SQE Syllabus: The Complete Guide to What's on the Exam 2026 July

The SQE syllabus is the official blueprint for everything you need to know to become a qualified solicitor in England and Wales. Introduced by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) in September 2021, the Solicitors Qualifying Examination replaced the old LPC and QLTS pathways with a single, standardized assessment that every aspiring solicitor must pass. Understanding the full scope of the sqe syllabus is the single most important step you can take before you begin preparing, because the exam tests an enormous breadth of legal knowledge across two distinct stages with very different formats and skill demands.

SQE1 focuses on Functioning Legal Knowledge (FLK) — the substantive law that underpins everyday legal practice. It is delivered as two computer-based multiple-choice papers, each containing 180 questions, and candidates must demonstrate competence across eleven subject areas ranging from business law and criminal practice to wills and the SRA's own Code of Conduct. The sheer volume of testable material in SQE1 surprises most first-time candidates, which is why a structured, topic-by-topic approach to the syllabus is essential from day one of your preparation.

SQE2 shifts the emphasis from knowledge recall to practical legal skills. Instead of answering multiple-choice questions about the law in the abstract, candidates must apply that knowledge to realistic client scenarios through a series of oral and written assessments covering client interviewing, advocacy, legal research, legal writing, and case analysis. The SQE2 assessment is deliberately designed to mirror the kind of tasks a trainee solicitor would be expected to handle in the first weeks of a qualifying work experience placement.

One feature that distinguishes the SQE from earlier qualification routes is its accessibility. Candidates do not need to have completed a qualifying law degree or a Graduate Diploma in Law to sit the exam, although they must hold a degree of some kind. This openness means that the syllabus has to be fully self-contained — the SRA cannot assume any prior legal training, so the assessments are benchmarked to the standard of a competent day-one solicitor rather than an academic specialist in any particular field.

For US-based international students and foreign-qualified lawyers who want to practise in England and Wales, the SQE represents a faster and more affordable route to qualification than the old QLTS. However, the syllabus is rooted exclusively in English and Welsh law, which means candidates with a US JD must undertake a significant amount of reskilling in areas such as land law, equity and trusts, and the English civil and criminal procedure rules.

Preparation timelines vary widely depending on your starting point. A candidate with a fresh English law degree might need six to nine months of dedicated study, while a foreign-qualified lawyer converting from a different jurisdiction could need twelve to eighteen months. Regardless of background, every candidate benefits from the same core strategy: map the entire SQE syllabus early, identify your weakest subject areas, and then systematically build competence through a combination of substantive study and timed practice questions under exam conditions.

This guide walks you through every section of the SQE syllabus in detail. You will find a breakdown of all eleven SQE1 subject areas, an explanation of the five SQE2 skill categories, a realistic study schedule, and actionable tips for each stage of preparation. Whether you are just beginning to research the exam or are already deep into your revision, this resource will help you approach the SQE syllabus with confidence and clarity.

SQE1 is divided into two Functioning Legal Knowledge papers, each containing 180 single-best-answer multiple-choice questions. FLK1 and FLK2 are sat on separate days, and each paper lasts two and a half hours, giving you roughly 50 seconds per question. Both papers draw from the same pool of eleven subject areas, but the SRA has not published a precise breakdown of how many questions come from each subject — which means every topic must be treated as a serious exam priority and no area can be safely skipped.

Business Law and Practice is consistently one of the highest-weighted subjects on SQE1. It covers company formation and constitution, partnership law, business finance, taxation of businesses, and the employment law issues that arise in commercial transactions. Candidates who lack a commercial law background often underestimate how technical this subject becomes, particularly around corporation tax, capital gains, and the Bribery Act provisions that apply to corporate entities operating across multiple jurisdictions.

Dispute Resolution covers both civil and commercial litigation under the Civil Procedure Rules 1998. You need to understand pre-action protocols, the three tracks (small claims, fast track, and multi-track), interim applications, costs management, and enforcement of judgments. The SQE tests this subject in a highly practical way — questions frequently present a scenario at a specific procedural stage and ask you to identify the correct next step, the applicable time limit, or the likely costs consequence of a particular strategic choice.

Criminal Law and Practice is another major SQE1 component. It requires detailed knowledge of substantive criminal offences (including theft, fraud, assault, homicide, and driving offences), as well as the procedural rules governing police powers, bail, mode of trial, and sentencing. Candidates must be comfortable moving between the Magistrates' Court and Crown Court contexts and must understand how the Sentencing Council guidelines interact with judicial discretion in real cases.

Real Property and Land Law tests the full range of land law principles: freehold and leasehold estates, registered and unregistered title, easements, covenants, mortgages, and adverse possession. For candidates from US law backgrounds, English land law can feel particularly unfamiliar because of its reliance on equity, the distinction between legal and equitable interests, and the role of the Land Registry. Allocate generous revision time here, especially to the rules on overriding interests under the Land Registration Act 2002.

