Accreditation Is a Sequence of Five Steps
Professional trustee accreditation in the UK runs through two parallel regimes. The Association of Professional Pension Trustees (APPT) operates one and the Pensions Management Institute operates the other. Both are built on the standards published in 2019 by the Professional Trustee Standards Working Group, and the requirements they set are closely aligned.
Neither is a single exam. Each is a sequence of five things, followed by an ongoing obligation that never ends while you remain accredited:
- Complete The Pensions Regulator's Trustee Toolkit
- Pass CPT Unit 1, which is the Award in Pension Trusteeship
- Pass CPT Unit 2, the soft skills unit
- Pass fit and proper checks
- Maintain continuing professional development, with a fresh DBS check every three years
Most people meet the first three across a year or so, depending on how the exam sitting calendar falls. This post takes the steps in order and points out where the timing traps are.
Step 1: The Trustee Toolkit
The Pensions Regulator's Trustee Toolkit is free e-learning, made up of 12 modules with 12 assessments, and TPR indicates roughly 18 to 22 hours to work through it.
It is a prerequisite for accreditation under both regimes. It is also genuinely good material, written by the regulator whose expectations you will be judged against, and the APT's own reading list points at it. There is no sensible reason to skip it or to leave it until last, and a fair number of candidates find that working through it first makes the qualification content considerably easier to absorb.
We have written a fuller comparison of what the Toolkit covers and what it does not in our post on the Trustee Toolkit and the APT.
Step 2: CPT Unit 1, the Award in Pension Trusteeship
CPT Unit 1 and the Award in Pension Trusteeship are the same unit and the same exam. Passing it certificates you with the standalone APT and also satisfies the Unit 1 requirement for both accreditation routes. If you already hold the APT, you are exempt from sitting CPT Unit 1 again.
The exam is 60 multiple-choice questions in 90 minutes with a nominal pass mark of 75%, delivered online and remotely proctored through TestReach. There are no entry requirements beyond PMI Student Membership, which is added to your entry automatically if you do not hold it.
PMI lists three public sittings in 2026: 18 March, 15 July and 17 November. That calendar is the single biggest driver of how long accreditation takes. A failed or missed sitting costs about four months, which is why candidates working to a firm deadline generally aim to be comfortably above 75% in practice several weeks before the date rather than arriving at it hoping.
The full detail on format, fees and syllabus is in our guide to the Award in Pension Trusteeship.
Step 3: CPT Unit 2, Soft Skills
Unit 2 covers the behavioural side of trusteeship rather than the technical content of Unit 1. It is also a 60-question, 90-minute multiple-choice paper.
One point worth knowing before you sit it: PMI itself notes that soft-skills items do not always have a single definitive correct answer in the way a question about the Pensions Act 1995 does. Candidates who prepare for Unit 2 as though it were a second Unit 1, with a right answer waiting to be recalled, often find it a different experience. It rewards judgement about how a trustee should behave in a board setting more than it rewards recall.
Holding the APT alone does not complete either accreditation route. Both want Unit 2 as well.
Step 4: Fit and Proper Checks
Both regimes require a fit and proper assessment, made up of:
- A basic DBS check
- Five years of employment history
- Two industry references
It is worth being clear about what this is and is not. This is a professional accreditation standard operated by APPT and PMI. It is not a statutory precondition of holding office as a pension trustee. Anyone can be appointed a trustee of an occupational scheme without any of it.
What the law does impose separately is disqualification. Under the Pensions Act 1995, certain events automatically bar a person from acting as a trustee, including being an undischarged bankrupt, having been convicted of an offence involving dishonesty or deception, being disqualified as a company director, having previously been removed as a trustee for misconduct or mismanagement, and lacking capacity. Those grounds apply to individual trustees and to the directors of a corporate trustee alike, and they operate by law without anyone needing to make an order. The Pensions Regulator can also make prohibition and suspension orders, which are different in kind because they require TPR to make a decision.
Understanding that distinction is examinable in its own right, and it comes up in the appointment and removal of trustees.
Step 5: CPD, and What Comes After Accreditation
Accreditation is not a one-off. Once accredited you must complete 25 hours of continuing professional development a year, of which at least 15 must be structured, and obtain a fresh DBS check every three years.
Please treat the structured CPD requirement carefully. It has to be met through activity that qualifies as structured CPD under your accrediting body's rules. Working through a practice question bank, ours included, is revision. It is not structured CPD and we do not offer it as such. If you are counting hours towards accreditation, check what qualifies with APPT or PMI directly rather than assuming.
Realistic Timings
There is no fixed length to the route, but the shape of it is fairly predictable.
- The Toolkit is the only step you fully control. 18 to 22 hours, whenever you can find them.
- Unit 1 and Unit 2 are gated by three public sittings a year. If your firm can gather ten candidates, private sittings are available on working days with at least one calendar month's notice, which removes the calendar constraint entirely.
- Fit and proper checks depend on how quickly your two referees respond, which in a small industry is usually a matter of weeks rather than months.
The candidates who take longest are almost always the ones who left the Toolkit until after the exams and then discovered that a sitting date had passed.
Is It Worth Doing If You Are Not Going Professional?
Accreditation is designed for people who act as trustees professionally. If you are a member-nominated trustee on one board, or a scheme secretary supporting one, the full route is probably more than you need.
The APT on its own is a different question, and for a lot of people it is a reasonable answer. It is open entry, it is a recognised Level 3 qualification, and it maps onto the same trustee knowledge that The Pensions Regulator expects every trustee to have. Plenty of pensions lawyers, in-house pensions managers and scheme secretaries sit it for credibility with boards and clients without any intention of becoming a professional trustee.
There is also an open question hanging over the whole area. The Government consulted between December 2025 and March 2026 on putting professional trustee standards on a statutory footing, and the response had not been published when we last reviewed this post. We have set out what was proposed and what remains undecided in our post on the DWP consultation on trustee accreditation. Nothing in that consultation has changed the requirements described above.
Start With the Technical Unit
Of the five steps, the one that takes real preparation is CPT Unit 1. It is the exam with the 75% threshold, the 92 assessment criteria and the synoptic paper.
Practice on The Trust and Its Creation is free on Trustee Prep, with no card required, and it is the natural place to find out how much of the syllabus you already know.
Trustee Prep is an independent practice platform and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Pensions Management Institute, the Association of Professional Pension Trustees or The Pensions Regulator. Accreditation requirements are set by APPT and PMI and can change, so confirm the current position with them before you plan around it.
Start practising APT questions free.