Every nurse, midwife and nursing associate on the NMC register must revalidate every three years, and the CPD element is 35 hours — of which at least 20 must be participatory learning. That single word, participatory, is where most of the confusion sits, and it is the reason a folder full of online course certificates can still leave you short when your renewal date arrives.
Revalidation is not one requirement. It is eight, and the CPD hours are only one of them. This guide sets out all eight with the actual numbers, explains what the NMC means by participatory learning, and is honest about where an online awareness course does and does not help.
At a glance: Nexis CPD offers £9 CPD-accredited online courses relevant to nursing practice, with a verifiable e-certificate on passing — and any three courses cost £18.
The eight revalidation requirements in full
Over the three-year period since your registration was last renewed, or since you joined the register, you must have:
- 450 practice hours (more if you hold more than one registration — see below)
- 35 hours of CPD, of which at least 20 hours must include participatory learning
- Five pieces of practice-related feedback
- Five written reflective accounts
- A reflective discussion with another NMC registrant
- A health and character declaration
- A professional indemnity arrangement in place when practising
- Confirmation from an appropriate confirmer that you have met the requirements
Miss any one of them and your revalidation is incomplete, regardless of how strong the others are. The requirements are cumulative, not a menu.
Practice hours: 450, or more
The standard requirement is 450 practice hours over three years for a nurse, a midwife or a nursing associate. It also applies if you hold a nurse and SCPHN registration, or a midwife and SCPHN registration.
Where it changes is dual and triple registration:
- Dual registration (for example nurse and midwife) — 900 hours, made up of 450 hours for each part
- Triple registration as nurse, midwife and nursing associate — 1,350 hours
Practice hours are not limited to hands-on clinical care at the bedside. Work in education, management, policy, research or quality improvement can count where you are using your nursing, midwifery or nursing associate knowledge and skills. What matters is that the hours are recorded: dates, hours, place of work, scope of practice, and a brief description of the work.
The 35 CPD hours — and the 20 that decide it
You need 35 hours of CPD relevant to your scope of practice across the three years. That is under 12 hours a year, which sounds comfortable. The constraint is the split:
- At least 20 hours must include participatory learning
- The remaining 15 hours can be non-participatory — individual learning you do alone
The NMC defines participatory learning as activity that involves interaction with one or more other professionals. That interaction can be in a physical or a virtual setting. Its own examples include attending a conference, a workshop, a training course, or a group meeting to discuss a specific event or a new way of working.
The distinction is about interaction, not about format. A webinar where you can question the presenter and discuss with peers is participatory. A recorded module you complete alone at 11pm is not, however good it is.
What your CPD record must contain
For each activity, the NMC expects you to record:
- the CPD method
- a description of the topic and how it related to your practice
- the dates on which the activity was undertaken
- the number of hours, including the number of participatory hours
- the part of the Code most relevant to the activity
- evidence that you undertook the activity
That fifth point catches people out. Every entry should name which part of the Code it connects to — prioritise people, practise effectively, preserve safety, or promote professionalism and trust. If your log has hours and certificates but no link to the Code, it is not yet in the shape the NMC asks for.
What actually counts towards the 35 hours
The NMC does not publish an approved list, because relevance to your scope of practice is the test. In practice, nurses log hours from:
- Participatory: clinical supervision, team learning sessions and in-service training, journal clubs, ward-based simulation, conferences and study days, professional network or forum meetings, structured mentoring conversations, live webinars where you can ask questions, quality improvement or audit meetings where learning is discussed
- Non-participatory: self-paced e-learning, reading journal articles, guidelines or NICE standards, watching recorded lectures, private study for a qualification, reviewing new policy documents
Log time honestly — the actual duration of the activity, not the time it appears on a certificate. A 45-minute session is 0.75 hours, and a three-year log built from real numbers will survive a question far better than one built from round figures.
A three-year pattern that works
Spreading the requirement makes it almost invisible; leaving it makes it a crisis. A workable rhythm:
- Year one: around 12 CPD hours, of which 7 participatory. Two pieces of feedback logged. One reflective account written.
- Year two: the same again. You are now at roughly 24 hours, four pieces of feedback and two or three accounts.
- Year three, months 1–6: finish the hours, the fifth piece of feedback and the remaining accounts.
- Year three, months 7–9: book and hold the reflective discussion, then confirmation. Submit with time in hand.
The single most useful habit is logging on the day. Ten minutes after a training session, while you can still remember what changed in your thinking, produces a better entry than an hour of reconstruction two years later.
Where an online course honestly fits
We sell online courses, so read this with that in mind — but the honest position is straightforward.
