Reference material for people actually sitting the Certified Payroll Professional exam. Dates, weightings, law years, and the figures that changed — written down properly, with the source cited, so you do not have to reconstruct them from a forum thread.
Everything here is free to read and requires nothing. We do sell a question bank, and we mention it, but these pages are written to be useful on their own. Where a guide states a figure, it names where the figure came from — and where we could not verify something, it says so rather than guessing.
Two separate changes land on the same date. The content outline reweights — the old and new percentages are set out side by side, which is the table nobody else has published. And the tested law year moves from January 1, 2025 to January 1, 2026, which quietly rewrites the answer to every question with a dollar figure in it: wage base, deferral limits, the §129 dependent care exclusion, and the whole OBBBA layer with its new W-2 Box 12 codes.
Also covers the Fall 2026 and Spring 2027 testing windows, registration deadlines, exam fees and format, and an honest answer to “is my 2025 study guide still valid?”
Coming next. Guides we are writing, roughly in this order:
Reading about the exam is not studying for it. If you want to know which of the seven content areas is your weak one before you plan anything, the diagnostic is 20 questions, free, and gives you a per-area breakdown. No card, no obligation.
The full bank is 400 questions for $39 once, with a written explanation on every one, built to the September 5, 2026 outline and to federal law as of January 1, 2026 — which is the whole point of the guide above.
Take the free 20-question diagnostic → See the full question bank →Found an error, or want a guide on something specific? Email help@escheat-sheet.com. Corrections get made fast and requests genuinely shape what gets written next.