Free Lesson 1.1: What Is a Business?
Free AP Business with Personal Finance lesson for Unit 1, Topic 1.1: editable slides, guided notes, the Brew & Brood case study, AP-style MCQs, and a Mini-FRQ.
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AP Business with Personal Finance: a teacher's guide
The course launches this school year and the first exam is in May 2027. Here is what is in it unit by unit, the two projects nobody tells you about up front, and what your school has to have in place.
Written for the 2026-27 launch year. Every figure below comes from College Board's published Course and Exam Description.
What the course is
A full-year College Board course launching in 2026-27, with the first exam on Tuesday, May 4, 2027. It is one of the AP Career Kickstart courses, alongside AP Cybersecurity, with AP Networking following in 2027-28. There are no prerequisites.
It is roughly an Introduction to Business survey with personal finance braided through it, which is why it maps so well onto the courses states already run. The framework spirals five skill categories: concept application, entrepreneurship, decision making, communication, and collaboration. Of those, the CED states that Skill Categories 1 through 4 are what the multiple-choice section assesses.
Students who take the year and earn a qualifying score on the exam and the full-year Business Canvas Project receive the AP Business with Personal Finance Credential.
The units, and the Unit 3 split most summaries miss
College Board publishes this as five units, but Unit 3 is issued as two separately titled and separately paced parts, and they sit far apart in size: six class periods of personal saving and borrowing against twenty-nine of business finance and accounting. If you plan from a summary that merges them, you will misjudge the biggest block of the year.
| Unit | Topics | Class periods | What it covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unit 1: Businesses, Competition, and New Ideas | 8 | 37 | What a business is, markets and competitive advantage, PESTEL factors, where business ideas come from, vision, ethics, org roles, and supply chains. |
| Unit 2: Marketing | 7 | 34 | Marketing to customers, consumer behavior, market research, then the four Ps: product, price, place and channels, promotion. |
| Unit 3, Part 1: Personal Saving and Borrowing | 2 | 6 | Saving for future purchases, and borrowing, credit, and debt. |
| Unit 3, Part 2: Business Finance and Accounting | 7 | 29 | Accounting and financial management, expenses, financial capital, the income statement, the balance sheet, cash flow, and ethics in financial reporting. |
| Unit 4: Management and Strategy | 4 | 30 | Management and leadership, KPIs, strategy and decision making, and strategic frameworks including Porter's Five Forces and SWOT. |
| Unit 5: Personal Goals, Budgeting, and Investing | 3 | 24 | Taxes, net income and budgeting; managing personal risk; saving and investing for education, housing, and retirement. Includes the culminating Financial Advisor event. |
Pacing is based on 45-minute periods meeting five days a week, and each topic typically takes three to five of them. Adding the CED's per-unit figures gives about 160 periods across the year, though College Board does not publish a course-wide total itself, and Unit 5 can take another 20 periods if you use the optional extra personal finance coverage.
One requirement worth reading twice: to receive authorization to label the course Advanced Placement, all topics must be included. You are free to reorder them, but not to drop them.
Two required projects
This course carries more project weight than most AP courses, and both projects are required rather than optional enrichment.
The Business Canvas Project
A through-course project: students build out a business idea across organization, operations, customer, product, market, and finance, with an appendix holding a written pitch, a projected income statement, and a data visualization. They work alone or in teams of up to three. It is introduced in Unit 1, integrated through Units 2 to 4, and finished with about ten class periods at the end of Unit 4.
Students do not submit it to College Board for scoring. Instead the exam contains an exam-day validation question about their own project, worth 15% of the exam score, which is a strong reason not to let the project slide to the last week. (The canvas is a modified Business Model Canvas, originally developed by Strategyzer.)
The Financial Advisor Project
The culminating project in Unit 5, in which students advise a fictional client household across four iterative tasks and a culminating event. It is scored by you against a rubric published in the CED, not by College Board.
Where to download the CED
Free from College Board: the AP Business with Personal Finance Course and Exam Description. About 9 MB and roughly 300 pages, no login.
It is long, but the parts worth reading first are short: the Course at a Glance spread near the front lays out the whole year, and the two project guides in the back are the only complete description of what students actually have to produce.
The textbook question
There is no single official textbook, but this course is unusual: the Course Audit requires that each student has a college-level Introduction to Business textbook for individual use, in print or electronic form, supplemented where necessary.
College Board publishes an Example Textbook List of thirteen titles to help you choose. It attaches an explicit caveat, and it is worth quoting rather than paraphrasing: the list is not exhaustive, and the texts listed "should not be regarded as endorsed, authorized, recommended, or approved by College Board." Not using a book from the list does not put your authorization at risk.
Practically, this is a budget conversation to have early, because a per-student text is the kind of line item that has to go in before the year starts. Curriculum packages, including ours, supplement a textbook rather than replace it.
The exam
2 hours 40 minutes, fully digital in Bluebook. Section I is 60 multiple-choice questions in 70 minutes, worth 60%. Section II is 4 free-response questions in 90 minutes, worth 40%.
