PMP Practice Questions: 25 Exam-Style Examples With Answers and Explanations (2026 ECO)

Most free PMP practice questions floating around were written for the 2021 Exam Content Outline. That matters more than usual this year, because on 9 July 2026 PMI tripled the weight of one domain and shrank the task list by a quarter. A question set built on the old weights over-tests the things the exam now cares about least.

These 25 PMP practice questions are written to the current outline. They are split roughly in line with the live domain weights: 8 on People (33%), 10 on Process (41%) and 7 on Business Environment (26%). Around 60% of them sit in agile or hybrid delivery contexts, which is the approach mix PMI now uses.

Work through them cold, then read the explanations. The explanation is the part that teaches you something, so do not skip it on the ones you got right.

What the 2026 PMP Exam Actually Looks Like

Before the questions, the facts you are being tested against.

The exam opens with a case study section and then moves to independent questions. Once you take a break, the section behind you is closed for review.

Exam Tip: PMI has not published a numeric passing score since 2007. There is no 61% or 175-out-of-200 target to aim at. You are scored Above Target, Target, Below Target or Needs Improvement per domain, so a lopsided performance in Business Environment can sink an otherwise strong result now that it carries 26% of the paper.

Question formats now include case study sets, enhanced matching (test centres only), pull-down lists, hotspot and graphic-based items alongside standard multiple choice and multiple response. The questions below are written as multiple choice because that is the format you can practise on a page, but the reasoning they demand is identical.

People Domain Practice Questions (8)

Answers to all 25 are in the section below the questions. Write yours down before you scroll.

1. Two senior developers on a hybrid project disagree publicly in every stand-up about the deployment approach. Velocity has dropped for three sprints. What should the project manager do first?

2. A newly formed agile team is arguing over roles, questioning the product owner's priorities and missing its first two sprint goals. Which Tuckman stage is the team in, and what does it need?

3. A project manager inherits a distributed team spread across five time zones. Stand-ups have collapsed because nobody can find a common hour. What is the best response?

4. A stakeholder with high power and low interest has started sending daily emails demanding detail-level status. What does this signal?

5. During sprint retrospective a team member says they do not feel safe raising defects because the last person who did was blamed. What should the project manager address first?

6. A functional manager pulls a key resource off your project for two weeks without warning. You are working in a weak matrix organisation. What is your most effective first step?

7. Your team has agreed a definition of done, but two members keep marking stories complete without unit tests. What is the appropriate response?

8. A servant leader on a hybrid project notices the team repeatedly blocked by a slow security review. What is the primary duty here?

Process Domain Practice Questions (10)

9. Your project has an EV of £180,000, a PV of £200,000 and an AC of £210,000. What is the cost performance index, and what does it tell you?

10. A predictive project's critical path is 45 days. Activity D on the critical path slips by 4 days. Activity F, which has 6 days of total float, slips by 3 days. What is the impact on the project finish date?

11. Halfway through a hybrid project the product owner wants to add a reporting module that was never in scope. The change would consume the entire management reserve. What should happen?

12. A risk with a 30% probability and a £50,000 impact has been identified. What is the expected monetary value, and which response strategy fits a threat of this size on a £4m project?

13. Which technique tells you the maximum number of communication channels on a team that grows from 6 members to 10?

14. Your Scrum team consistently completes 32 story points per two-week sprint. The remaining backlog is 224 points. Assuming velocity holds, how many sprints remain and what is the honest caveat?

15. A vendor is delivering under a firm fixed price contract and has fallen four weeks behind. Who carries the cost of the overrun?

16. A quality audit finds that 3 of the last 40 delivered features failed acceptance testing for the same root cause. Which tool identifies the cause rather than the symptoms?

17. During sprint planning the team commits to 40 points but the product owner asks for 55 to hit a demo date. What should the project manager support?

18. A predictive project is at 60% complete with a CPI of 0.85. The sponsor asks what the project will cost at completion assuming current performance continues. Which formula applies?

Business Environment Practice Questions (7)

19. Your organisation operates in the EU and your project delivers an AI-assisted candidate screening tool. What must the project manager confirm before release?

20. A benefits realisation plan states the project will cut processing time by 40%. The project delivers on time and on budget, but processing time falls only 12%. Was the project successful?

21. Mid-project, a competitor releases a product that makes your planned feature set obsolete. What is the project manager's duty?

22. Your project introduces a new claims system. Six weeks after go-live, adoption is at 30%. Which element of the plan was most likely weak?

23. A sponsor asks you to record a delayed milestone as complete because the quarterly board pack is due. What does the PMI Code of Ethics require?

24. Your organisation is adopting sustainability reporting. Which project artefact should capture the environmental impact of your delivery choices?

25. A programme of five projects has a shared dependency on one platform team. Which governance body owns the trade-off decision when two projects need that team in the same window?

