How to pass SQE1

How long to study for SQE1, in hours and in months

Plan for roughly 300 to 500 hours of preparation for SQE1, spread across four to eight months. That is a working range rather than a rule, and where you sit inside it depends on two things: how much of the content you already have, and how much of your week you can actually give it.

The hours are the honest number. The months are the number that determines whether you pass, because the same 400 hours crammed into eight weeks does far less for you than the same 400 hours spread over six months. SQE1 is a recall exam across thirteen subject areas, and recall is built by revisiting material after you have partly forgotten it. You cannot compress that. You can only start earlier.

Work out your own figure from your week, not from a forum post. If you can give ten hours a week, 400 hours is forty weeks and you need most of a year. If you can give twenty five hours a week because you are studying full time, the same total lands inside four months. Both are normal. What is not survivable is deciding the total first and then discovering in month five that your week cannot carry it.

• Recent law graduate, studying full time. Nearer 300 hours over four to five months. You are consolidating and drilling more than learning from scratch.
• Non law background, studying full time. Nearer 500 hours over six months. Two subjects will be entirely new and the vocabulary costs you time before the law does.
• Working full time, any background. Same hours, longer calendar. Six to nine months at eight to twelve hours a week is a more realistic shape than four months of heroics.
• Resitting one paper. Far less, but not proportionally less. The subjects you passed decay while you focus on the ones you did not.

Build the plan backwards from the sitting date

Fix the exam date first, then work back. Planning forwards from today produces a plan that runs out of road, because the content expands to fill whatever time you give it and the mocks get squeezed into the last fortnight, which is exactly when they are least useful.

Start at the sitting and place the fixed points in reverse. The final week is consolidation and rest, not new material. The four weeks before that are mock exams and targeted repair. Before that is your main content run, and it should finish with a fortnight of slack in it, because it will overrun.

One date most candidates miss entirely: the examinable law cut-off for your sitting, which falls several months before the exam itself. Law that changes after that cut-off is not examinable in your sitting, so material published after it can actively mislead you. Confirm the cut-off date for your own sitting on the SRA's published assessment information before you buy anything. Checked 9 September 2026.

• Week of the exam. Light review of your own error log only. No new subjects, no new sources.
• Final four to six weeks. One full timed mock a week, each followed by two or three days repairing what it exposed.
• Middle block. Content plus daily mixed question practice. Every subject touched every week, not once and then abandoned.
• First block. The two hardest or least familiar subjects, while you still have the time to be slow at them.
• Before any of it. Book the sitting, and note the examinable law cut-off date for it.

Interleave subjects instead of blocking them

Blocking means finishing Contract before you start Tort. It feels efficient, it produces a satisfying sense of mastery, and it is the single most common structural mistake in SQE1 preparation.

The problem is that blocking lets you answer questions without identifying the subject first. When you have spent a week in Trusts, every question in front of you is a trusts question, so you never practise the thing the exam actually asks: reading a client scenario cold and working out what area of law it belongs to before you can even begin. On the day, the paper jumps from a trust to a police interview to a completion statement with no warning, and candidates who blocked find their apparent mastery does not transfer.

Interleaving feels worse and works better. Mixing subjects within a single session makes each question harder, your accuracy in practice drops, and the discomfort is the point: you are paying in practice for the retrieval work you would otherwise have to do for the first time in the exam hall. Keep a subject focus for learning new material if you like, but make your question practice mixed from early on.

• Learn new material in a subject block if that helps, but never practise questions that way for long
• Every practice set should span at least three or four subjects
• Expect your practice accuracy to fall when you switch to mixed sets. That is the method working, not you regressing
• Ethics and Professional Conduct is examined inside other subjects, so it has to be interleaved by definition
• Track accuracy per subject inside mixed sets, since that is the number that predicts the exam

Spaced repetition, and how often to actually review

Review material on expanding intervals: about one day after you first learn it, then three days, then a week, then a fortnight, then a month. When you get something wrong, drop it back to a short interval and let it climb again.

The mechanism matters more than the exact numbers. Recall is strengthened by retrieving something when it has partly faded, not by rereading it while it is still fresh. Reviewing too soon feels productive and does almost nothing. Reviewing too late means relearning from scratch. The intervals above aim at the useful middle, and any schedule that expands after a success and contracts after a failure will do the job.

