I don’t count hours, never have. If I know it, I KNOW that I know it.
120-150 here. For l2 I did 150-180, and I passed, but still had some weaknesses. I felt less confident for l3.
The question you have to ask yourself is what would you like your odds of passing to be? Maybe you could get away with only 250 hours. But maybe that would raise your odds of failure to, let’s say, 30% (and that’s being pretty darn generous, isn’t it?–given that the odds of failure generally are about 50%). So you would have a 30% chance of having to take the exam next year and study again. And you sure as heck wouldn’t take any chances the next year, would you? No sir. You would buckle down and put in at least 350 hours, wouldn’t you? So your expected time on the exam would be 250 hrs + .3 (350) = 355 hours. For my part, I’d much rather put in the 350 hours and raise my overall confidence level. These calculations are just rough, of course, but you get the idea, I’m sure, or you wouldn’t have put in 500 hours for level 2. You might be able to shave a little bit off of that for Level 3, I think, but not alot.
I think the 250 number is roughly what someone with some industry experience/background would require. The number goes up from that level based on that. The correct answer to the question is “it takes as long as is needed to honestly say that you fully grasp the material”. Depending on your background, that range is pretty damn wide.
As obvious as it sounds, Level III is more difficult than Level II because half of the 40% best performers of level II will fail Level III. I studied twice as hard for Level III than for Level II (perhaps 300 hours vs 150 hours) and feel way less confident this year. The exam was more difficult than many people think, tons of traps, gave false sense of confidence…