How much do CFA charterholders earn?

The CFA Institute Compensation Study 2024 reports a median 2023 total compensation of $115,000 for portfolio managers at intermediate professional level. That figure describes charterholders; it does not isolate what the charter contributed, because everyone counted in it holds one.

Does the CFA charter increase your salary?

There is no reliable evidence that it raises pay in a job you already hold. Within a single role and seniority band, all of them charterholders, experience alone moves median pay by 59% and region by 76%, which is larger than any premium usually attributed to the charter.

How many people who start the CFA actually finish?

CFA Institute does not publish a completion rate. Applying a decade of published pass rates to 100 first-attempt Level I candidates leaves roughly 9 through all three levels; retakes raise that, and candidates who stop after passing a level lower it.

How much does the CFA cost in total?

Registration is roughly $3,500 if you register early for every level and pass each first time, with a full fee for every retake. The larger cost is time: about 300 hours per level on CFA Institute's own guidance, so around 900 hours minimum.

Is the CFA better than an MBA?

They do different jobs. The charter is narrow and technical and signals investment expertise; an MBA is broad and much of its value is the network and the recruiting pipeline. If you want a specific investment role that screens for the charter, the charter is the cheaper route to it.

Is the CFA Exam Worth It?

Q: Is the CFA worth it if I don't work in finance?

Usually not on its own. CFA Institute's own member data shows the charter working hardest at the point of entry and as a differentiator between candidates, and it still requires 4,000 hours of qualified work experience before you can hold it.

The best number that exists

You came here for a number, so here is the best one that exists. CFA Institute surveyed its members in 2024 and published what they earn. The median total compensation for 2023 for a portfolio manager at the intermediate professional level, roughly where a charterholder sits five to ten years in, is $115,000.

That is a real number from a real survey, and it is the last one on this page you should take at face value. Every person counted in it holds the charter. So it tells you what charterholders earn. It does not tell you what the charter earned them, and those are different questions with different answers.

What actually moves the number

Hold everything still. Same job function, same seniority band, same credential: portfolio managers at intermediate level, every one of them a charterholder. Now change only how long they have been working, and then only where they work.

Same job, same seniority, all charterholders: pay by experience

Median total compensation for 2023. The only thing changing is years in the industry.

0 to less than 5 years
n = 195

$96,400

5 to less than 10 years
n = 349

$115,000

10 to less than 20 years
n = 129

$153,000

Experience alone moves the median by 59%, among people who all already hold the charter.

Medians for 2023 total compensation, portfolio management, intermediate professional (n = 689), as reported in the CFA Institute Compensation Study 2024, quoted here to examine what the figures do and do not show. The study and its data are CFA Institute's.

Same job, same seniority, all charterholders: pay by region

Median total compensation for 2023, in US dollars, for the same intermediate professional portfolio managers.

Americas
n = 403

$130,500

EMEA
n = 202

$103,670

APAC
n = 84

$74,040

Where you work moves the median by 76%, again among people who all hold the charter.

Two things that have nothing to do with the charter swing pay by 59% and 76% inside a single job title. Any headline premium smaller than that is inside the noise of who happens to be in each group.

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Why the quoted premiums are unreliable

Search this question and you will be told charterholders earn 18% to 53% more, or 10% to 25% more, or 57% more than a Level I candidate. The figures contradict each other, most name no comparison group, and most sit on sites selling exam preparation.

Follow them back and they lead to the same CFA Institute survey quoted at the top of this page. It went to CFA Institute members, 17,358 usable replies came back, and that was an 8.6% response rate. Of those replies, 16,877 were charterholders and 481 were not.

The comparison group is 2.8% of a self-selected sample, and even those people are CFA Institute members. A survey shaped like that cannot weigh the charter against the wider industry, because the wider industry is not in it.

Common mistake: the "57% more than a Level I candidate" figure. A Level I candidate and a charterholder are usually the same person four years apart. The experience chart above already showed you what four to ten years does on its own.

What the evidence can establish

One study tries to isolate the charter's effect rather than describe the people who hold it. Kang, Li and Su, in the Financial Analysts Journal in 2018, looked at roughly 9,900 US sell-side equity analysts between 1993 and 2015, about a third of them charterholders, and adjusted for the fact that people who sit the exams already differ from people who do not.

Charterholders' stock recommendations performed better, by about 4.7% a year in abnormal returns, and the charter raised the probability of making Institutional Investor's All-America Research Team by around two percentage points, a relative increase of roughly a fifth.