Two practical points. First, review by answering questions, not by rereading notes: rereading produces the feeling of knowing without the ability to retrieve. Second, keep it daily. Twenty to thirty minutes of review every day beats a three hour review session at the weekend, because the whole point is to catch material at the moment it is starting to fade rather than long after.

• First review one day after learning, then three days, a week, a fortnight, a month
• Reset to a short interval whenever you get an item wrong
• Always review by retrieving, never by rereading
• Twenty to thirty minutes daily beats one long weekly session
• In the last month, review is your error log plus mock repair, not the whole syllabus again

The 102 seconds problem

Each SQE1 session is 90 questions in 153 minutes. That is 1 minute 42 seconds per question, and it is the constraint that catches out people who knew the material.

A long client scenario can take thirty seconds to read before you have thought about anything. Two of the five options will look defensible. If you give that question three minutes because you want to be sure, you have borrowed the time from a question later in the paper that you would have got right in forty seconds. The candidates who run out of time rarely do so because they were slow throughout. They do so because they spent five minutes each on four questions they were never going to resolve.

So train the rhythm rather than trusting it will appear. Practise with a 102 second budget until the feel of it is automatic, and practise the decision to move on, which is a separate skill from answering. Mark and leave. An unanswered question scores nothing and there is no negative marking, so a guess costs you nothing and an abandoned question costs you a mark.

• 90 questions, 153 minutes, 102 seconds each, per session
• Aim to be at question 45 by the halfway point, and check once, not constantly
• If a question is unresolved at three minutes, answer it anyway, flag it and move
• No negative marking means never leaving a blank
• Time per subject against accuracy tells you more than accuracy alone. Being right on Trusts but four minutes a question is a different problem from being wrong

The skill that decides it: best answer versus defensible answer

SQE1 questions give you five options and ask for the single best answer, not the only correct one. Usually two options are defensible and one of them is better. Learning to see the difference is the highest value skill in the whole preparation, and it is one almost nobody practises deliberately.

The difference is always made by a fact in the scenario. Something in the stem, often a date, a sum, a relationship or a sequence of events, makes one defensible answer better than the other. Examiners construct questions around that discriminator, so a wrong answer is usually not a gap in your legal knowledge but a fact you skimmed past.

Practise it directly. When you get a question wrong, do not stop at reading why the right answer is right. Find the option you chose, work out whether it was simply wrong or was the second best answer, and name the one fact that separates them. If you find you repeatedly take the second best answer, that is a reading problem rather than a knowledge problem, and more revision will not fix it.

• Read the final sentence of the question first, then the scenario, so you know what you are looking for
• Narrow to two, then hunt for the fact that separates them rather than rereading the law
• After every miss, decide whether your answer was wrong or merely second best
• Repeatedly taking the second best answer means drill the reading, not the subject
• Watch for the qualifiers. Best, most likely and first are not decoration, they are the question

Do you need a prep course

No, and plenty of people pass without one. What you do need is the thing a course happens to supply: a structure, a schedule and some way of finding out what you do not know before results day.

A course is worth its price if you know you will not build that yourself, if two of the subjects are entirely new to you, or if your employer is paying. It is poor value if you already have the content, have a working plan and mostly need volume of practice, because that is the cheapest part of the market and the part a course marks up hardest.

Be honest about which of those you are. The route gives you no feedback at all until results day, so if you go without a course, the substitute you must build is not more reading. It is a steady supply of questions in the exam's format, with explanations you actually read, and a record of your own error patterns.

• A course buys structure and deadlines, not exclusive content
• Question volume with real explanations is the part you cannot skip either way
• Self study needs a written plan with dates in it, or it silently becomes rereading
• Compare what you would be paying per hour of contact against what you would be paying for practice

Where to go next

If you have not booked yet, do that before you plan anything, because the sitting date is the fixed point everything else hangs off.

Then get the format clear in your head, and start doing questions much earlier than feels comfortable. Practice is not the last stage of preparation. It is how the preparation works.

• The SQE1 exam format, the papers, the sessions and how single best answer marking works
• Free SQE1 practice questions, real format questions with full explanations
• SQE1 pass rates, what the published figures are and what they do and do not tell you
• What to expect on SQE1 exam day, the shape of the day, what to bring and the admin rules
• What is the SQE, the overview if you are at the very start