Part of the expanding PassProfessor catalog: this guide covers AFP’s Certified Treasury Professional examination as AFP publishes it — 170 multiple-choice questions in 3.5 hours (150 scored, 20 unscored pretest), five domains weighted from 56–60 scored questions for Corporate Liquidity Management down to 13–17 for Internal and External Relationships, under the 2026–2028 test specifications based on the Essentials of Treasury Management, Eighth Edition, with scaled scoring and no published passing number. PassProfessor’s companion practice program is in the works, built to those specifications only.
The program is in the works, built on AFP’s published specifications for this examination. Join the notify list and we will email you when enrollment opens — then use this guide to plan your preparation domain by domain and task by task.
AFP rebuilds the CTP examination on a three-year cycle, and the current cycle — the 2026–2028 test specifications, based on the Essentials of Treasury Management, Eighth Edition — replaced the prior cycle’s specifications outright. That single fact decides most preparation questions before they are asked: material organized around older domain weights, including a widely copied set of ranges from a different cycle, aims the candidate’s hours at an examination that is no longer administered. This guide describes the current examination only: its format and windows, its eligibility rules, its published domain and task ranges in full, an honest account of its scoring, and a study method for each domain.
Which examination is this guide about?
One examination: the Certified Treasury Professional exam from AFP (the Association for Financial Professionals), delivered computer-based at Pearson test centers, in its 2026–2028 form. Everything in this guide — the domain names, the task statements, the question ranges, the fees and windows — follows AFP’s 2026 CTP Candidate Handbook. Where the prior cycle differed, the difference is flagged rather than blended, because the specifications a candidate studies to are the specifications that decide the result.
The real exam at a glance
| Fact of record | Detail |
|---|---|
| Credential | Certified Treasury Professional (CTP) |
| Certifying body | AFP (Association for Financial Professionals) |
| Current specifications | 2026–2028 test specifications, based on the Essentials of Treasury Management, Eighth Edition. Earlier cycles’ specifications are superseded |
| Format | 170 multiple-choice questions in 3.5 hours (a 4-hour appointment including tutorial and questionnaire): 150 scored questions and 20 unscored pretest questions, which may come from any domain. Candidates may review, mark, skip and change answers; there is no penalty for incorrect answers |
| Delivery | Computer-based at Pearson test centers (5,000+ worldwide) |
| Testing windows | Two per year: June/July and December/January (2026A: June 1–July 31, 2026; 2026B: December 1, 2026–January 31, 2027) |
| Scoring | Scaled scoring. AFP does not publish the exact score or percentage required to pass — the 2026 Candidate Handbook states that AFP cannot indicate an exact number or percentage of questions that need to be answered correctly |
| Results | A pass/fail report at the test center at the end of the examination; the actual score is provided only if the candidate does not pass, with per-domain performance diagnostics |
| Eligibility | Candidates may sit before meeting the requirements; the credential is awarded only when they are met: 2 or more years of full-time, career-based corporate finance-related work experience. A graduate degree in business, finance or accounting, or two years of full-time university-level teaching in a finance topic, each counts as one year |
| Retakes | Once per testing window within the application’s validity of six consecutive testing windows; re-registration fee $250; no-show penalty $90 |
| Examination fees (2026, new applicant) | AFP member $925 early / $1,025 final; non-member $1,320 early / $1,420 final, including the application fee. Fees are set by AFP — confirm the current amounts at financialprofessionals.org |
| Keeping the credential | Certification is valid 3 years; 36 continuing education credits per 3-year cycle, plus a recertification fee. AFP membership is not required to maintain the credential |
Who can sit for the CTP?
You may sit the examination before you meet the credential requirements — AFP is explicit on the point — but the CTP itself is awarded only once the requirements are met. The core requirement is two or more years of full-time, career-based corporate finance-related work experience. The experience need not be specifically in treasury or cash management, and internships and volunteer work do not count toward it. Two substitutions exist, each worth one year: a graduate degree in business, finance, or accounting, and two years of full-time university-level teaching in a finance topic. A candidate using a substitution must still report at least one year of qualifying experience. Membership of AFP is not required before registering. Your application stays valid for six consecutive testing windows, and within that validity you may retake the examination once per window, with no AFP limit on total retakes; re-registration costs $250, and a $90 penalty applies to a no-show. CTPs agree to AFP’s Standards of Ethical Conduct — competence, integrity, and confidentiality — and violations can revoke the credential.