A self-paced online course that you complete alone is non-participatory CPD. It counts, but only towards the 15 non-participatory hours. If all 35 of your hours are solo e-learning, you have not met the requirement, and no provider can change that by describing their course differently.
Used sensibly, online learning does two useful jobs:
- It fills the 15 non-participatory hours efficiently. Those hours have to come from somewhere, and structured learning with a dated certificate is cleaner evidence than “read some articles”.
- It gives a participatory activity something to be about. If you complete a course on the Mental Capacity Act and then take it to a team meeting — discussing how your unit handles capacity assessments, what your documentation looks like, where practice varies — that discussion is interaction with other professionals. Record the discussion as the participatory element, honestly, for the time it actually took.
What you cannot do is relabel solo learning as participatory because it happened to be about a shared topic. The test is interaction, and your confirmer may reasonably ask about it.
Five pieces of practice-related feedback
You must obtain five pieces of practice-related feedback in the three years. This is one of the least demanding requirements, and one of the most commonly left to the last month.
Feedback can be written or verbal, formal or informal. It may come from patients and service users, from colleagues, or from management. It can also include feedback from team performance reports or from your annual appraisal. A thank-you card from a family, a comment in a debrief, a point raised in supervision — all legitimate, provided you note what it was and what you did with it.
Two practical points. Record the content of the feedback and how you used it to improve practice, rather than just noting that feedback occurred. And be careful not to record anything that identifies a patient or another person.
Five written reflective accounts
You must prepare five written reflective accounts in the three-year period, on the NMC’s approved form. Each account must refer to one or more of:
- an instance of your CPD
- a piece of practice-related feedback you have received
- an event or experience in your own professional practice
— and explain how it relates to the Code.
The reflection is where revalidation stops being administrative. The NMC is not looking for polished writing. It is looking for evidence that you noticed something, thought about it against the standards you are held to, and changed or confirmed something in your practice as a result. A short, specific account of one real situation is worth more than a page of generalities.
The reflective discussion
You must have a reflective discussion with another NMC registrant — a registered nurse, midwife or nursing associate — covering your five written reflective accounts.
The registrant you hold the discussion with must sign the approved form, recording their name, NMC Pin, email, professional address and postcode, and the date of the discussion. If you work somewhere without easy access to another registrant, this is the requirement to plan earliest, because it depends on someone else’s diary.
Confirmation, health and character, and indemnity
Confirmation is the step where someone reviews your evidence and confirms you have met the requirements. The NMC’s strong preference is your line manager. If you do not have a line manager, or do not have access to someone on the NMC register, you can seek confirmation from another healthcare professional regulated in the UK. Your confirmer does not have to be a nurse, and the confirmation is not an assessment of the quality of your reflections — it is confirmation that the requirements have been met.
Health and character: you must declare whether there are any health or character issues that may affect your fitness to practise, including any convictions or cautions.
Professional indemnity: you must have appropriate cover under an indemnity arrangement when practising. For most employed nurses this comes through the employer; if you do any independent or agency work, check that it is genuinely covered rather than assuming.
Timing: why three months out is too late
Revalidation is due on the same date every three years, and the NMC sends reminders in advance. The requirements that fail are rarely the hours — they are the ones that depend on other people. The reflective discussion needs another registrant. Confirmation needs a confirmer who has time to look at your evidence properly. Both can take weeks to arrange around shift patterns and annual leave.
A workable approach is to keep the log continuously, aim to finish the five reflective accounts by month 30 of the 36, and book the discussion and confirmation with a clear two months to spare. If your registration lapses, you cannot practise as a registered nurse until you are readmitted, which is a slower and more expensive problem than the one you were avoiding.
Five things that most often go wrong
- All 35 hours are solo e-learning. The most common failure, and the least excusable now you know the rule. You need 20 participatory hours, and they must involve other professionals.
- Hours logged with no link to the Code. The NMC asks which part of the Code each activity relates to. A log without it is incomplete even when the hours are there.
- Feedback recorded as a fact, not as learning. “Received positive feedback from a relative” is a note. What it should say is what the feedback was about and what you did differently, or confirmed, as a result.
- Reflective accounts written as summaries. Describing a course is not reflection. The account needs the instance, your thinking about it against the Code, and the effect on your practice.
- Leaving the discussion and confirmation to the last fortnight. Both depend on someone else being available. This is what turns a manageable process into a lapsed registration.
Bank, agency and part-time work
The 450-hour requirement does not scale down for part-time hours — it is a minimum across three years, whoever you work for. Hours from bank and agency shifts count, and so do hours across multiple employers; you simply record each separately with the dates, hours and scope of practice.
