HR Professional in Human Resources - International PDF

The PHRi exam puts 115 questions in front of you, yet only 90 of them count towards your result. The other 25 are trial items that HRCI is testing for future exams, and nothing marks them out. You get 135 minutes plus 30 minutes of administration time, you pay $395 for the exam and $100 to apply, and you need a scaled score of 500 on a scale of 100-700.

Those numbers shape how you should prepare. Because the trial items are invisible, you cannot ignore any question, and because the pass line is a scaled score rather than a percentage, chasing a fixed share of correct answers misleads you. This guide sets out what the letters mean, who HRCI lets in, what the questions look like, how the seven functional areas are weighted, what the exam costs and what to do if it goes wrong, followed by an eight-week training plan. Every exam fact comes from HRCI or from our exam summary, checked in September 2026.

What does PHRi mean, and who is the exam for?

PHRi stands for Professional in Human Resources - International. It is a credential awarded by HRCI, the Human Resource Certification Institute, and it certifies that you can carry out the technical and operational side of HR: recruiting, pay and benefits, employee relations, learning, HR data and the day-to-day handling of people problems. HRCI classes it as a professional certification, one step above the knowledge-level aPHRi and one step below the strategic SPHRi.