NMC Revalidation: What Nurses and Midwives Must Do Every Three Years

Every nurse, midwife and nursing associate on the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) register — one of the largest professional registers in UK healthcare, with well over 780,000 people on it — has to revalidate to keep their registration active. Revalidation is not a one-off exam. It is an ongoing process of gathering evidence that you remain safe, up to date and fit to practise, and it culminates in a renewal application submitted every three years. For registrants, compliance leads and providers alike, understanding exactly what the cycle demands — and building the evidence for it steadily rather than in a last-minute scramble — is central to keeping services staffed and registrants practising legally.

What the three-year cycle actually requires

Revalidation runs on a three-year cycle tied to your registration renewal date, and the NMC sets out a specific checklist that every application must evidence. According to the NMC's own guidance, the requirements are:

• Practice hours: a minimum of 450 hours of practice within the three-year period for a single registration (nurse, midwife or nursing associate). Anyone dually registered — for example as both a nurse and a midwife — must complete 450 hours against each registration, meaning 900 hours in total.
• CPD: 35 hours of continuing professional development relevant to your scope of practice, of which at least 20 hours must involve participatory learning — that is, learning that involves interaction with others, such as workshops, courses or group discussion, rather than solitary reading.
• Written reflective accounts: five written reflective accounts, each based on your CPD, feedback received, or an event or experience in your practice, linked to the Code.
• Reflective discussion: one reflective discussion covering those five written accounts, held face to face with another NMC registrant (another nurse, midwife or nursing associate).
• Practice-related feedback: five pieces of practice-related feedback, which can be formal or informal, written or verbal, and drawn from sources such as patients, service users, colleagues, management, appraisals or team performance reports.
• Health and character declaration: a self-declaration confirming you continue to meet the NMC's health and character requirements for registration.
• Professional indemnity arrangement: confirmation that you have an appropriate indemnity arrangement in place, whether through an employer, a professional body or personal cover.
• Confirmation: sign-off from a "confirmer" — typically your line manager or another suitable person — who discusses your revalidation evidence with you and confirms you have met the requirements. Where your confirmer is themselves an NMC registrant, the confirmation discussion can double up as your reflective discussion.

All of this evidence must be ready to submit online, in the NMC's system, in the run-up to your renewal date — the NMC sends reminders around 60 days beforehand, but the underlying evidence has to have been built across the full three years, not assembled overnight.

What happens if you don't complete it

Revalidation is not optional, and missing it has real consequences. If a registrant does not submit their revalidation application — or does not pay the annual registration fee — by their renewal date, the NMC automatically lapses their registration and removes their name from the register. A registrant whose registration has lapsed is not permitted to practise as a nurse, midwife or nursing associate until they are readmitted, and readmission is its own process that can take several weeks to complete, separate from simply catching up on the missed evidence. For providers, a lapsed registrant effectively becomes an unregistered member of staff overnight, which has obvious implications for rostering, clinical governance and, in a regulated setting, for what a Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspection would find in that person's file. This is exactly the kind of gap CQC inspectors look for when they review staff training and registration records, which is why revalidation tracking sits so close to wider inspection readiness — see our guide to CQC inspections and staff training for how the two connect in practice.

Building evidence throughout the cycle, not at the end

The registrants who find revalidation stressful are almost always the ones who leave it until the final months. The requirements are designed to be met gradually across three years, and a steady approach makes the eventual application straightforward rather than a scramble. A few practical habits make the difference:

• Log CPD as you go. Note the date, activity, hours and how it relates to your practice immediately after each course, webinar or study session, rather than trying to reconstruct three years of activity from memory.
• Write reflective accounts soon after the event. A reflection written within days of a significant piece of learning, feedback or practice experience is far richer — and far easier to write — than one attempted retrospectively.
• Collect feedback opportunistically. Save relevant emails, appraisal comments, patient thank-you notes or supervision feedback as they arrive, rather than chasing colleagues for retrospective comments close to your renewal date.
• Track practice hours alongside your rota. Most registrants meet the hours requirement easily through normal employment, but anyone working part-time, taking career breaks, or moving between roles should keep a running tally to be sure.
• Identify your confirmer and discussion partner early. Booking the reflective discussion and confirmation conversation well ahead of your renewal date avoids a last-minute scheduling scramble with a busy manager or colleague.
• Use a structured CPD plan. Choosing CPD that maps to your actual scope of practice, appraisal objectives and any revalidation portfolio gaps makes each hour count twice — for your development and for your evidence.

For compliance leads and providers, the same discipline applies at team level: a shared tracker of renewal dates, CPD completion and outstanding evidence turns revalidation from an individual scramble into a managed, predictable process — which matters given how directly it feeds into wider regulatory readiness. Our broader overview of UK healthcare compliance and CPD training covers how revalidation fits alongside other statutory and mandatory training obligations across a health or social care organisation.

Making the 35 hours count

Because 20 of the 35 required CPD hours must be participatory, registrants need a mix of independent and interactive learning built into their plan rather than relying solely on reading or e-learning. Structured, accredited courses that combine self-paced study with recorded interaction or assessment can help registrants meet both the hours requirement and the participatory threshold efficiently, while producing clear evidence — certificates, dates and content summaries — that slots straight into a revalidation portfolio. Learnsignal's CPD courses are built with exactly that kind of evidence trail in mind, giving nurses, midwives and the compliance teams who support them a straightforward way to build verifiable CPD hours across the three-year cycle rather than searching for last-minute options as a renewal date approaches.