PMP Certification Eligibility Criteria

To be eligible for the PMP credential, 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.

The eligibility requirements depend upon your Education Background.

  1. If you hold a Secondary degree (high school diploma, associate's degree or global equivalent), then you need:
    • Project Management Experience: Minimum five years/60 months unique nonoverlapping professional project management experience.
    • Project Management Education: 35 contact hours of formal project management education OR CAPM® Certification.
  2. If you hold a Four-year degree (bachelor's degree or global equivalent), then you need:
    • Project Management Experience: Minimum three years/36 months unique non-overlapping professional project management experience.
    • Project Management Education: 35 contact hours of formal project management education OR CAPM® Certification.
  3. If you hold a Bachelor's or post-graduate degree from a GAC accredited program (bachelor's degree or master's or global equivalent), then you need:
    • Project Management Experience: Minimum two years/24 months unique non-overlapping professional project management experience.
    • Project Management Education: GAC course work can be used to fulfill the 35 contact hours of formal project management education requirement.

For complete details, refer to the PMP Handbook and PMP Exam Content Outline.

PMP Certification Eligibility Criteria

What does non-overlapping experience mean for the PMP exam?

Let’s say that you have managed 2 project in 2019. Project 1 ran from Jan’19 to Jun’19 (6 months), and Project 2 ran from Apr’19 to Dec’19 (9 months). In this case, you have an overlap between the two projects during Apr’19 to Jun’19 (3 months). So the experience from these 3 months is counted as 3 months, and not 3 x 2 = 6 months. Therefore, your total unique non-overlapping experience would be counted as 12 (3 + 3 + 6) months, not 15 (6 + 9) months.

The PMP Exam Content Outline has a very nice example with a diagram to explain this requirement.

More PMP FAQs

For more PMP FAQs refer to: 100+ FAQs on PMP Certification Exam