SOCPA Zakat and Tax: Syllabus, Topics and a Study Plan

Zakat and Tax is the SOCPA Fellowship subject with no equivalent anywhere else. FAR has an IFRS counterpart, Auditing maps onto ISA, and Business Environment is recognisable to anyone who has studied finance. Zakat and Tax is Saudi law, administered by a Saudi authority, and it changes when that law changes.

That has two consequences for how you prepare. The good one is that the syllabus is finite and rules driven, which makes it one of the most reliably passable subjects in the Fellowship if you work through it properly. The bad one is that a large share of the study material available online is out of date, sometimes by several years and several rule changes.

This guide sets out what the subject covers, how to divide your time across it, which rules changed recently enough to invalidate older material, and where each area is explained in detail.

The exam at a glance

Item	Zakat and Tax
Subject	Zakat and Tax, one of the six Fellowship subjects
Format	70 multiple-choice questions in 160 minutes, then 3 essay questions in 80 minutes
Length	4 hours, as one continuous session
Score weighting	75% multiple choice, 25% essays, since the third cycle of 2025
Passing score	60 out of 100, and at least 5 of the 25 essay marks
Sittings	Four cycles a year, every subject in every cycle; 2026: 5 to 8 April, 28 June to 1 July, 27 to 30 September, 20 to 23 December, registration about six weeks before each
Fees	SAR 1,000 first registration (SAR 500 for a later sitting) plus SAR 300 per subject
Language	Arabic or English, the candidate's choice, since the September 2025 cycle
Delivery	Computer-based at test centres in ten Saudi cities, booked through the National Center for Assessment (ETEC) e-services
Credit expiry	A pass lapses four calendar years and thirty days after the sitting date if the Fellowship is not completed by then

SOCPA publishes a minimum and a maximum weight for each topic area of the paper.

Topic area	Weight
The conceptual framework of zakat and tax	3 to 7%
Zakat	20 to 30%
Income tax	20 to 30%
Excise tax	5 to 15%
Value added tax	20 to 30%
Real estate transaction tax	5 to 10%
ZATCA's organisation and the rules of the tax violation and dispute committees	2 to 3%

What the subject covers

Zakat and Tax is one of the six subjects in the SOCPA Fellowship examination, sat and scored on its own. In practice it breaks into five bodies of rules, all administered by the Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority.

Area	What it involves	Character
Zakat	The Zakat base, additions and deductions, the attribution of liabilities, the minimum base, rates and returns	Computational. The single largest area and the one most often examined in depth.
Income tax	Who is taxable, the 20% rate, allowable and disallowable expenses, tax base adjustments, losses, mixed ownership	Computational, with a heavy overlap into Zakat through mixed companies.
Withholding tax	Payments to non-residents, the rate by payment type, timing and filing obligations	Memorisation. Cheap marks, frequently examined.
VAT	Output and input tax, registration thresholds, zero-rated vs exempt supplies, recovery, returns, e-invoicing	Rules plus mechanics. The most administratively detailed area.
Other levies	Real estate transaction tax, excise tax, customs at a high level	Narrow and well defined. Worth securing completely.

The proportions are not published as blueprint percentages the way the CPA's are. What can be said with confidence is that Zakat is the anchor of the subject, that VAT is the second largest area, and that withholding tax and real estate transaction tax carry a return on study time out of all proportion to their size, because they are short, precise and examinable as recall.

Start with Zakat, and start with what the base means

Almost everyone who struggles with Zakat is struggling with the same misconception: they are treating it as a tax on profit. It is not. Zakat is charged on a base, and the base represents the funding the business holds that is not tied up in long-term assets.

That single idea explains the whole structure of the computation. You add up the sources of long-term funding, then deduct what those sources were sunk into. It also explains the parts candidates get wrong: why a loss-making company can still owe Zakat, why you cannot simply deduct every fixed asset, and why there is a floor below which the base cannot fall.

Read: How the Zakat Base Is Calculated in Saudi Arabia, which works through the additions, the deductions, the 2.5% and 2.577% rates and a full example.

The 2024 regulations invalidate older material

This is the point on which the most study material is wrong, and it is worth checking any resource you use against it.

New executive regulations published in March 2024 apply to financial years beginning on or after 1 January 2024, and they moved the computation onto closing balances at the year end rather than opening balances and holding-period tests. Any guide, template or worked example still built around opening balances is describing a system that no longer operates. The same regulations widened the deductible items and updated the limits on the base.

If a source does not mention the change, treat it as pre-2024 and set it aside.

