The Short Answer
The Award in Pension Trusteeship (APT) is a Level 3 qualification from the Pensions Management Institute, sitting on the Regulated Qualifications Framework and worth 10 credits. It has one mandatory unit, called Pension Trusteeship, and one assessment: a 60-question multiple-choice exam of 90 minutes with a nominal pass mark of 75%.
The same unit is also examined as Unit 1 of PMI's Certificate in Pension Trusteeship (CPT). If you pass the APT you hold both the standalone award and the Unit 1 pass that the professional trustee accreditation routes ask for.
This post covers the format, the fees, the sitting dates and where the qualification fits, so you can decide whether and when to book.
What the Exam Looks Like
There is no coursework, no portfolio, no written paper and no oral assessment at any stage. The whole qualification is one multiple-choice paper.
| Attribute | Detail |
|---|---|
| Units | One mandatory unit (Pension Trusteeship) |
| Questions | 60, one mark each |
| Duration | 90 minutes |
| Pass mark | 75% nominal, which is 45 marks out of 60 |
| Grading | Pass or fail, with your raw score and percentage reported by email |
| Level and credits | RQF Level 3, 10 credits |
| Total qualification time | 100 hours (3.5 guided learning hours, 95 hours of self-study, 1.5 hours of assessment) |
Two features of that table deserve more attention than they usually get.
The first is the pass mark. 75% is materially higher than most Level 3 multiple-choice exams in UK professional qualifications, several of which sit at 65% or 70%. If you practise against a 70% threshold and consistently score 72%, you are not ready. You can afford 15 wrong answers out of 60, and no more.
The second is that PMI describes the paper as synoptic. Questions are free to cut across the syllabus rather than sitting neatly inside one learning outcome, so a question that looks like it is about investment may really be testing a fiduciary principle from trust law. Revision organised as separate silos tends to come apart under that kind of paper.
The 90-Second Rule
90 minutes for 60 questions gives you an average of 90 seconds per question. That average matters more than it sounds, because the questions are not uniform in length. A definitional recall item ("which Act created The Pensions Regulator?") takes twenty seconds. A scenario item describing a trustee board, a conflicted director and a discretionary decision takes considerably longer to read before you can even start thinking.
Sitting at least a few full 60-question papers under time is the single most useful thing most candidates do, because pace is the part of the exam that reading alone cannot prepare you for.
What the Syllabus Covers
PMI groups the unit into three syllabus areas:
- Law and pensions overview
- Investment and funding issues for defined contribution and defined benefit pensions
- Scheme management issues for defined contribution and defined benefit pensions
Underneath those areas the specification publishes seven learning outcomes and 92 assessment criteria, running from the basic concepts of a trust through to the contents of an internal control report. The specification is a public document and it is worth reading before you book, because the 92 criteria are the actual scope of what can be asked.
Many of the criteria are explicitly labelled (DB only) or (DC only). Funding measures, transfers and the covenant are DB items. Charges, default arrangements and decumulation are DC items. Trustees who have only ever worked with one scheme type routinely lose marks on the other, and that is the most predictable weak spot on the whole paper.
On our own site we arrange those 92 criteria into five modules and 22 units so that they are practicable to work through. That arrangement is ours rather than PMI's: PMI publishes a flat list of seven learning outcomes with no intermediate grouping and no published weightings, and you should not read our module sizes as a guide to how many exam questions each area will attract.
The five modules are:
- Trust law and the role of the trustee, covering the creation of a trust, appointment and removal, fiduciary duties, conflicts, powers and protections
- Pensions law and regulation, covering the statute book, The Pensions Regulator, disputes, tax, automatic enrolment and scheme design
- Investment for DB and DC schemes, covering asset classes, strategy, managers, fees, responsible investment and the Statement of Investment Principles
- Funding, benefits and member protection, covering actuarial valuation, the employer covenant, the Statutory Funding Objective, DC arrangements, transfers and the Pension Protection Fund
- Scheme documentation and governance, covering the trust deed and rules, member communications, annual reports, control reports and running a trustee board
One of the seven learning outcomes is given over entirely to a single document, the Statement of Investment Principles, which makes it unusually good value per hour of revision. We have covered it separately in our post on what a Statement of Investment Principles is.