How is the CTP exam scored?
AFP scores the examination on a scaled basis: the raw score is converted by a statistical formula. AFP publishes no passing number for this examination — the 2026 Candidate Handbook’s FAQ states that AFP cannot indicate an exact number or percentage of questions that need to be answered correctly to pass. Read any specific passing figure quoted elsewhere with that in mind: figures in circulation come from older examination cycles, do not appear in the current Handbook, and this guide prints none. What a candidate does receive is immediate and usable: a pass/fail report at the test center at the end of the examination, and — for a candidate who does not pass — the actual score together with per-domain performance diagnostics, which show where the attempt was lost and are the proper foundation of a retake plan. One cycle note: because the June/July 2026 window was the first administration under the current body of knowledge, AFP held those results for six to eight weeks after the window closed while the passing standard was set; candidates in that window should plan around that published exception rather than the usual same-day report.
The Handbook also publishes the examination’s cognitive mix, which is a scoring fact of a different and very practical kind: 33–37 percent of items test knowledge of facts and terms, 38–42 percent test concepts and principles, 23–27 percent test application to situations, and 10–15 percent are mathematical computations. A preparation plan that trains only the first band leaves most of the examination’s method unprepared.
The specifications, domain by domain
AFP publishes a question range for each of the 33 task areas on the 150 scored questions. The practice bank follows the same ranges, so the share of practice a candidate meets in each task area matches the share of the real examination that task carries.
Domain 1 — Corporate Liquidity Management (56–60 scored questions; 576 practice questions)
| Task area | Exam range | Practice questions |
|---|---|---|
| Cash Forecasting and Flow Management | 16–18 | 163 |
| Cash Positioning and Short-Term Investing/Borrowing | 15–17 | 154 |
| Intercompany Financing and In-House Banking | 6–8 | 67 |
| Banking Structure and Cash Concentration | 3–5 | 38 |
| Foreign Exchange Exposure Management | 3–5 | 38 |
| Trade Financing and Letters of Credit | 2–4 | 29 |
| Cash Reconciliation and Balance Review | 2–4 | 29 |
| Treasury Operations Optimization | 2–4 | 29 |
| Financial Ratio Analysis for Treasury Decisions | 2–4 | 29 |
#### What does Corporate Liquidity Management cover?
The daily engine of treasury, and more than a third of the scored examination. Cash forecasting and flow management — the single largest task area on the examination — covers building, reading, and correcting the forecast: receipts and disbursements timing, forecast variance, and the decisions a forecast drives. Cash positioning and short-term investing and borrowing covers knowing the position, concentrating it, and putting surplus to work or covering a shortfall in money-market and short-term instruments. Around those two anchors sit the structures that move cash across accounts, banks, borders, and entities — concentration structures, intercompany financing and in-house banking, trade financing and letters of credit — and the disciplines that keep the picture honest: reconciliation and balance review, operations optimization, foreign exchange exposure at the operating level, and ratio analysis used for treasury decisions.
How should you prepare for Corporate Liquidity Management? Weight your time as the ranges do: forecasting and positioning first and deepest. Work the computations — cash conversion cycle, forecast variance, yields, availability — by hand until the method is automatic, and for every structure be able to say where the cash sits, when it moves, and what it earns or costs in between.
Follow the cash through every item in this domain: timing, location, currency, and availability decide the credited answer more often than terminology does.
