The most widely held project management credential, revised on 9 July 2026 with a new Examination Content Outline that reweighted every domain and made AI and sustainability testable for the first time.
$425 for PMI members. $675 without membership, which is more than the cost of joining. A retake is $275 for members and $375 without.
Format
180 questions in 240 minutes, of which 170 are scored and 10 are unscored pretest items that are not identified. Multiple choice, multiple response, matching, hotspot and limited fill in the blank, with case study sets introduced in the 2026 revision. Two optional 10 minute breaks.
Pass mark
PMI publishes no percentage. Results arrive as a rating of Above Target, Target, Below Target or Needs Improvement in each of the three domains, alongside an overall pass or fail.
Prerequisites
35 hours of project management education on every route, with no waiver for experience. Then either a four year degree and 36 months leading projects, or a secondary school diploma and 60 months. A degree from a GAC accredited programme reduces the experience requirement to 24 months.
Renewal
60 professional development units every three years, of which at least 35 must come from education and no more than 25 from giving back. Renewal costs $60 for members and $150 without.
Based on
The PMP Examination Content Outline effective 9 July 2026 and the PMBOK Guide 8th edition
What it covers
What it covers. The exam changed substantially on 9 July 2026 and a great deal of the preparation material in circulation still describes the previous one. People fell from 42 per cent to 33, Process from 50 to 41, and Business Environment rose from 8 per cent to 26. That last move is the largest change to the credential in years and it is where most candidates are now underprepared.
AI in project management and sustainability became testable topics in the same revision. Case study sets appeared as a question format, and the time allowed rose from 230 minutes to 240. Roughly 60 per cent of the content sits in adaptive or hybrid delivery rather than purely predictive work, so a candidate who has only run stage gated projects has ground to make up.
The reference is now the PMBOK Guide 8th edition, which consolidated twelve principles into six, reduced eight performance domains to seven, and reintroduced five focus areas holding 40 processes. It is closer to the sixth edition in structure than the seventh was, which is a relief to anybody who found the seventh hard to revise from.
Preparation is mostly situational judgement rather than recall. Most questions describe a project in difficulty and ask what the project manager does next, and the answer usually turns on who owns the decision, what the baseline says, and whether the approach is predictive or adaptive.
The syllabus3 domains · free
PMI’s own domains. Each opens its own page listing the concepts beneath it, and each concept has a page of its own.
A senior integration engineer on a payments migration has delivered every task she has been given with no supervision, and the project manager stopped reviewing her work months ago. A new financial reporting rule has just come into scope, she has never worked in that area, and her first outline of the approach misses two obligations the compliance lead spotted immediately. What should the project manager do next?
ALeave the reporting work with her unsupervised, because she has earned the autonomy and will find the gaps herself.
BMove the reporting work to a contractor who has delivered it before, so she is not set up to fail.
CRaise the gaps with her functional manager so they can be handled as a development objective.
DGive her close direction on the reporting work while continuing to leave the rest of her tasks alone.