Wills and the Administration of Estates covers testamentary capacity, the formal requirements for a valid will, intestacy rules, personal representatives, inheritance tax at a basic level, and the rights of disappointed beneficiaries under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975. This subject rewards methodical learners because it has a relatively stable body of rules with predictable exam question patterns — if you memorise the intestacy hierarchy and the rules on gifts to witnesses, you can reliably pick up marks in this area.

The remaining SQE1 subjects — Solicitors Accounts, the SRA Standards and Regulations, and the Legal System of England and Wales — are sometimes underestimated by candidates who focus heavily on substantive law. Solicitors Accounts in particular is a frequent source of avoidable losses because its rules around client money, office money, and the three-way reconciliation are highly specific and technical. Treat these regulatory subjects with the same rigour you apply to core black-letter law, and you will avoid one of the most common SQE1 pitfalls.

Approaching the SQE1 syllabus subject by subject is the most effective revision strategy for the majority of candidates. Rather than jumping between topics based on what appears in practice question banks, experienced SQE tutors recommend spending a dedicated block of one to two weeks on each of the eleven subject areas before moving into a mixed-practice phase. This approach builds deep retrieval pathways for each subject before the interference of cross-subject mixing can disrupt your recall accuracy under timed conditions.

Business Law and Practice deserves the longest dedicated block — typically three to four weeks for candidates without a commercial background. Begin with company law (the Companies Act 2006 is the core statute), then move to partnerships and LLPs, followed by business taxation. Tax questions in SQE1 are not as technically deep as ACCA-level content, but they do require you to understand income tax on profits, corporation tax on chargeable gains, VAT registration thresholds, and the basics of stamp duty land tax, particularly as it applies to commercial property transactions.

For Contract Law and Tort, most English law graduates will already have a solid foundation from their undergraduate studies. The SQE tests these subjects at a practical application level rather than an academic theory level, which means the emphasis is on identifying which cause of action applies in a given set of facts, what the claimant must prove at each element, and what defences or limiting principles the defendant can invoke. Pay particular attention to the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 and the Consumer Rights Act 2015 — both are heavily tested in commercial and consumer dispute scenarios.

Equity and Trusts is one of the subjects that consistently trips up international candidates and those who studied law in Scotland or overseas. The distinction between legal and equitable ownership, the three certainties for express trust creation, the rules on constitution of trusts, and the remedies available in equity (constructive trusts, resulting trusts, proprietary estoppel) all require careful study. The SQE1 questions in this area often turn on a single element of the trust creation rules or a specific limitation on tracing in equity, so precision matters far more than general familiarity.

Criminal Law and Practice rewards candidates who enjoy factual analysis. The SQE tests your ability to identify the correct offence from a set of facts, apply the relevant mens rea standard (intention, recklessness, or negligence depending on the offence), and determine the appropriate court, bail position, and likely sentence range.

Build a quick-reference chart of the major offences tested — theft, burglary, robbery, fraud, assault, GBH, manslaughter, murder, and the common driving offences — with the actus reus, mens rea, and mode of trial for each. This chart will save you significant time during revision and serve as a powerful last-minute revision tool in the week before your SQE1 sitting.

Solicitors Accounts is the subject where marks are most easily lost through carelessness and most easily recovered through targeted practice. The SRA Accounts Rules 2019 govern every aspect of how solicitors handle client money, and SQE1 questions in this area typically present a series of transactions and ask you to identify whether money should be held in the client account or the office account, how a specific transaction should be recorded, or whether a particular action constitutes a breach of the Accounts Rules.

Work through the SRA's own illustrative scenarios alongside your course materials, and practise the three-way reconciliation calculation until it becomes automatic.

The SRA Standards and Regulations subject covers the Code of Conduct for Solicitors, the Code of Conduct for Firms, the SQE Assessment Regulations, and the disciplinary framework. Questions in this area often present ethical dilemmas — a conflict of interest, a confidentiality breach, a situation involving a vulnerable client — and ask you to identify the solicitor's obligations and the correct course of action. The SRA's published guidance documents and ethics scenarios are an underused free resource that maps directly onto the types of scenarios tested in FLK1 and FLK2.

Understanding the SQE pass rate and difficulty level is essential for calibrating your preparation effort and managing your expectations realistically. The SRA publishes cohort-level pass rate data after each exam window, and the numbers are consistently sobering: SQE1 pass rates have typically ranged between 50% and 60% since the exam launched in 2021, while SQE2 pass rates have been somewhat higher, often in the 65%–75% range, though they fluctuate by cohort. These figures suggest that roughly one in two candidates who sit SQE1 will not pass on their first attempt.

Several factors contribute to the relatively high failure rate on SQE1. The breadth of the syllabus is the most commonly cited challenge — eleven subject areas covering thousands of individual legal rules and principles is an enormous amount of material to hold simultaneously at the level of precision required to answer single-best-answer multiple-choice questions correctly under time pressure. Candidates who underestimate the volume of content and begin intensive revision too late are the most common cohort in the fail group.