Domain 2 — Capital Structure and Capital Investments (34–38 scored questions; 358 practice questions)
| Task area | Exam range | Practice questions |
|---|---|---|
| Debt and Equity Issuance and Servicing | 10–12 | 109 |
| Syndicated Loan Agreements | 6–8 | 70 |
| Investment Portfolio Management | 5–7 | 60 |
| Revolving Debt Agreements | 2–4 | 30 |
| Mergers, Acquisitions and Divestitures Impact | 2–4 | 30 |
| Market Conditions and Borrowing Strategy | 2–4 | 30 |
| Hedging FX, Interest Rate and Commodity Exposure | 2–4 | 29 |
#### What does Capital Structure and Capital Investments cover?
How the organisation raises longer-term money, services it, invests its portfolio, and hedges the exposures that funding creates. Debt and equity issuance and servicing — the domain’s largest task — covers the instruments, their terms, and the treasurer’s obligations across their life. Syndicated loans and revolving agreements cover committed bank funding: structure, covenants, pricing, and availability. Investment portfolio management covers policy-constrained investing of longer balances. The remaining tasks place treasury inside corporate events and markets: the cash, funding, and control consequences of mergers, acquisitions and divestitures; reading market conditions into a borrowing strategy; and hedging foreign exchange, interest rate, and commodity exposure with the instruments the specifications name.
How should you prepare for Capital Structure and Capital Investments? Learn each instrument and agreement by its mechanics — parties, cash flows, covenants, and what happens at maturity, drawdown, or default — and practise the selection judgment the examination rewards: which funding or hedge fits the exposure, the horizon, and the policy in the stem.
An instrument that is sound in general but mismatched to the stated exposure or horizon is the standard distractor in this domain.
Domain 3 — Internal and External Relationships (13–17 scored questions; 149 practice questions)
| Task area | Exam range | Practice questions |
|---|---|---|
| Bank Account Administration and Fee Analysis | 4–6 | 41 |
| Treasury as Internal Advisor | 3–5 | 33 |
| External Financial Service Provider Relationships | 2–4 | 25 |
| Selecting Service Providers and Agreements | 2–4 | 25 |
| Internal Stakeholder Relationships | 2–4 | 25 |
#### What does Internal and External Relationships cover?
Treasury’s relationships in both directions. Outward: administering bank accounts and analysing the fees they carry, managing relationships with external financial service providers, and selecting providers and settling the agreements that govern them. Inward: treasury acting as internal advisor to the business, and the stakeholder relationships that make treasury’s information and controls actually used. It is the smallest domain on the examination — and, at 13 to 17 scored questions, still larger than the margin of many results.
How should you prepare for Internal and External Relationships? Treat it as applied administration: account structures and their costs, what a fee analysis examines and can recover, what a service agreement must settle, and how an advisory answer is framed for an internal audience that does not live in treasury’s vocabulary.
Do not let the smallest domain become free marks for other candidates: its questions are concrete, and prepared candidates take nearly all of them.
Domain 4 — Risk Monitoring and Control (24–28 scored questions; 258 practice questions)
| Task area | Exam range | Practice questions |
|---|---|---|
| Regulatory Compliance and Reporting | 5–7 | 52 |
| Treasury Policy and Controls Compliance | 4–6 | 44 |
| Business Continuity Planning | 3–5 | 36 |
| Drafting Treasury Policies and Procedures | 2–4 | 27 |
| Fraud Detection and Mitigation | 2–4 | 27 |
| Counterparty Risk Management | 2–4 | 27 |
| Merchant Services Management | 2–4 | 27 |
| Performance Benchmarking | 1–3 | 18 |
#### What does Risk Monitoring and Control cover?
The control environment treasury owns and evidences. Regulatory compliance and reporting is its largest task, followed by compliance with treasury policy and controls: segregation of duties, authorization limits, and the monitoring that shows controls operated. Drafting policies and procedures, fraud detection and mitigation, counterparty risk, merchant services, business continuity planning, and performance benchmarking complete the domain — the disciplines that keep a treasury function defensible to auditors, banks, and its own board.
How should you prepare for Risk Monitoring and Control? Think like a control owner throughout. For each scenario, name the control that failed or the control that would have prevented the failure, and distinguish the policy question (what should the rule be?) from the compliance question (did the rule operate?) — the examination tests both, and they have different answers.