How and When You Sit It
The exam is delivered online through TestReach and is remotely proctored. You sit it at home or at your workplace with a live proctor watching both you and your screen, so you need a quiet room, a working camera and a stable connection.
PMI lists three public sittings in 2026: 18 March, 15 July and 17 November. Three dates a year is not many, and it changes how you should plan. Missing a sitting costs you roughly four months rather than a fortnight, so the sensible approach is to count backwards from a chosen date and start early enough that you are comfortable a few weeks before, rather than aiming to peak on the morning itself.
Employers can also arrange private sittings on working days between 09:00 and 17:00, subject to a minimum of ten candidates and at least one calendar month's notice. Firms putting a cohort through at once usually find this easier to manage than three fixed public dates.
What It Costs
PMI charges £617 for candidates who are not current student members. Current PMI student members pay £330, with student membership itself costing £287 a year and added automatically to your entry if you do not already hold it. A physical certificate is an optional £85.
Private sittings for firms are priced separately, starting at £6,500 for ten candidates and rising to £11,000 for a group of 16 to 20.
We have broken all of this down, including how the two routes compare once membership is counted, in our post on how much the APT costs.
Who Can Sit It
There are no entry requirements. You do not need a prior qualification, a pensions background or a minimum period in office. You do need PMI Student Membership, which is added to your entry automatically if you do not hold it.
That open entry is deliberate. The APT is built on The Pensions Regulator's indicative syllabus for trustee knowledge and is designed to be sat by people who are already serving as trustees, including lay and member-nominated trustees who came to the board from an entirely different job.
Where the APT Sits Among PMI's Trusteeship Qualifications
- Award in Pension Trusteeship (APT). Level 3, the technical trustee knowledge qualification described here, and equivalent to CPT Unit 1.
- Certificate in Pension Trusteeship (CPT). Unit 1 (the technical content, identical to the APT) plus Unit 2, which covers soft skills. Unit 2 is also a 60-question, 90-minute multiple-choice paper, though PMI notes that soft-skills items do not always have a single definitive correct answer. If you already hold the APT you are exempt from sitting CPT Unit 1.
- Diploma in Pension Trusteeship (DPT). The advanced qualification, aimed at judgement on complex issues, and the first PMI trusteeship qualification to integrate ESG.
If your reason for sitting the APT is professional trustee accreditation, the APT on its own is a component rather than the finish line. Both the APPT and PMI accreditation routes want CPT Unit 2 as well, plus completion of The Pensions Regulator's Trustee Toolkit and a set of fit and proper checks. Our guide to becoming an accredited professional pension trustee sets out the full route in order.
How Much Study It Really Takes
PMI's total qualification time of 100 hours is the published guide, and only 3.5 of those hours are guided learning. The rest is self-study. Whether that is generous or tight depends almost entirely on where you are starting from.
An experienced scheme secretary or pensions lawyer will already know a great deal of Module 1 and Module 2, and will be spending their time on the investment and funding criteria. A member-nominated trustee two months into their first board will be meeting most of it for the first time. Neither is unusual, and neither should read the 100-hour figure as a promise.
What is common to both is the need to test yourself rather than only read. Answering questions you might get wrong is a better predictor of exam readiness than time spent with the specification open, and at a 75% threshold you want that prediction to be reliable before you pay to sit.
Try the Free Unit
You can find out where you stand without spending anything. Practice on The Trust and Its Creation, the opening unit on trust law, is free on Trustee Prep with no card required.
Trustee Prep is an independent practice platform. We are not affiliated with or endorsed by the Pensions Management Institute, the Association of Professional Pension Trustees or The Pensions Regulator, and you book your exam directly with PMI. Fees and sitting dates change, so check the current position on PMI's own site before you commit.
Start practising APT questions free.