Answers and Explanations

1. Meet both developers separately to understand the underlying positions, then facilitate a joint session to agree an approach. Collaborate or problem-solve is the conflict resolution mode PMI prefers, and it needs facts before it needs a meeting. Escalating to the sponsor hands away a decision that is yours. Removing one developer treats the symptom. Putting it to a team vote turns a technical decision into a popularity contest.

2. Storming, and it needs active coaching and facilitation. Storming is exactly this: conflict surfacing while the team works out how it operates. The response is not to leave them to it and it is not to reorganise the team. Coach them, turn the disagreements into explicit working agreements, and the team reaches norming.

3. Rotate the stand-up time on a published schedule so the burden is shared, and move status to an asynchronous written update. Fixing the meeting time to suit headquarters loads the cost onto the same people every week. Cancelling stand-ups removes the coordination the team needs. Recording a stand-up nobody attends live is theatre. The measurable thing is that the inconvenience is distributed and the information still flows.

4. The stakeholder's interest has risen and your engagement strategy is out of date. The stakeholder engagement assessment matrix is not a one-off. Daily emails are the signal that someone has moved from "keep satisfied" towards "manage closely". Update the register and the communications management plan, then agree a reporting cadence with them directly. Ignoring the emails or delegating them to a junior treats a live stakeholder as an administrative nuisance.

5. Psychological safety, before anything about the defects themselves. A team that hides defects produces a schedule that looks good and a product that is not. The retrospective finding is the more serious defect. The response is to establish a blameless post-incident norm and to demonstrate it the next time something breaks.

6. Talk to the functional manager directly, armed with the schedule impact. In a weak matrix the project manager has limited formal authority, which makes negotiation the tool, not escalation. Going straight to the sponsor before you have spoken to the person who made the decision damages a relationship you need for the rest of the project. Quantify what two weeks costs, then negotiate.

7. Take it to the team, not to the individuals. The definition of done is a team working agreement. A project manager who polices it privately becomes the enforcer and the team stops owning it. Raise it in retrospective, let the team decide how it holds itself to the standard, and make the agreement explicit.

8. Remove the impediment, which here means engaging the security function to change the review process. Servant leadership on this question is not encouragement. It is going upstream to the constraint. Adding the blocker to a risk register and reporting it every week is not removing it.

9. CPI is 0.857, so the project is spending £1 to earn 86p of value. CPI is EV divided by AC: 180,000 / 210,000 = 0.857. Anything below 1.0 means over budget for work performed. Note also that SPI is EV / PV = 180,000 / 200,000 = 0.9, so the project is behind schedule as well. Two indices below 1.0 is the classic pattern of a project in trouble on both axes.

10. The project finishes 4 days late. Only critical path slippage moves the finish date directly. Activity F consumed 3 of its 6 days of total float and now has 3 days remaining, so it has not become critical. Watch F, but the answer to the question asked is 4 days.

11. Raise a change request through integrated change control, with the management reserve exposure stated. Management reserve requires management approval, and it is not the product owner's to spend. A hybrid project still has a change control process for scope of this size. Adding it to the backlog quietly is the wrong answer even in an agile context, because the funding decision sits outside the team.

12. EMV is £15,000 (0.30 x £50,000), and mitigate is the proportionate response. At £15,000 against a £4m project this is not a candidate for transfer via insurance and it is not large enough to justify avoiding by changing scope. Reduce probability or impact, and hold contingency for the residual.

13. The communication channels formula, n(n-1)/2. Six members give 15 channels. Ten members give 45. The point of the question is the shape of the curve: a 67% increase in headcount tripled the communication overhead, which is why adding people to a late project rarely helps.

14. Seven sprints, and the caveat is that velocity is an observation, not a commitment. 224 / 32 = 7. Velocity varies with team composition, holidays, technical debt and story sizing drift, so quote a range rather than a date. Presenting sprint seven as a delivery guarantee is how forecasts turn into broken promises.

15. The seller carries it. Under firm fixed price the seller bears cost risk. Your exposure is schedule and, if the contract includes them, liquidated damages in your favour. This is the mirror image of cost plus fixed fee, where the buyer carries cost risk.

16. Root cause analysis, typically via a cause and effect (Ishikawa) diagram or five whys. A Pareto chart tells you which categories dominate. A control chart tells you whether the process is stable. Neither tells you why. With the same root cause behind three failures, the diagnostic tool is the one that traces backwards from effect to cause.

17. The team's 40 points. Commitment belongs to the team that does the work. The project manager's job here is to protect the team from scope pressure and to help the product owner find the real options: cut scope for the demo, reduce the demo's ambition, or move the date. Overcommitting to please a stakeholder produces a failed sprint and a damaged relationship six weeks later.