Read the limits as carefully as the result. It covers US sell-side research, so it says nothing about the buy side, compliance, corporate finance, private banking, or anywhere outside the US. It measures analyst output and recognition. It does not measure anyone's salary. And it appeared in a journal owned by CFA Institute, which does not make it wrong but is worth knowing. The paper is Assessing the Worth of the CFA Program. A page telling you to check the source owes you the source.

What each source can and cannot show
Source	Claim	Establishes
A compensation survey of members	Charterholders report a median of $115,000 in this role.	No: that the charter produced that figure
A prep provider's salary page	Charterholders earn 18% to 53% more.	No: the ranges contradict each other and name no comparison group
Kang, Li and Su (2018)	Charterholders' recommendations performed better and they were likelier to make the All-America Research Team.	Yes: the charter tracks better analyst output in US sell-side research, after adjusting for ability
The job posting you want to answer	CFA charter required, or meaningful progress towards it.	Yes: this specific door is gated, which is the only question that matters to you

What CFA Institute's own data shows

In 2024 CFA Institute asked its members, for the first time, what the charter had actually done for their careers. The answers are not about money.

42%

of entry-level members said pursuing the charter helped them secure their first job in the investment industry

37%

across all seniority levels said it helped them enter the industry at all

~80%

agreed it improved their ability to compete with other candidates, across regions and seniority levels

When CFA Institute set out to demonstrate the charter's value, the evidence it produced was about getting in and standing out, not about being paid more. That is the honest case for the charter, and it is a good one.

What it really costs

The fees are the small number. CFA Institute's guidance is about 300 hours of study per level, so the minimum path is roughly 900 hours, and failing a level earns you no discount on the next attempt: it costs you the whole level again.

The price of the charter, in hours

CFA Institute's guidance is about 300 hours per level; most candidates report needing more.

Through Level I

~300 h

Through Level II
Widely reported as the hardest

~600 h

Through Level III
Minimum path, all first attempts

~900 h

With one failure anywhere
Plus 6 to 12 months of waiting

~1,200 h

Roughly six months of full-time work, if you pass all three at the first attempt.

Hours are CFA Institute guidance; the failure row is CFAQuiz arithmetic.

The other costs, before you count the hours
Registration, everything early and first time	Roughly $3,500 in total
Each retake	Another registration fee, in full
Typical time to complete	Three to four years
After passing Level III	4,000 hours of qualified work experience before you hold the charter

Fees change every cycle and depend on how early you register, so treat any figure on a third-party site, this one included, as approximate and check CFA Institute for the current schedule. Passing Level III does not make you a charterholder: the work experience requirement runs alongside, and if your job does not qualify, the exams alone do not finish the job.

All of it has to be weighed against your honest chance of finishing, which is lower than most people assume. Pass rates over the last decade have run near 40% at Level I, 45% at Level II and 50% at Level III; in August 2026 they were 43% at Level I (28,145 candidates) and 45% at Level II (10,004). Survivable one at a time. Multiplied, not.

Out of 100 candidates who sit Level I

First-attempt arithmetic on a decade of published pass rates. Retakes lift the final figure; people who pass a level and never sit the next one pull it back down.

Sit Level I
The starting cohort

100

Pass Level I
About 40%

Pass Level II
About 45% of those who sit it

Pass Level III
About 50%, still needs work experience

Survivable one at a time. Multiplied, not.

Modelled, not a published completion rate.

The expected value of starting is not the value of the charter. It is the value of the charter multiplied by your honest chance of finishing, minus 900 hours you spend either way. Anyone selling you this decision on a salary figure has quietly assumed you are in the last bar.

How to decide, in four questions

Ignore the averages. Four questions settle this faster than any comparison table.

1Do the jobs you want ask for it?

Open twenty real postings for the role you are aiming at and count. This single check beats every statistic on this page, because it measures your market instead of a global average.

2Are you in the industry, or trying to get in?

CFA Institute's own data says the charter is strongest at the point of entry and as a differentiator between candidates. It is a weak substitute for experience if you are far outside the field.

3Will your employer pay, and give you study leave?

Support changes both the cost and your odds of finishing, which are the two terms in the whole calculation.

4Can you find 300 hours, three times?

Without wrecking something else. The people who regret it are rarely the ones who failed an exam. They are the ones who spent two years half-studying and never sat Level II.

The one-line version: if you want a role that screens for the charter and you are already near that world, it is one of the better-value credentials in finance. If you are hoping it will raise the salary of a job you already have, the evidence for that is much thinner than the internet suggests.

If you have decided to start, the next honest question is what actually predicts passing Level I. You can also try ten free questions per topic to see what the exam asks before you pay anyone anything.

Is the CFA exam worth it?