The free-response questions are, in order: the Business Canvas Project exam-day validation question (25 minutes, 15%), then Personal Finance, Business Concept Application, and Business Decision, which share the remaining 65 minutes and 25%.
Multiple-choice weighting runs Unit 1 at 20 to 30%, Unit 2 at 20 to 30%, Unit 3 at 25 to 35%, and Unit 4 at 15 to 20%. Personal finance is not quarantined into one section: the CED notes those ranges include 12 to 15 items assessing personal finance across Units 1 through 4, making up 20 to 25% of the exam.
Unit 5 is not assessed on the exam at all. The CED is explicit that it can be taught before or after the exam to suit your calendar, which makes it the natural home for the weeks after AP testing ends.
What your school needs
The Course Audit
Every teacher submits an AP Course Audit form and completes one of four authorization pathways, assigned at random: syllabus submission, guided syllabus creation, online learning modules, or a course knowledge check. For the launch year the window runs from March 2026 through January 2027, with January 31, 2027 the deadline to complete the initial submission of course materials.
Resources the audit asks you to confirm
Beyond the per-student textbook, the school confirms access to resources supporting the required personal finance content, opportunities to engage with business case studies, and opportunities for students to develop all five skill categories.
Who teaches it
There are no student prerequisites and no specialist requirement. In practice it is landing with business and CTE teachers, and with people who taught a personal finance or intro business elective and are now scaling it to an AP year.
Common questions
Where do I download the AP Business with Personal Finance CED or course framework PDF?
Free from College Board on AP Central. It is a single public PDF of about 9 MB and roughly 300 pages, no login required.
Is there an AP Business with Personal Finance textbook?
There is no single official textbook, but unlike most AP courses the Course Audit does require one: the school confirms that each student has a college-level Introduction to Business textbook for individual use, in print or electronic form, supplemented where needed. College Board publishes an Example Textbook List of 13 titles, and states that the list is not exhaustive and that the texts listed should not be regarded as endorsed, authorized, recommended, or approved by College Board.
When is the first AP Business with Personal Finance exam?
Tuesday, May 4, 2027, in Session 1. The course launches for the 2026-27 school year, so the first cohort tests at the end of that year.
What is on the exam?
Two sections, 2 hours 40 minutes, taken digitally in Bluebook. Section I is 60 multiple-choice questions in 70 minutes, worth 60%. Section II is 4 free-response questions in 90 minutes, worth 40%: a Business Canvas Project exam-day validation question (15%), then Personal Finance, Business Concept Application, and Business Decision.
Is Unit 5 on the AP Exam?
No. The CED states that Unit 5 is designed to be taught either before or after the AP Exam, as suits a school's calendar, and is not assessed on the exam. Units 1 through 4 should be taught before the exam.
Does the course have a project?
Two, and both are required. The Business Canvas Project runs through the course, is introduced in Unit 1 and integrated across Units 2 to 4, and is assessed on the exam by a validation question. Students do not submit it to College Board for scoring. The Financial Advisor Project is the culminating project in Unit 5 and is scored by the teacher against a rubric in the CED.
Are there prerequisites?
No. The CED says there are no specific course prerequisites, and that students should be motivated and willing to work both individually and in teams on college-level projects.
What does the AP Course Audit require?
Every teacher submits a Course Audit form and completes one of four authorization pathways, assigned at random: syllabus submission, guided syllabus creation, online learning modules, or a course knowledge check. For the launch year the window runs March 2026 to January 2027, with January 31, 2027 as the deadline for the initial submission of course materials.
Does College Board endorse a curriculum provider for this course?
College Board's CED names four National Partners: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Council for Economic Education, the National Business Education Association, and the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship. It does not name curriculum vendors as endorsed providers, and its textbook list is explicitly non-endorsing. Treat any product claiming official status carefully, including ours: we align independently to the public framework.
Teaching it this year?
We build a full-year AP Business with Personal Finance curriculum: 5 units and 31 lesson packets with editable slides, guided notes, case studies, AP-style MCQs, Mini-FRQs with scoring guides, and answer keys, plus the Business Canvas and Financial Advisor project arcs built in. Start with the free lesson and see whether it fits how you teach.
AP Business: Full-Year Course
Editable full-year AP Business with Personal Finance curriculum: 5 units, 31 lessons, case studies, projects, FRQs & answer keys.
$250$369View the full course
Teaching Intro to Business instead?
The same units cover the standard intro scope, including Principles of Business, Marketing, and Finance in Texas. You can run the sequence as an on-level course and keep the AP alignment for when the course is added.
AP® is a trademark registered by the College Board, which is not affiliated with, and does not endorse, this product. Our curriculum is independently aligned to the publicly available AP® Business with Personal Finance Course Framework. Course details on this page come from College Board's published Course and Exam Description, AP Central, and the Course Audit requirements; check those sources directly for anything you are making a scheduling or budget decision on.