PMP certification training, judged on one question: will PMI accept it?

PMP certification training is sold on comfort — cohorts, mentors, mock exams, money-back promises. None of that is what your application is assessed on. Your application is assessed on whether you can evidence 35 hours of project-management training that PMI will accept if it audits you, and audits are random.

So this page asks one question of every route: will PMI accept these hours? Everything below comes from PMI’s PMP certification page and the PMP Examination Content Outline — July 2026, both read on 24 September 2026. Where a provider’s own page is quoted, it is quoted for its own price and nothing else.

The requirement, in PMI’s words

You need at least 35 hours of commercial training in project management, aligned to the topics in the PMP Exam Content Outline, recorded in the training section of the application. PMI counts an hour of classroom instruction as one training hour; its own example turns a university course of three hours a week for fifteen weeks into 45 training hours.

Two details catch people out. First, PMI says to record all training hours regardless of when they were accrued — unlike your project experience, the training has no ten-year window, so a course you took in 2015 still counts. Second, books and practice exams on their own will not be accepted. A question bank is not training, however much of it you get through.

“Lastly, books and practice exams alone will NOT be accepted as eligible commercial training.” — PMP Examination Content Outline, July 2026

Who PMI says may teach those hours

PMI lists seven kinds of provider: a PMI Authorized Training Partner, a China Registered Education Provider, a programme accredited by PMI’s Global Accreditation Center, a project-management course from an accredited higher-education institution, an employer or company-sponsored programme, a training company or consultant, and a self-paced on-demand course that includes an end-of-course assessment.

That list is broader than the marketing around it suggests. PMI states plainly that it does not endorse or control third-party training providers and that candidates are free to prepare in any way they choose, so long as the training reaches 35 hours and aligns to the exam content outline. It also reserves the right to judge training to be of poor quality and disqualify it — which is the risk you carry with any provider, however it advertises itself.

The 1 December 2026 change, and who it hits

From 1 December 2026, a live class — taught by an instructor in person or online — only satisfies the training requirement if it is delivered by a PMI Authorized Training Partner, a China Registered Education Provider, or an eligible accredited higher-education programme, including GAC programmes. PMI states this on its PMP certification page.

Read what it does not say. It does not touch self-paced courses, which remain acceptable from any organisation as long as they include an end-of-course assessment. It does not retroactively cancel hours you already hold. What it removes is the generic live class from a training company with no PMI status — the cheapest kind of live cohort on the market, and the kind most likely to be advertised as “35 contact hours” without saying who is behind it.

If you are booking a live cohort that runs after that date, the provider’s name in PMI’s Authorized Training Partner directory is now part of the product. Check it there, not on the provider’s own page.

PMI’s own course: the one nobody can argue with

PMI sells a PMP Exam Prep Course of 35 hours, worth 35 PDUs, at USD $699 for members and USD $799 for everyone else. It is the most expensive route on this page and the only one where the organisation assessing your application is also the organisation that taught you. If an audit is the thing keeping you up at night, this removes that worry completely.

PMI also gives away a one-hour introduction at USD $0, which is a sensible thing to spend an evening on before you spend anything else. Neither product earns this site a penny: PMI runs no affiliate programme we could verify, so the link here is an ordinary link, and we would still put it first.

The membership maths is less flattering than it looks. PMI individual membership is USD $139 a year and takes $100 off that course. On the course alone, membership leaves you $39 worse off. Whether it pays for itself depends on the exam fee discount, and PMI does not publish the exam fee — so nobody, including us, can finish that calculation honestly.

KnowledgeHut: Premier Authorized Training Partner, priced by region

KnowledgeHut describes itself as a Premier Authorized Training Partner of PMI and sells 36 contact hours of live instructor-led training, bundled with a complimentary self-paced course that carries 35 contact hours of its own. The ATP status is the part that matters after 1 December 2026, and it is the part you should confirm in PMI’s directory rather than on the sales page.

The price we were shown on 24 September 2026 was €399 against a €1,199 list price. That is a discount of about two thirds, displayed as the normal state of affairs, and it will not be the number you see: KnowledgeHut prices by region and runs offers continuously. Treat any figure — including ours — as a sample, not a price list.

Two things on that page deserve a flag. It markets a “100% Money-Back Guarantee”, which is a refund policy, not a statement about your chances. And on the day we read it, its eligibility summary said project experience must fall “within the past 8 years” and listed only two education routes. PMI’s current rule is ten years and four routes. Buy the training, not the summary.

Simplilearn: 35 contact hours, live, and a guarantee we will not repeat

Simplilearn sells live instructor-led PMP training advertised as 35 contact hours — exactly the number the application asks for, with nothing spare. The price displayed to us on 24 September 2026 was €299, marked “30% Off” against €429.

Its eligibility summary was better than KnowledgeHut’s: it had the ten-year window right. It still listed only two of PMI’s four routes, leaving out the associate-degree and GAC paths, which are precisely the routes that shorten the experience requirement for the people most likely to be reading them.

Simplilearn also markets a “100% Money Back Guarantee” and its page carries an FAQ headed with the PMP pass rate. PMI publishes no pass rate. Whatever answer sits under that heading did not come from PMI, and you will not find a pass rate anywhere on this site.

Coursera: the Google certificate, and whether its hours count

The Google Project Management Professional Certificate is a seven-course self-paced series on Coursera, charged at $49 a month after a seven-day free trial, with Coursera’s own page estimating that most learners finish for less than $300. Coursera says the certificate “qualifies you for over 100 hours of project management education” and carries an ACE recommendation of up to nine college credits.

Here is the honest position. PMI’s list accepts self-paced on-demand courses that include an end-of-course assessment, and this one is assessed throughout — so it fits the category. But PMI names no provider as pre-approved, keeps the right to reject training it judges poor, and Coursera’s own wording points the certificate at the CAPM, not the PMP. It is a defensible route to the hours and a genuinely good introduction; it is not a guarantee, and anyone telling you it is has read neither page.

Note also that it is a subscription. Finish in three months and it costs about $147; take nine and it costs about $441. The price is set by your pace, not by the seller.

Udemy: plentiful, cheap, and the one route we will not price

A recorded PMP course from a marketplace can satisfy PMI’s requirement, provided it ends in an assessment and genuinely runs to 35 hours of instruction. Plenty do. For a self-disciplined candidate who mostly needs the certificate of completion and already knows how to sit down and study, it is a perfectly reasonable one.

We do not print a price for it. Marketplace list prices are promotional almost continuously and vary by region and account, so any figure we published would be wrong within days — and a wrong price on a certification page is worse than no price. What we will say is what to check: that the course states a number of hours on its completion certificate, because that certificate is what an audit asks you to produce.

Training you may already have, and did not count

Before you buy anything, add up what you already hold. An employer’s internal project-management programme counts. A university module counts, for the hours that were actually project management. A course from 2018 counts, because the training requirement has no expiry. An active CAPM waives the 35 hours entirely — PMI treats the certification itself as a 35-training-hour credit.

That last one is worth a moment. If you already hold a live CAPM, the whole of this page is optional for you, and no training provider has any reason to mention it.