Most people who sit the immigration adviser entrance exam fail it
Twenty-five per cent passed in 2015/16, 36% in 2016/17, 38% in 2017/18. In 2017/18, 519 people sat the Level 1 assessment and 321 of them did not get through. No other legal profession publishes a comparable rate.
By Rose Traviss · 29 September 2026
Nobody joins the regulated immigration advice scheme without passing the Level 1 competence assessment. It is the door, and anybody who wants to work at Level 2 or Level 3 must pass it before they are allowed to attempt the higher one.
Between 2015/16 and 2017/18 — the three years for which the regulator published both the number sitting and the number passing — the pass rate ran from a quarter to just under two-fifths.
| Year | Sat Level 1 | Passed | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015/16 | 572 | — | 25% |
| 2016/17 | 466 | 168 | 36% |
| 2017/18 | 519 | 198 | 38% |
The 2015/16 report gives the rate but not the count, so no pass figure is shown for that year; multiplying 572 by a rounded percentage would invent a number the regulator never published.
The 2017/18 report puts it plainly: “Of the 519 candidates who sat the Level 1 assessment, 198 (38%) were successful and 321 (62%) were unsuccessful.”
The higher levels are not easier
Level 2 and Level 3 are taken by people who have already passed Level 1, so the population is pre-filtered. The rates are still low.
| Year | Level 2 candidates | Level 2 rate | Level 3 candidates | Level 3 rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015/16 | 92 | 46% | 55 | 31% |
| 2017/18 | 86 | 47% | 39 | 33% |
Roughly half fail at Level 2 and two-thirds at Level 3, among people who have already cleared the entry assessment.
Why this is the only number like it
None of the other regulators on this site publishes an entry-assessment pass rate. The Council for Licensed Conveyancers did once: “A total of 585 candidates sat CLC examinations in 2010. Of these candidates, 401 achieved the required pass mark — a success rate of 68.5%.” That is the last such figure in its annual reports.
The Faculty Office publishes course results in a different shape, as successes rather than rates: 41 students passed the University College London notarial practice course at the first sitting in the year to its 2026 Registrar’s report, and 21 of them had applied for admission by the time it went to print. It does not say how many sat.
The CLSB publishes intake — 52 new entrants in 2025 — and not attempts.
So a prospective immigration adviser is the one entrant to a small legal profession who can find out, from the regulator, roughly what their odds are.
What it means for the size of the profession
The regulator’s own adviser headcount stops in 2008 at 4,061. What the assessment figures show is a queue of between 466 and 572 people a year attempting to get in, of whom between about 140 and 200 succeed — in a scheme that had about four thousand advisers when it last said.
That is a high failure rate at the door of a profession whose clients are, by definition, people navigating the immigration system. The regulator’s own commentary treats the low pass rate as a problem to be worked on rather than a standard to be defended: it describes the 2016/17 results as “disappointing for applicants” while noting they were an improvement on the year before, and lists steps taken “to encourage increased success by Level 1 candidates”.
The figures
Read from the OISC annual reports for 2015/16, 2016/17 and 2017/18; the Council for Licensed Conveyancers’ 2010–12 annual review; and the Faculty Office’s Registrar’s Annual Report 2026. Each figure appears on the reports page with the sentence it was read from.
No pass rate is computed here from a count and a headcount that were published in different documents, and none is carried forward past the last year the regulator stated it. The series ends in 2017/18 because that is where the publication ends, not because the assessments stopped.