How Many Exams Are There in ACCA? Levels & Exemptions

Right, let's lay out the full picture first. The ACCA Course has 13 exams total, and yeah, they do get harder as you climb the three levels. Here's what that looks like:

Now here's the catch worth knowing early , that 13 is basically the worst-case scenario. It's what you'd be looking at only if you had absolutely nothing in your academic background that ACCA could give you credit for. Most people aren't in that boat, though. If you've got a relevant degree or some work experience behind you, your ACCA Exemptions will probably knock a few papers off before you even sit your first exam. We'll get into that properly in a bit.

Paper codes like "SBL" or "AA" sound like alphabet soup until someone actually tells you what's inside them. So let's go through it level by level.

Applied Knowledge – 3 Exams

Consider this the warm-up lap. Everyone starts here, and honestly, its whole job is just to make sure you've got the basics locked in before things start getting genuinely hard.

• Business and Technology (BT) — basically how businesses tick day to day. Structure, governance, and where accountants actually fit into that bigger picture
• Management Accounting (MA) — costing, budgeting, and how a company keeps tabs on its own performance from the inside
• Financial Accounting (FA) — the real foundation stuff. Double-entry bookkeeping, building financial statements, and actually learning to read them properly instead of just staring blankly

Applied Skills – 6 Exams

Once you clear Applied Knowledge, things step up a notch , actually, more than a notch. This is where accounting, tax, law, and finance all start asking a lot more of you.

• Corporate and Business Law (LW)
• Performance Management (PM)
• Taxation (TX)
• Financial Reporting (FR)
• Audit and Assurance (AA)
• Financial Management (FM)

If we're being real, these six are the papers that end up mattering most once you're actually working , tax filings, audits, financial calls that affect real money. Want the nitty-gritty on what each paper covers? The ACCA Syllabus breaks it all down topic by topic.

Strategic Professional – 4 Exams

This is the home stretch, and it plays by slightly different rules than the first two levels. Two papers are non-negotiable, and then you pick two more from a shortlist of four.

Essential (no way around these two):

• Strategic Business Leader (SBL)
• Strategic Business Reporting (SBR)

Options (choose any 2 out of 4):

• Advanced Financial Management (AFM)
• Advanced Performance Management (APM)
• Advanced Taxation (ATX)
• Advanced Audit and Assurance (AAA)

Here's where people usually trip up, so pay attention to this bit. If you literally count every paper listed at this level, you'll land on 6. But you never actually sit all 6 , you only ever take 4, because two of those four option papers just aren't part of your journey at all. That's the whole reason the final count lands on 13, not 15. Seriously, this one confuses more people than you'd expect.

Honestly? Probably not. And this might be the single most important thing in this whole article, because thinking you're locked into all 13 can genuinely talk people out of starting ACCA at all , when that's not even true for most of them.

Here's the actual mechanism: if you've already covered similar territory through an earlier degree, diploma, or professional qualification, ACCA can waive certain papers for you. This usually happens at Applied Knowledge level, and sometimes it creeps into Applied Skills too. And no, it's not decided by what your degree is called on paper , ACCA genuinely sits down and goes through your transcripts before making that call.

One thing worth being upfront about, though: an exemption is not the same thing as passing that exam. All it really means is that ACCA's satisfied you've already learned that content somewhere else, so there's no point making you sit through it twice. Depending on where you're coming from ,  B.Com, M.Com, CA, CMA, or something else entirely , your actual number could end up sitting well below 13.

ACCA runs several exam windows throughout the year, and yes, you're generally free to sit more than one paper in the same session. There are some limits depending on level and exam format, but broadly speaking, you've got room.

That said, just because you can doesn't automatically mean you should. Cramming several heavy papers into one sitting sounds like a great time-saver on paper, but in reality it just spreads your prep painfully thin across subjects that each deserve proper attention , especially once you're past Applied Knowledge. What generally works better is pairing a tougher paper with an easier one, rather than piling on difficulty and hoping for the best come exam day. Sorting out an ACCA Study Plan early on really does save you a lot of last-minute panic.

Truthfully, there's no single answer that fits everyone here, no matter how confidently someone throws out a number. How long it actually takes comes down to your exemptions, how often you're sitting for exams, how much real study time you can carve out week to week, and honestly, how much your job or life outside ACCA is demanding of you at the same time.

There's also the Practical Experience Requirement (PER) sitting alongside all this , a chunk of relevant work experience you need to complete too. The good part is you can usually be knocking this out while you're still taking exams, rather than waiting until you're done, which does help with your overall ACCA Duration. Rather than chasing some timeline you saw floating around online, it's genuinely more useful to just build a pace that actually fits your life.

Yes  and honestly, this is probably the single biggest factor in how long your ACCA journey ends up stretching. A few patterns that tend to show up a lot:

• B.Com graduates often walk away with exemptions at the Applied Knowledge level
• M.Com graduates usually get something similar, sometimes a touch wider
• Folks with CA, CMA, or other relevant professional backgrounds can sometimes land bigger exemptions, occasionally covering Applied Knowledge completely and even parts of Applied Skills

Just don't treat any of that as a guarantee, though. What you actually receive comes down entirely to ACCA reviewing your specific transcripts, not some blanket rule tied to your degree's name. Once you've got a clearer picture of your own exemptions, it's worth checking your ACCA Eligibility and ACCA Fees together, since the two tend to move hand in hand.

So here's the whole thing wrapped up: ACCA has 13 exams if you're starting from scratch with no exemptions , 3 at Applied Knowledge, 6 at Applied Skills, and 4 at Strategic Professional, where 2 are compulsory and the other 2 come from a pool of options. But if you've already got relevant qualifications under your belt, exemptions can shrink that number quite noticeably.

Still not totally sure where you stand? That's genuinely normal, and it's exactly what NorthStar Academy is here to help with   making sense of the qualification structure, figuring out what you'd actually need to prepare for, and helping you map out your ACCA journey properly instead of just guessing. While you're exploring, it's also worth reading up on the Benefits of ACCA, what ACCA Career Opportunities actually look like, typical ACCA Salary ranges, the ACCA Exam Pattern, and how it stacks up in ACCA vs CPA and ACCA vs CA.