorsed or approved by the Solicitors Regulation Authority or by Kaplan SQE Limited, and nothing here is legal advice. Our practice questions are written by us in the published formats. They are not the test publishers' own questions, we do not reproduce any publisher's items or convert your result into their scores or percentiles, and Assize Careers is not affiliated with, authorised by or endorsed by any test publisher, assessment provider, regulator or law firm.
The SRA publishes its own free sample questions and the assessment specification, and both should be the first thing you read: everything official is on sqe.sra.org.uk.
What the two assessments are
SQE1 tests functioning legal knowledge through single-best-answer multiple-choice questions, split across two assessments. The first covers business law and practice, dispute resolution and contract law. The second covers property practice, wills and the administration of estates, solicitors accounts, land law, trusts, and criminal law and practice. The questions are set at the level of a competent newly qualified solicitor and are not designed to test specialist practice, which is the sentence most candidates should read twice: depth beyond that level is wasted preparation.
SQE2 tests practical legal skills through written and oral tasks rather than multiple choice. The syllabus for both is in the SRA's assessment specification, it is reviewed annually for changes in law and practice, and the current edition applies to assessments from 1 September 2026 and was updated in April 2026. We summarise it and link it. We do not reprint it, and a question bank that has not been re-mapped since the last annual review is out of date in a way its seller may not mention.
How it is marked
By a passing score the SRA publishes with each sitting. For both parts of SQE1 in January 2026 the passing score was 300, and the mean scores were 311.2 for the first functioning legal knowledge assessment and 304.3 for the second. For SQE2 in January 2026 the pass mark was also 300, with a mean of 330.4, a median of 331 and a range from 128 to 459.
What the published pass rates actually say
From the SRA's own statistical reports for the January 2026 sitting. In SQE1, 7,918 candidates sat both assessments and 53% passed; of the 6,760 candidates sitting for the first time, 58% passed. In SQE2, 1,141 candidates were graded and 80% passed, including 79% of the 873 first-attempt candidates.
The breakdown by undergraduate degree classification is the number worth knowing before you book. These are first-attempt candidates only. In SQE1, 79% of candidates with a first passed, 57% of those with a 2:1, 27% of those with a third and 20% of those with a 2:2. In SQE2 the same comparison runs 92%, 81% and 53% for firsts, 2:1s and 2:2s. Groups of fewer than ten candidates are suppressed by the SRA, so some cells in its reports are not published at all, and we do not estimate them.
Solicitor apprentices outperform the cohort as a whole: 1,377 of 1,896 passed SQE1, or 70.5%, and 824 of 887 passed SQE2, or 92.9%, against 66% and 85% for all candidates in the SRA's four-year figures published on 29 January 2026.
What predicts a pass, and what nobody can sell you
The SRA has analysed this itself. Prior education and attainment explains 23% of the variation in SQE1 performance, university ranking 11.9% and degree classification 10.6%. That leaves 67% of the variation unexplained by anything the SRA records. Nobody can sell you the other 67%.
The honest reading is that your degree class shifts the odds and does not set them, and that the largest single factor in the published analysis is unmeasured. Treat any provider implying otherwise with suspicion, including us.
The pass rate nobody publishes
The SRA publishes no SQE pass rate by training provider or by university attended. Any such figure in circulation is self-reported by the provider and unverified, so Assize Careers publishes none, and will not rank preparation providers on outcomes until there are verified figures to rank them on. If a course is advertised to you with a pass rate, ask who counted it, over which sittings, whether it includes resits and whether anyone outside the company has checked.
What it costs, and what that buys
SQE1 costs £2,006 and SQE2 £3,086, so £5,092 for one attempt at each. Both rose at the start of the 2026/27 academic year, from £1,934 and £2,974, and the new fees apply to anyone booking from October 2026. The total is our arithmetic: the SRA publishes the two fees and not the sum.
Those are the assessment fees only. Preparation courses, materials and resits are all extra and none of them is regulated — and a resit is the whole assessment fee again, not a reduced one. The fee has risen in each of the last two years, so check the current one on the SRA's own fees page before you book rather than trusting any figure, including ours.
