PMP Certification Exam Requirements

To be eligible for the Project Management Professional (PMP®) certification, you must meet certain educational and professional experience requirements. All project management experience must have been accrued within the last eight consecutive years prior to your application submission.

Experience must include leading and directing projects. A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result (as defined by the PMBOK® Guide). 

In addition to one of the three below (Set A, B, or C) project management experience and education sets, applications must also have at least 35 contact hours of formal project management education unless they are an active CAPM® holder. If you are an active CAPM® certification holder, you do NOT need to document the 35 contact hours. Your project management education requirement is waived.

The PMP® examination is comprised of 180 questions. Of the 180 questions, 5 are considered pretest questions. Pretest questions do not affect the score and are used in examinations as an effective and legitimate way to test the validity of future examination questions. All questions are randomly placed throughout the examination. For a list of current item types included in the exam, please refer to the PMP® Exam Updates page on pmi.org. 

# of Scored Questions:175

# of Pretest (Unscored) Questions: 5

Total Exam Questions: 180 

Allotted Exam Time: 230 Minutes 

For the PMP® exam, there are now two 10-minute breaks in the exam. The first break will appear after you complete questions 1- 60 and review all of your answers. The second break will appear after you have completed question 120 and confirmed that you have reviewed all of your answers. Please note, once you review your responses and start your break you will not be able to return to the questions from the previous section of the exam. 

When you are signed back in after each break, you will have the remaining allotted time to complete the remaining section(s). In total, you will have 230 minutes to respond to 180 questions. 

NOTE: The examination is preceded by a tutorial and followed by a survey, both of which are optional, and take 5-15 minutes to complete. The time used to complete the tutorial and survey is not included in the examination time of 230 minutes.

If you do not pass your first exam attempt, we encourage you to continue your study and retake the exam. You may take the examination up to three times within your one-year eligibility period. After three attempts, you must wait one year from the date of the last examination before you reapply for the certification. This policy is to designed to uphold exam security and reduce overexposure of examination questions to individual candidates. However, during this year you are welcome to apply for any other PMI certification. 

If your one year eligibility period expires without you passing the examination, you must reapply for the certification.

All information courtesy of PMI.org