Two practical consequences. First, if your hours are spread across several employers, keep your own record as you go — reconstructing a three-year picture from several rotas afterwards is painful. Second, if you work mainly bank or agency, identify early who will act as your confirmer, because you may not have an obvious line manager. Confirmation from another UK-regulated healthcare professional is permitted, and arranging it in advance is far easier than finding someone in your final month.
What your employer provides, and what stays yours
Many employers support revalidation well: mandatory training that counts, appraisals that generate feedback, supervision that supplies participatory hours, and managers who confirm. None of that transfers the responsibility. The registration is yours, the evidence is yours to keep, and if you change jobs mid-cycle your portfolio needs to come with you.
It is worth keeping your revalidation portfolio somewhere personal rather than only on an employer system you may lose access to. Nurses who move trusts or leave agency work often discover that their training records went with the login.
The NMC also carries out verification on a proportion of applications, which may mean being asked to supply your evidence. Keeping the portfolio in order throughout the cycle is what makes that a non-event.
Which courses suit a nurse’s non-participatory hours?
The topics that map onto most nursing roles — and that keep coming up in incident reviews and CQC findings — are the legal and safety frameworks around care:
- Mental Capacity Act — capacity assessment and best interests decisions (see our guide to the five principles)
- Safeguarding Adults — the Care Act 2014 framework (see what is safeguarding adults)
- Infection Prevention and Control — standard precautions and the chain of infection (see our IPC guide)
Those three together cost £18 rather than £27, because any three courses trigger the pay-for-2-get-3 offer. Add them to the cart and the discount applies automatically. Depending on your setting, Sepsis Awareness, Administering Medication and DoLS may be closer to your scope of practice.
To repeat the important caveat: these count towards your 15 non-participatory hours. Plan the 20 participatory hours separately — team learning sessions, clinical supervision, conferences, workshops, journal clubs, or a structured discussion of what you learned.
Frequently asked questions
How many CPD hours do nurses need for revalidation?
35 hours of CPD relevant to your scope of practice over the three year period since your registration was last renewed, of which at least 20 hours must include participatory learning. The remaining 15 hours can be non-participatory, meaning learning you do on your own. The hours are only one of eight revalidation requirements.
What counts as participatory learning for NMC revalidation?
The NMC defines participatory learning as activity that involves interaction with one or more other professionals, in a physical or virtual setting. Its examples include attending a conference, workshop or training course, and group meetings to discuss a specific event or a new way of working. Clinical supervision, journal clubs and in-service training sessions also qualify. The test is genuine interaction, not the subject or the format.
Does an online course count towards NMC revalidation?
Yes, but as non-participatory CPD. A self-paced online course you complete alone counts towards the 15 non-participatory hours, not the 20 participatory hours. No provider can make solo e-learning participatory by describing it differently. If you discuss what you learned with colleagues in a team meeting or supervision, that discussion is participatory and can be recorded separately for the time it actually took.
How many practice hours do I need for revalidation?
450 practice hours over three years for a nurse, midwife or nursing associate, and also for those registered as a nurse and SCPHN or a midwife and SCPHN. Dual registration as a nurse and midwife requires 900 hours, made up of 450 for each part, and triple registration as nurse, midwife and nursing associate requires 1,350 hours.
What are the five reflective accounts and the reflective discussion?
You must prepare five written reflective accounts over the three years, each referring to an instance of your CPD, a piece of practice-related feedback, or an event or experience in your practice, and explaining how it relates to the Code. You must then have a reflective discussion about them with another NMC registrant, who signs the approved form recording their name, NMC Pin, email, professional address and postcode, and the date.
What happens if I do not complete revalidation on time?
If you do not revalidate by your renewal date your registration lapses, and you cannot practise as a registered nurse, midwife or nursing associate until you are readmitted to the register. Readmission is slower and more expensive than revalidating on time. The requirements most likely to cause a delay are those that depend on other people, namely the reflective discussion and confirmation, so book both well in advance.
Who can confirm my revalidation?
The NMC expects you to seek confirmation from your line manager where you have one. If you do not have a line manager, or do not have access to someone on the NMC register, you can seek confirmation from another healthcare professional regulated in the UK. The confirmer checks that you have met the requirements; they are not assessing the quality of your reflections.
CPD courses for nurses and nursing associates
£9 per course. CPD accredited, 100% online, verifiable e-certificate. Pay for 2, get 3 — any 3 courses for £18.
This article is general information, not legal advice or a statement of NMC policy. Nexis CPD is not an NMC-approved provider, and a CPD awareness course is not a nursing qualification. Self-paced online learning is non-participatory CPD for revalidation purposes. Requirements change — always confirm the current rules with the Nursing and Midwifery Council before you revalidate.