Prevention outranks detection in this domain’s credited answers: the control that stops the loss beats the control that finds it sooner.
Domain 5 — Treasury Technology (15–17 scored questions; 159 practice questions)
| Task area | Exam range | Practice questions |
|---|---|---|
| Leveraging Treasury Technology Systems | 6–8 | 65 |
| Technology Security Issues | 4–6 | 47 |
| Implementing Treasury Products and Services | 2–4 | 28 |
| Information and Cyber Risk Monitoring | 1–3 | 19 |
#### What does Treasury Technology cover?
The systems layer of the function: using treasury technology systems to run positioning, payments, and reporting; the security issues those systems carry — access, authentication, and control of payment capability; implementing treasury products and services with banks and vendors; and monitoring information and cyber risk as it bears on treasury operations.
How should you prepare for Treasury Technology? Learn capabilities and risks, not vendor catalogues: what each class of system does for treasury, who should be able to do what inside it, and how implementation and access decisions create or close risk.
Access is the recurring key in this domain: most scenarios turn on who could initiate, approve, or alter a payment or a record.
How should you study for the CTP?
Weight your time like the examination does. Corporate Liquidity Management alone is more than a third of the scored examination, and cash forecasting plus cash positioning are its two largest task areas — master daily liquidity mechanics before the smaller domains, and let the published ranges, not habit, set the shares of your study time.
Drill the computations. Roughly 10–15 percent of the real examination is mathematical: cash conversion cycle, forecast variance, yields, fees, and availability. Work them by hand until the method is automatic; in the companion program, every calculation item’s explanation shows the full computation, and wrong answers are built from wrong methods, so a miss identifies the method to repair.
Study to the current specifications. The 2026–2028 specifications (Essentials of Treasury Management, Eighth Edition) replaced the prior cycle. Material organized around older domain weights — including a widely copied set of ranges from a different cycle — will mis-aim your preparation, however polished it looks.
Think like a control owner in Domain 4. Segregation of duties, authorization limits, fraud controls, and continuity planning are scenario territory: for each situation, identify the control that failed or the control that prevents it.
Train all four cognitive levels. The Handbook’s mix — facts and terms, concepts and principles, application, and computation — means a plan built on terminology alone prepares for about a third of the examination. Alternate terminology review with scenario work and hand-worked calculations from the start, not as a finishing stage.
How should you read your practice results?
An overall practice percentage is the least useful number a CTP candidate owns — for this examination it cannot even be compared against a published pass mark, because AFP publishes none. The useful reading is by domain and then by task area: which domains are secure, which are inconsistent — right on concepts, wrong on application or computation — and which are simply thin. Each pattern has a different repair. A secure domain needs only maintenance in mixed practice. An inconsistent domain needs slower work on the method its items demand, with every computation miss reworked by hand and every scenario miss examined for the feature of the situation that was underweighted. A thin domain needs study before drilling, because drilling untaught material rehearses guessing. Revisit each repaired domain after a gap of several days, in mixed practice, so that retention — not recognition of recently seen material — is what carries the result. The companion program reports a 70 percent practice benchmark, labelled PRACTICE BENCHMARK ONLY, as a progress gauge across that work; it is a PassProfessor study aid, not an AFP standard, and it should steer study time, never serve as a pass prediction.
What does the sitting itself demand?
The sitting allows 210 minutes for 170 questions — about 74 seconds per question — inside a 4-hour appointment that also holds the tutorial and questionnaire. Because there is no penalty for incorrect answers and candidates may review, mark, skip, and change answers, the disciplined pattern is to answer every item, mark the ones that need a second pass, and reserve the closing minutes for marked items rather than stalling early on a single calculation. Remember that 20 of the 170 questions are unscored pretest items that may come from any domain and are not identified: an unexpectedly strange item is a pretest candidate, not a reason to lose the sitting’s rhythm. The pass/fail report prints at the center when you finish, so the sitting ends with a decision in hand — and, on a failed attempt, with the per-domain diagnostics that make the retake plan concrete.
