CISI Investment, Risk & Taxation Past Papers: What Exists (2026)

Searching for CISI Investment, Risk and Taxation past papers ends the same way for every Investment Advice Diploma candidate: there are none on the open web. CISI does not release previously sat papers, and the 80 questions you will face are drawn from a live, rotating bank the institute guards carefully.

That does not mean you are short of practice. This page covers what official material actually exists, why unofficial PDFs are uniquely dangerous for a tax-heavy paper, and how to get the past-papers experience with material written to the current UK tax year.

The paper you are preparing for

Eighty questions in two hours works out at 90 seconds each, spread across eight elements that run from asset classes and risk statistics to the heaviest single element, UK taxation. The element-by-element weightings, and how to split your revision between the quantitative and tax halves, are covered in our guide to passing Investment, Risk and Taxation.

What CISI actually gives you

One official sample paper. CISI publishes a single specimen paper written to the live standard. Sit it once, properly timed, late in your revision, because you only get one clean read of it.

The workbook. The official workbook has end-of-chapter questions and a practice paper at the back. Do them, but they are a fixed set: once seen, re-sitting them measures your memory of the answers, not your knowledge of the syllabus.

Revision Express and the CBT demo. Revision Express is CISI's paid online revision add-on, and the free Prometric demo shows you how the on-screen test behaves. The demo is worth five minutes; nobody should lose marks to unfamiliar software.

Note also that IntegrityMatters, CISI's short online integrity test, is a prerequisite before you can sit the paper.

Why old PDFs cost you more on this paper than any other

Scribd, Docsity and the forums host plenty of documents titled something like "IAD tax mock consolidated". The problem is that no CISI syllabus moves faster than this one. Income tax bands, capital gains rates, the inheritance tax nil-rate bands, ISA and pension limits: they are reset at Budgets, and the workbook is revised to match. A paper written against last year's edition will confidently teach you numbers that are now wrong, and on a paper where a single figure flips the answer, a confidently wrong number is worse than a gap.

The alternative: current, weighted mock papers

What "past papers" really means is renewable, exam-standard practice in the real format. Passkey gives Investment, Risk and Taxation full mock papers, each 80 questions in two hours, weighted element by element like the real paper, including exam-standard papers drawn from a reserved pool that practice mode never touches, so your first sitting of a mock is a genuinely unseen test. Every question is written from scratch against the current syllabus and the current UK tax year, every answer carries a full explanation, and the weak-spot tracker shows whether it is the tax half or the statistics half leaking marks.

Your mock scores become a forecast rather than a hope. And the forecast is backed: average 80% or higher across your last three Passkey mocks, sit the real exam within 30 days, and if you do not pass, we refund you in full.

Every Investment, Risk and Taxation revision resource, in one list

• The official CISI workbook, current edition, from the CISI shop. The single source of truth for the syllabus.
• The official sample paper, sat once, timed, late in your revision.
• CISI Revision Express (paid) and the free Prometric CBT demo.
• Passkey: the full question bank, weighted 80-question mocks with a reserved unseen pool, explanations and weak-spot tracking. £59 once covers all nine exams we support, for up to three months; see pricing.
• Free practice questions and the free diagnostic.
• Our guide to passing Investment, Risk and Taxation, and if you are taking the planning route through the diploma, Financial Planning and Advice past papers.

Passkey is an independent study tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or accredited by the Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment. For what exists across every paper, see CISI past papers: what's actually available.