The Headline Figures
PMI publishes two prices for the Award in Pension Trusteeship:
| Item | Fee |
|---|---|
| Exam entry, candidates who are not current PMI student members | £617 |
| Exam entry, current PMI student members | £330 |
| PMI Student Membership (required, added automatically if not held) | £287 a year |
| Physical certificate (optional) | £85 |
Fees change, so check PMI's own qualification page before you budget around these. They were correct when this post was last reviewed.
Why the Two Prices Are Really One Price
At first glance the £617 and £330 look like a discount for members. Put the numbers together and something simpler emerges: £330 plus £287 comes to exactly £617.
PMI Student Membership is mandatory for the qualification and is added to your entry automatically if you do not already hold it. The £617 is therefore the combined cost of the exam and a year of membership, while the £330 is what you pay when you already hold the membership and have paid for it separately.
The practical consequence is that there is no first-year saving to be found by joining PMI before you enter. If you are sitting the APT and nothing else, budget £617 and stop worrying about which line it splits across. The £330 rate becomes relevant if you are already a student member for another reason, or in a later year if you sit something else while your membership is still running.
What Else You Might Pay
The certificate. A physical certificate is £85 and it is optional. Your result comes by email with your raw score and percentage, and that is what employers and accrediting bodies work from. Buy the certificate if you want it on a wall.
A resit. PMI reports the result as a pass or a fail. Failing means entering again and paying to sit again, and it also means waiting, which is usually the more expensive part. There are three public sittings in 2026, on 18 March, 15 July and 17 November, so a failed attempt typically costs about four months as well as another entry fee. Check the current resit fee with PMI directly.
Study materials. There is no compulsory purchase here, which is unusual for a professional qualification. The Pensions Regulator's Trustee Toolkit is free, covers a lot of the underlying material, and is where the APT's own reading list points. PMI sells its own study support separately. Third-party tutor-led APT courses exist and are priced by the provider.
Practice questions. Trustee Prep is £9.99 a month. That is entirely separate from anything PMI charges and it is not a substitute for the exam entry fee.
Your time. PMI's published total qualification time is 100 hours, of which 3.5 are guided learning and 95 are self-study. For anyone billing their time, that is by a wide margin the largest number on this page.
What It Costs a Firm
Employers putting a group through the exam have a second option. PMI runs 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.
| Group size | Private sitting fee |
|---|---|
| 10 candidates | £6,500 |
| 16 to 20 candidates | £11,000 |
At ten candidates that works out at £650 each, which is close to the individual non-member rate. What the private sitting buys is control of the date. Rather than fitting a cohort around three fixed public sittings, a firm can pick a day that suits its own training calendar, which for a team of ten people with client commitments is often worth more than the per-head arithmetic suggests.
Budgeting for Accreditation Rather Than the Award
If your reason for sitting the APT is professional trustee accreditation, the exam is one line in a longer budget. Both the APPT and PMI routes also require:
- Completion of The Pensions Regulator's Trustee Toolkit, which is free
- A pass in CPT Unit 2, priced separately by PMI
- Fit and proper checks, including a basic DBS check
- Ongoing CPD of 25 hours a year, of which at least 15 must be structured, plus a fresh DBS check every three years
The recurring CPD requirement is the part that most often gets left out of a first budget, and it does not end. Our guide to becoming an accredited professional pension trustee sets out the whole sequence.
One caution on that CPD line. Practice questions, ours included, are revision rather than structured CPD, and we do not offer them as counting towards the accreditation requirement. Confirm what qualifies with APPT or PMI before you plan hours around it.
The Cheapest Sensible Route
For an individual paying their own way:
- Work through the Trustee Toolkit first. It is free, official, and required for accreditation anyway. Twelve modules and roughly 18 to 22 hours.
- Read the APT specification. It is published by PMI and lists all 92 assessment criteria. It is the definitive answer to what can be asked, and it costs nothing.
- Test yourself before you book. At a 75% pass mark you can afford 15 wrong answers out of 60, and the honest way to find out whether you are there is to answer questions rather than to re-read.
- Only enter when your practice scores are comfortably above 75%. A single avoided resit pays for a great deal of preparation, and it saves four months.
That order is deliberate. The most expensive way to sit this exam is to pay £617, sit it early and find out in an email that you scored 71%.
Where Our Price Sits
Trustee Prep is £9.99 a month, and it is a practice question platform rather than a course. We do not teach the syllabus and we are not affiliated with or endorsed by PMI, the Association of Professional Pension Trustees or The Pensions Regulator. Everything PMI charges is separate and is paid to PMI directly.
You can find out where you stand before spending anything with us. Practice on The Trust and Its Creation is free with no card required, and our guide to the Award in Pension Trusteeship covers the format and the sitting calendar in full.
Start practising APT questions free.