Frequently asked questions
How many questions are on the CTP exam, and how long is it? 170 multiple-choice questions in 3.5 hours, within a 4-hour appointment that includes the tutorial and questionnaire. Of the 170, 150 are scored and 20 are unscored pretest questions, which may come from any domain. You may review, mark, skip and change answers, and there is no penalty for incorrect answers.
What score do I need to pass the CTP exam? AFP does not publish one. The examination is scaled-scored, and the 2026 Candidate Handbook states that AFP cannot indicate an exact number or percentage of questions that need to be answered correctly to pass. A specific scaled figure quoted by some secondary sources comes from older examination cycles and does not appear in the current Handbook.
Which specifications should I study? The 2026–2028 test specifications, based on the Essentials of Treasury Management, Eighth Edition. The prior cycle’s specifications are superseded, and material organized around older domain weights will mis-aim your preparation.
Can I take the exam before I have two years of experience? Yes. Candidates may sit before meeting the requirements; the credential is awarded once the experience requirement is documented. The requirement is two or more years of full-time, career-based corporate finance-related work experience — internships and volunteer work do not count, and the experience need not be specifically in treasury.
Does a graduate degree reduce the experience requirement? Yes, by one year. A graduate degree in business, finance, or accounting counts as one year of experience, as do two years of full-time university-level teaching in a finance topic. A candidate using either substitution must still report at least one year of qualifying experience.
How much math is on the exam? AFP’s published cognitive mix puts mathematical computations at 10–15 percent of the examination, alongside factual knowledge (33–37 percent), concepts and principles (38–42 percent), and application to situations (23–27 percent). The companion program mirrors that mix, and every calculation item’s explanation shows the full computation.
What does the exam cost? For 2026, AFP’s new-applicant fees are $925 early / $1,025 final for AFP members and $1,320 early / $1,420 final for non-members, including the application fee. Re-registration is $250, and a no-show penalty of $90 applies. Fees are set by AFP — confirm the current amounts at financialprofessionals.org.
When is the exam offered, and how often can I retake it? In two windows each year — June/July and December/January (2026A: June 1–July 31, 2026; 2026B: December 1, 2026–January 31, 2027). Your application is valid for six consecutive testing windows, and you may retake once per window within that validity.
How and when do I get my result? A pass/fail report is printed at the test center at the end of the examination. If you do not pass, your actual score is provided with per-domain performance diagnostics. One exception is on record: results from the June/July 2026 window — the first administration under the current body of knowledge — were held for six to eight weeks after the window closed while AFP set the passing standard.
Which domain matters most? Corporate Liquidity Management, at 56–60 of the 150 scored questions — more than a third of the examination. Within it, cash forecasting and flow management (16–18) and cash positioning and short-term investing and borrowing (15–17) are the two largest task areas on the whole examination.
Are these AFP’s actual examination questions? No. Every PassProfessor question is an original practice question written to AFP’s published 2026–2028 test specifications. The companion program carries 1,500 original practice questions with an explanation for every question. AFP does not release its examination questions.
How is the practice simulation scored? It presents 170 questions in 210 minutes — the real examination’s size and time limit — and reports a 70 percent practice benchmark as a study gauge, labelled PRACTICE BENCHMARK ONLY. That benchmark is a PassProfessor study aid, not AFP’s standard: AFP publishes no passing score or percentage.
How do CTPs keep the credential? Certification is valid for three years, maintained with 36 continuing education credits per three-year cycle plus a recertification fee. AFP membership is not required to maintain the credential, and CTPs remain bound by AFP’s Standards of Ethical Conduct.
When will enrollment open? The program is in the works. Join the notify list on the companion program page or on this guide and we will email you when enrollment opens.
Disclaimer
PassProfessor is an independent exam-preparation provider; this guide is not endorsed by, affiliated with, or sponsored by AFP. Certified Treasury Professional and CTP are marks of the Association for Financial Professionals, used on this page as a factual reference to the certifying body’s examination. Examination details on this page are drawn from the sources recorded below and are current as of November 2026; AFP’s official publications govern if anything here differs from them. The credential is awarded by AFP alone when its requirements are complete.