18. EAC = BAC / CPI. This is the formula for when current cost performance is expected to continue, which is what the sponsor asked. If the variance were judged atypical you would use EAC = AC + (BAC - EV) instead. Picking the right EAC formula depends entirely on the assumption stated in the question, which is why PMI phrases these so carefully.

19. That the tool meets the EU AI Act obligations for its risk classification. Candidate screening is treated as high risk under the Act, which brings requirements for risk management, data governance, human oversight, transparency and record keeping. Confirming regulatory compliance before release is a Business Environment task, and it is exactly the kind of content that grew when the domain went from 8% to 26%.

20. No, and this is the point of benefits realisation. On time and on budget measures delivery, not value. A project that delivers the agreed output without the agreed outcome has failed against the business case. The 2026 outline puts value delivery at the centre for this reason. The correct action is to analyse the shortfall and feed it back into the benefits realisation plan, not to declare success on the triple constraint.

21. Escalate to the sponsor and steering group with a recommendation, which may include terminating the project. The project manager owns the analysis and the recommendation. The decision to continue, pivot or stop belongs to governance. Continuing to deliver a known-obsolete scope because it is what the charter says is the failure mode this question is testing.

22. Organisational change management, specifically training and readiness. A technically successful go-live with 30% adoption is an OCM failure, not a delivery failure. The system works and the people are not using it. Look at what was assumed about training, communication and business process change in the plan.

23. Refuse, and report the milestone accurately. The Code of Ethics is explicit on honesty: PMI practitioners do not engage in or condone behaviour designed to deceive, including making misleading statements or providing false information. Seniority of the requester does not change the answer. Offer the sponsor an accurate status with a recovery plan attached, which is the version of help that does not end a career.

24. The project management plan, through the sustainability or ESG considerations captured in the business case and carried into delivery decisions. Sustainability entered the 2026 outline as a genuine content area rather than a footnote. Treating it as a communications item or a closing report line item misses that it should shape procurement, materials and design decisions while there is still time to change them.

25. The programme steering committee or programme board. A conflict between two projects sharing a scarce resource is above both project managers by definition. Neither project manager can resolve it without one of them losing, which is why programme governance exists. Escalating it is correct behaviour, not an admission of failure.

How to Use These Questions

Scoring 20 out of 25 here does not predict a pass. A 25-question set cannot cover 26 tasks across three domains, and the real exam mixes case study sets and matching items you cannot replicate on a page.

What this set can do is show you where your reasoning breaks. Read your wrong answers by domain. Three or more misses in Business Environment is the single most common gap for anyone studying from 2021-era material, because that content was 8% of the exam and is now 26%.

If the Process questions caught you out on formulas, that is a memorisation problem and it is fixable in a weekend. If the People questions caught you out on conflict and coaching, that is a judgement problem and it takes longer, because PMI wants the collaborative option almost every time.

For the changes themselves, read what actually changed in the 2026 PMP exam. For how to review a full mock without chasing the number, read how to use a PMP practice exam. If you are still deciding between credentials, CAPM vs PMP covers the entry requirements.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I pass the PMP in 2 weeks?

Only if you already manage projects daily and know the ECO. PMI requires 35 hours of project management education plus 36 months of experience with a four-year degree, or 60 months without one, so nobody starts from zero. For an experienced project manager with the prerequisites already banked, two weeks of focused revision on the domain weights and question style is realistic. For anyone else, it is not.

Is the PMP exam actually hard?

It is hard in a specific way: the questions are situational and several options are defensible. You are picking what PMI considers best practice, not what worked at your last employer. Candidates who fail usually fail on judgement rather than knowledge, which is why practice questions with explanations are more useful than reading the PMBOK Guide again.

Is PMP still worth it in 2026?

For roles that screen on it, yes, and the 2026 refresh has made it more current rather than less. The exam now spans agile and hybrid delivery at roughly 60%, and covers AI-enabled project work and sustainability. Our full breakdown is in is PMP certification worth it.

What is the PMP passing score?

There is not one. PMI stopped publishing a numeric threshold in 2007 and reports performance as Above Target, Target, Below Target or Needs Improvement in each domain. The practical implication is that you cannot bank a strong Process score to cover a weak Business Environment score, so revise for balance.

How many questions are on the PMP exam?

180 questions in 240 minutes, of which 170 are scored and 10 are unscored pretest items seeded through the paper. You get two optional 10-minute breaks, and any section you have already passed becomes non-reviewable once you take the break after it.

Ready to Start Practising?

Twenty-five questions will find your weak domain. Fixing it takes a few hundred more, written to the current outline, with explanations that tell you why the distractors were built the way they were.

The CertCrush PMP course gives you a full question bank mapped to the 2026 ECO, timed mock exams in the live format, and per-domain scoring so you can see whether Business Environment is still costing you marks.

Create a free account and start with a timed mock this week rather than the week before your exam date.