Income tax, and the mixed ownership problem

Which levy an entity pays is decided by who owns it, not by what it does. Saudi and GCC ownership is subject to Zakat; foreign ownership is subject to corporate income tax at 20%; mixed ownership is split proportionally and pays both.

The mixed case is the one that generates real examination questions, because a single set of financial statements has to support two computations on two different bases. If you can do a mixed-ownership company cleanly, you have understood both levies.

Read: Zakat or Income Tax? Who Pays What in Saudi Arabia.

Withholding tax: the cheapest marks in the subject

Withholding tax is a rate table applied to payments made to non-residents, and the examinable content is essentially which rate attaches to which type of payment. Management fees at 20%, royalties at 15%, rent and dividends at 5%, with the remaining categories in between.

There is no conceptual difficulty here at all. There is only whether you have learned the table. Candidates who leave it to the last week and candidates who learn it in the first week end up with the same marks, which is the argument for learning it in the first week and stopping worrying about it.

Read: Withholding Tax in Saudi Arabia, by Payment Type.

VAT: mechanics first, then the edge cases

VAT looks large because it has a lot of administrative surface, but the mechanism underneath is one sentence: you charge output tax on your sales, you pay input tax on your purchases, and you remit the difference. Everything else is conditions on that.

Get the mechanism secure first, then work outwards to the parts that generate questions: the registration thresholds, the distinction between zero-rated and exempt supplies (which behave very differently for input tax recovery, and this is the classic examination trap), blocked input tax, and the treatment of imports.

Read: VAT Input Tax vs Output Tax in Saudi Arabia.

E-invoicing is now part of the VAT picture

ZATCA's Fatoora programme has moved from a compliance project to a standing feature of the VAT system, and Phase 2 integration has been rolling out in waves with progressively lower revenue thresholds. It is a reasonable thing to expect a question on, and it is also the part of the syllabus that changes most often.

Read: ZATCA E-Invoicing Phase 2: Who Is In Scope and by When.

Real estate transaction tax

RETT is small, self-contained and worth learning completely rather than partially. It is charged at 5% on the higher of the price or the market value, and unlike most levies it is settled before the notary rather than filed afterwards, which is the detail that makes it distinctive and therefore examinable.

Read: Real Estate Transaction Tax in Saudi Arabia.

A study plan

Eight weeks at eight to ten hours a week is enough for this subject if the time is spent on computation rather than reading. The order matters, because the areas build on each other more than they look like they do.

Weeks	Focus
1	What the Zakat base represents, the additions and deductions, the rates. Learn the withholding tax table in the same week and be done with it.
2 to 3	Full Zakat computations, including the attribution of liabilities and the minimum base test. Work examples, do not read them.
4	Income tax: the tax base, allowable and disallowable items, losses.
5	Mixed ownership, both computations from one set of statements. This is the integration week.
6	VAT mechanics, thresholds, zero-rated vs exempt, input tax recovery.
7	Real estate transaction tax, excise tax, e-invoicing. Short, finite, secure them.
8	Mixed practice under time, plus targeted repair on whatever the practice exposed.

The pass mark in each SOCPA subject is 60%, marked out of 100, with no compensation between subjects. This paper mixes multiple choice with essay questions, 75% and 25% of the marks since the third cycle of 2025 (Laws and Business Environment are multiple choice only), and the multiple choice portion carries the larger share of the marks, so accuracy at speed on short computational items matters more than long-form writing.

The one habit that matters most

Check the date on everything you study. Zakat and Tax is the only Fellowship subject where a well-written, thorough, carefully explained resource can be actively harmful because it describes rules that were replaced. The 2024 Zakat regulations, the e-invoicing waves and the periodic VAT guidance updates all mean that a two-year-old summary is not merely stale, it is wrong in specific and examinable ways.

When a source and the current ZATCA guidance disagree, the guidance wins.

Where to practise this

This is a subject where practice questions do almost all of the work, because the examinable skill is applying a rule to a fact pattern quickly and correctly. Prepito's Zakat and Tax course covers the base, the adjustments, income tax, VAT, excise tax and real estate transaction tax with practice questions, simulations and full explanations in Arabic and English.

For the qualification as a whole, see the SOCPA Fellowship exam guide for subjects, eligibility and fees, or the SOCPA programme.

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This is a study guide, not tax advice or a substitute for the Regulations. Sources: ZATCA guidance on calculating Zakat, SOCPA announcement on opening the Fellowship worldwide. Rates, thresholds and regulations change; confirm the current position with ZATCA, and confirm exam structure and fees with SOCPA, before relying on any figure here. Where SOCPA's English and Arabic pages disagree, the Arabic pages are the ones being kept current.