Where the SQE now sits among the routes
In the twelve months to August 2026, 9,384 solicitors were admitted in England and Wales: 4,800 through the Legal Practice Course and a period of recognised training, which is 51%, and 4,050 through the SQE, which is 43%. The year before, 6,059 of 9,582 came through the LPC route and 3,042 through the SQE. The SQE's share rose by 11 percentage points in a single year, and the transitional route is closing behind it. For the destination all of this leads to, there are 181,654 people on the roll recorded as SRA-regulated solicitors.
Two single-best-answer questions, written by us
In the published SQE1 style: a short factual stem, one best answer, and distractors that are each wrong for a stateable reason. Ours, not the SRA's, and no sample question of the SRA's is reproduced on this page.
A shop displays a laptop on a shelf with a label reading £400. A customer takes the laptop to the till. The assistant says the label is a mistake, that the price is £500, and declines to sell it at £400. Which of the following best describes the position?
- The display was an offer which the customer accepted by taking the laptop to the till, so the shop must sell at £400.
- The display was an invitation to treat, so no contract has been formed and the shop is not obliged to sell at £400.
- A contract was formed when the customer selected the laptop, but the shop may rescind it for mistake.
- The display was a unilateral offer which the customer accepted by performance, so the shop must sell at £400.
Answer and explanation
B. The display of goods with a price is generally treated as an invitation to treat rather than an offer. The offer is made by the customer at the till and the shop is free to accept or refuse it, so no contract exists and nothing obliges the shop to sell at the labelled price.
A is the attractive wrong answer because it matches how shopping feels and because consumers are often told the opposite in general advice. It inverts who offers and who accepts. C fails at the first step: there is no contract to rescind, so mistake never arises, and a question that tempts you into a remedy for a contract that was never formed is testing whether you check formation first. D does not fit the facts either, because nothing in them suggests the shop promised to sell to anyone who performed an act.
This rationale is ours. It is not endorsed by the Solicitors Regulation Authority or by Kaplan SQE Limited.
A client tells a solicitor that a supplier breached a written contract for the supply of goods on 1 June 2020, causing the client a loss. The contract is not executed as a deed, the client has never issued proceedings, and today is 12 October 2026. Which of the following is correct?
- The limitation period is six years from the date of the breach, so it expired on 1 June 2026.
- The limitation period is six years from the date the client first knew of the loss, so it has not yet expired.
- The limitation period is twelve years from the date of the breach, so it has not yet expired.
- There is no limitation period for a claim in contract, but the court may strike the claim out for delay.
Answer and explanation
A. For an action founded on simple contract, section 5 of the Limitation Act 1980 gives six years from the date on which the cause of action accrued, and in contract that is the date of the breach, not the date of the loss or of its discovery. Six years from 1 June 2020 expired on 1 June 2026, before today.
B is the distractor to watch, because a date-of-knowledge rule does exist in English limitation law, but for other claims: personal injury and latent damage, not simple contract. C is the period for an action on a specialty, which includes a contract executed as a deed, and the stem tells you this contract is not one. D is simply wrong, and is included because a candidate who cannot remember the period sometimes reaches for case management instead of the statute.
This rationale is ours. It is not endorsed by the Solicitors Regulation Authority or by Kaplan SQE Limited.
The question bank, and why it is not on sale yet
SQE1 question practice is listed on our pricing page as part of Pro and is marked as in preparation. It is not built yet, and it is not charged for. Two reasons, and both are ours to fix rather than yours to absorb.
- Original items take time to write properly. Every question has to be authored against the current specification, checked against the law as it stands and recorded with its author and date. A bank built faster than that is a bank built out of somebody else's questions.
- The licence position on the SRA's own sample questions is unresolved. The permission to use them in training material sits in the terms of the SQE website, and that page is behind a protection layer we could not read. Until a person has read it in a browser and confirmed what it permits, we will not publish the SRA's sample questions here, even though they are the only pre-tested questions from a live UK legal assessment that anyone could lawfully republish at all.
When the bank opens it will be original items mapped to the subject areas in the specification, with the mapping dated, and re-mapped after each annual review. If the SRA's sample questions ever appear alongside them, they will carry the SRA's own required wording and be clearly marked as the SRA's and not ours.
Assize Careers is not a regulator, professional body, university, law school or official careers service, and it is not part of or endorsed by one. Nothing on this site is legal advice.