NMC CPD hours for revalidation: what counts, and how to log them

Continuing professional development, or CPD, is one of the requirements you have to meet to revalidate with the Nursing and Midwifery Council. It sits alongside your practice hours, your five written reflective accounts, your practice-related feedback, and your reflective discussion and confirmation. CPD is often the part people leave until the last few months, then scramble to evidence. This guide sets out exactly how many hours you need, what counts, and what to record, so you can build the total steadily instead of panicking before your renewal date.

The numbers you need to hit

The NMC requires you to complete 35 hours of CPD relevant to your scope of practice in the three years since your registration was last renewed, or since you joined the register. Of those 35 hours, at least 20 must be participatory learning.

Two numbers, then. Thirty-five in total. Twenty of them participatory. The remaining fifteen can be self-directed. There is no upper limit, and nothing stopping you doing more, but 35 and 20 are the floors you have to clear.

Because the requirement runs across a full three-year cycle, the sensible approach is to log activities as you go. The NMC itself says you should work towards the requirements throughout the three-year period so you are prepared when your application is due. A few hours here and there across three years is far easier than 35 hours in a fortnight.

Participatory versus self-directed learning

This is the distinction that causes the most confusion, so it is worth being precise.

Participatory learning is any CPD activity that involves interaction with one or more other professionals. It does not matter whether you are in the same room. A virtual session counts just as much as a face-to-face one, as long as there is genuine interaction with other professionals. Typical examples include:

• attending a conference
• taking part in a workshop
• attending a relevant training course
• clinical supervision or a reflective group with colleagues
• a team teaching session or journal club

Self-directed learning is everything you do on your own. Reading a clinical guideline, completing an e-learning module by yourself, or researching a condition are all valid CPD, and they count towards your 35 hours. They simply do not count towards the 20 participatory hours.

A practical rule of thumb: if you learned it with other professionals, it is probably participatory. If you learned it alone, it is self-directed. When in doubt, record honestly what actually happened rather than reclassifying an activity to make the numbers work.

What to record for every activity

Hours on their own are not enough. For each CPD activity, the NMC expects your record to contain six things:

1. the CPD method (for example online learning, attending a course, or independent study)
2. a description of the topic and how it related to your practice
3. the dates on which you did the activity
4. the number of hours, including how many of those hours were participatory
5. the part of the Code most relevant to the activity
6. evidence that you undertook the activity

The Code reference is straightforward once you know the four themes: prioritise people, practise effectively, preserve safety, and promote professionalism and trust. Pick the theme the activity speaks to most directly.

Worked example. A community nurse attends a half-day virtual workshop on wound assessment run by the tissue viability team. In the CPD log this becomes: method, workshop (participatory); topic, updating wound assessment and dressing selection, directly relevant to a caseload with several complex wounds; dates, the day of the workshop; hours, three, all three participatory; Code theme, practise effectively; evidence, the booking confirmation and the notes taken during the session.

That single entry gives three participatory hours and a complete, defensible record. Fewer than a dozen entries like it across three years will clear both thresholds comfortably.

How CPD connects to your reflective accounts

It helps to be clear that CPD and the five written reflective accounts are separate requirements. Doing your CPD hours does not, by itself, produce your reflective accounts, and writing your reflective accounts does not replace logging your hours.

They do overlap in one useful way. Each of your five reflective accounts can be written about a piece of CPD, about practice-related feedback, or about an event or experience in your practice, and how it relates to the Code. So a meaningful CPD activity, the workshop above for instance, can become the subject of one of your reflective accounts. You still log the hours in your CPD record and, separately, write the reflective account on the NMC reflective account form. One activity, two requirements served, recorded in two different places.

Keeping evidence and what verification means

You must keep evidence of the CPD you have done, and be ready to show it to your confirmer. Evidence can be simple: course certificates, booking confirmations, notes you made, handouts, or programmes. You do not submit any of this to the NMC when you revalidate. You keep it in your portfolio.

Every year, the NMC selects a random sample of revalidation applications for verification. If yours is selected, it does not mean anything is wrong with your application. It simply means you may be asked to provide more detail, which is where a tidy CPD log and retained evidence make life easy. The clinicians who find verification stressful are usually the ones who left recording until the end and cannot now reconstruct what they did or when.

Avoiding the last-minute scramble

A few habits make the whole thing painless:

• log each activity the same week you do it, while you still remember the detail
• note the participatory hours separately from the total as you go, so you always know how close you are to 20
• keep the evidence in one place, whether a physical folder or a digital portfolio
• when you attend anything with other professionals, capture it straight away, because participatory hours are the harder threshold to backfill

Do that, and CPD stops being the frightening part of revalidation and becomes a quiet record that is simply there when you need it.

Turning a CPD activity into a reflective account

When one of your CPD activities is worth reflecting on properly, Reflectory can help. It interviews you about what happened and what you learned, then produces a reflective account in your own words, with identifiable details screened out and an AI-assistance disclosure built in. You still author the reflection. The tool just helps you get it onto the page in a form that maps to the NMC reflective account. Your first reflection is free.