Time management within the exam itself is another critical factor. With 180 questions to answer in 150 minutes, you have exactly 50 seconds per question. Many candidates report running out of time on their first sitting because they spent too long on difficult questions at the expense of easier marks elsewhere in the paper. The recommended strategy is to answer every question in order, flag any that require more thought, and use the remaining time to return to flagged questions — never leaving any question blank, since there is no negative marking on SQE1.

The SQE2 difficulty profile is different in character. The assessment is less about breadth and more about depth of practical skill — can you actually conduct a professional client interview, draft a coherent legal letter, and deliver a convincing oral submission? Many candidates who are academically strong find SQE2 more challenging than expected because it requires a different kind of preparation: deliberate practice of real-world lawyering tasks under time constraints, rather than the knowledge-recall focus that dominates SQE1 revision.

Candidates who have completed qualifying work experience (QWE) before sitting SQE2 consistently outperform those who sit the assessment without prior work experience. The SRA requires a minimum of two years of QWE as a condition of admission to the roll of solicitors, but there is no requirement to complete QWE before sitting either SQE1 or SQE2. In practice, however, candidates who can draw on real workplace experience when constructing their advocacy submissions and legal research outputs perform noticeably better in oral assessments.

Resit policies allow candidates to retake either SQE1 paper or any SQE2 assessment up to a maximum of three additional attempts (four total). Candidates who fail must wait for the next available exam window before resitting, which means that a failure in the autumn window typically pushes the resit to the following spring. Understanding the resit structure matters for financial planning as much as for academic planning — each SQE1 sitting costs around £1,600 and each SQE2 sitting costs around £2,422 as of 2024, so multiple resits represent a significant financial burden that careful first-attempt preparation can help avoid.

For candidates who want a detailed comparison of the SQE with alternative qualification routes still available to some candidates, including the BPTC for barristers and the legacy LPC for those who began training before the transition, the key difference lies in the flexibility of the SQE pathway combined with its stricter standardisation. The SQE does not allow candidates to specialise at the qualifying stage — everyone sits the same exam — which is either a strength or a weakness depending on your perspective and career goals.

Building an effective SQE study schedule requires balancing three competing demands: covering the full breadth of the syllabus, deepening your understanding of the subjects where you are weakest, and maintaining consistent practice under timed exam conditions throughout your preparation period. Most successful candidates allocate between 400 and 600 hours of total preparation time for SQE1, spread across a period of six to twelve months depending on their prior legal knowledge and weekly study availability.

The first phase of any SQE study plan should be a diagnostic audit. Before committing to a fixed revision schedule, work through a representative sample of past or mock questions across all eleven SQE1 subject areas and record your accuracy rate for each. This audit reveals your true starting point rather than your perceived starting point, which can be very different — many candidates discover that subjects they feel confident about produce poor diagnostic results, while subjects they dreaded turn out to be more accessible than expected under exam conditions.

During the intensive content phase, which typically runs for the first three to four months of a six-month plan, the focus should be on building a complete and accurate understanding of the law in each subject area. This means engaging with a primary study resource (a structured course, a textbook, or a combination of both) rather than jumping straight into practice questions. Practice questions are most valuable once you have a foundation in place — using them as a primary learning tool at the start of preparation leads to surface-level pattern recognition rather than genuine legal understanding.

The mixed-practice phase, which should occupy the final two to three months before your SQE1 sitting, is where you consolidate and refine under pressure. During this phase, shift the majority of your daily study time to timed question practice, simulate full exam sittings at least twice, and use your error log to identify residual knowledge gaps that need targeted review. An error log is simply a record of every question you answered incorrectly, organized by subject and topic, that you review and retest on a weekly basis until the error rate for each topic drops below 20%.

For SQE2, preparation should begin at least three to four months before your assessment date and should be structured around skill-building rather than knowledge acquisition. Produce a minimum of ten full legal writing tasks (letters, memos, attendance notes, drafted documents) and review each one critically against the SRA's published assessment criteria. Record at least five advocacy practice sessions and watch them back — most candidates are surprised by how their verbal habits, pacing, and response to judicial questions look from the outside.

Sleep, exercise, and deliberate rest are not optional extras in a serious SQE preparation plan — they are performance variables that directly affect your ability to recall and apply legal knowledge under exam pressure. Cognitive performance research consistently shows that distributed practice (shorter, more frequent study sessions) produces better long-term retention than massed practice (marathon study sessions with few breaks). Aim for sessions of 60 to 90 minutes with a short break between them, and protect at least one full rest day per week throughout your preparation period.

In the final two weeks before your SQE1 sitting, resist the temptation to introduce new material. The risk of confusing half-understood new content with well-established knowledge is higher than the potential benefit of covering one more topic. Instead, focus entirely on reviewing your error log, completing two or three final timed mock sittings, and consolidating your quick-reference charts for the highest-risk topics — Solicitors Accounts rules, criminal offence elements, and the civil procedure time limits that appear most frequently in Dispute Resolution questions.