Becoming a Certified Passive House Designer takes one course and one exam. There is no prerequisite: architects, engineers, contractors and energy assessors all sit the same Passive House Institute exam, open book, around three hours. Pass it and you hold the credential for five years, recognised in every country the standard operates in.
Who is the CPHD course for?
Anyone who wants the qualification. The Passive House Institute sets no entry requirement, and the course assumes no prior Passivhaus knowledge. The Designer and Consultant titles cover identical content: the Designer title goes to candidates with a recognised design qualification, the Consultant title to everyone else. Same course, same exam, same standing.
Mosart has trained more than 4,500 people since the practice began teaching the standard, and the cohorts are never just architects. We see M&E engineers who want to design ventilation that certifiers will accept, quantity surveyors pricing their first Passivhaus tender, council technical officers writing procurement documents, and site managers who got curious after their first blower-door test. The course meets all of them where they are.
What are the actual steps?
- Choose a format. On-demand if you need to fit study around project deadlines, the live webinar cohort if you work better with a timetable and tutors.
- Work through the modules with PHPP open. The software is included with the course, and the people who pass comfortably are the ones who model as they learn rather than watching passively.
- Practise on a real building. Your own house, a live project, anything with drawings. The exam rewards applied fluency, not recall.
- Sit the PHI exam. Written, open book, roughly three hours.
- Get listed. Successful candidates enter the PHI’s international database of certified professionals, and the credential runs for five years from that date.
What do the two formats cost?
| On-demand | Live webinar cohort | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | €1,795 | €2,880 |
| Format | Self-paced video modules | Nine half-day modules with tutors |
| PHPP licence | Full version included | Full version included |
| CPD points | 45 structured CPD points | 45 structured CPD points |
| Suits | Flexible schedules, self-starters | Accountability, live Q&A, cohort contact |
Both routes prepare you for the same exam, and both include the full Passive House Planning Package rather than a demo copy. That matters. PHPP is the working tool of the qualification, and learning it on a crippled version is learning it twice.
What does the curriculum cover?
The course is building physics applied to one job: designing buildings that hit a space-heating demand of 15 kWh/m²a or less and prove it. That means heat-loss fundamentals, U-values and how build-ups actually achieve them, thermal bridges and why assumed psi-values fail, airtightness as a continuous layer rather than a product, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, window specification and comfort criteria, and summer overheating.
Running through all of it is PHPP, the energy model behind every certified building. You learn to assemble a monthly energy balance from drawings, which is the skill the exam tests and the skill projects pay for. The retrofit standard, EnerPHit, and the economics of getting to the standard at sensible cost round out the syllabus.
What is the PHI exam like?
A written exam of about three hours, open book, set centrally by the Passive House Institute. The PHI’s own Building Certification Guide notes that its designers and consultants, more than 5,000 of them worldwide, qualify through training “concluding with an examination set by the Passive House Institute”. The paper mixes short calculations with judgement questions: read this detail, find the weak point, size this ventilation duty, check this energy balance.
Open book does not mean easy. The candidates who struggle are rarely short of knowledge; they are short of practice against the clock. Knowing where a value lives in PHPP or the course notes is worth more on the day than having once memorised it.
How long does the credential last?
Five years. Renewal runs through the PHI’s established routes: document a certified Passivhaus or EnerPHit building for which you held design responsibility, the path the Passivhaus Trust’s certification guidance describes, or keep the credential alive through continuing education. Either way, renewal rewards people who keep using the skill, which is the point.
One boundary worth knowing from the same guidance: the designer credential does not qualify you to certify buildings. Certifiers hold a separate PHI accreditation and must be independent of the design team. The designer qualification puts you on the delivery side of that relationship.
What will it do for your career?
The honest answer is that demand is moving faster than the supply of people who can do this work. The Passivhaus Trust reported in February 2025 that the standard now accounts for roughly 1% of all new UK homes under construction, with 2,250+ certified homes built, more than 8,000 in the pipeline, and a stated aim of 10% of new housing by 2035. The same release notes that around 60% of new Scottish schools are targeting the standard. That is a tenfold expansion resting on a workforce that does not yet exist.
Ireland tells the same story at project level. When we certify schemes like Seven Mills, a 5,500-home new town in Dublin, the bottleneck we see is rarely products or budget. It is people on the design and delivery side who can run the model, read a junction detail and answer a certifier’s query without a week of research. Every large scheme needs them, and there are not enough.
Where Mosart fits
If the workforce gap above looks like your opening, the course is the way through it. Start with the Certified Passivhaus Designer course, or browse the wider learning programme, including the Certified Passivhaus Tradesperson route for site-based roles. For a first taste of how PHPP thinks, try the treated floor area tool.