Training, exams and certification
Training, exams and certification
Forty questions, ninety minutes, open book, and a pass mark of seventy per cent. It is the broadest paper in the ITIL® v5 scheme — ten syllabus areas where every other module has nine — and you cannot sit it without an accredited course behind you.
Reviewed by GoToCertify’s accredited trainers
ITIL Service (Version 5) sits one level above Foundation and covers the delivery of resilient, high-performing digital services across the full lifecycle. Everything below is published by PeopleCert on the certification’s own page.
| Questions | 40, multiple choice |
|---|---|
| Duration | 90 minutes |
| Pass mark | 70% — 28 correct answers out of 40 |
| Materials | Open book |
| Prerequisites | Any ITIL 4 certification, or ITIL Foundation (Version 5), or ITIL Foundation Bridge (Version 5) |
| Accredited training | Mandatory. An Accredited Training Organization or ITIL Official eLearning |
| Languages | Nine — Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil) and Spanish |
Foundation gives you sixty minutes for forty questions. Service gives you ninety for the same forty. On the face of it that is fifty per cent more thinking time per question.
| ITIL® v5 Foundation | 90 sec/question | |
| ITIL® v5 Service | 135 sec/question |
The extra forty-five seconds is not a gift. It is the budget for the open book. A question you can look up is a question that invites you to look it up, and the lookup is where candidates lose the paper — not because the answer is hard to find, but because finding it three times costs more than the margin allows.
The margin, incidentally, is thinner than Foundation’s. Seventy per cent of forty leaves you twelve wrong answers. Foundation leaves you fourteen.
Service is the only ITIL® v5 module with ten syllabus areas. That is worth knowing before you sit it, because it means the paper spreads thinner than its siblings: on average four questions per area, and no area you can safely skip.
Two of those ten did not exist in ITIL 4 in this form. AI-enabled service delivery is new, and experience-led service quality is the point where Service overlaps deliberately with the Experience module.
Accredited training is part of the certification, not a recommendation. Service requires an Accredited Training Organization or ITIL Official eLearning, and PeopleCert states that exam results will not be released without proof of completion.
This is the single biggest difference between ITIL® v5 and a framework like TOGAF, where you can read the standard, book the exam and never speak to a trainer. Here the course is a gate, and it is a gate on the result — you can sit the paper, but the score stays sealed until the proof arrives.
Budget accordingly. Foundation can cost you a voucher. Service cannot.
Your course supplies the syllabus. What it rarely supplies is the clock. Ninety minutes across forty open-book questions is a pacing problem before it is a knowledge problem, and pacing is the one thing you can only learn by rehearsing it.
Three habits that travel well into this paper:
Decide your lookup budget in advance. Six lookups at ninety seconds each is nine minutes — affordable. Fifteen is not. Mark the question, move on, come back.
Know which of the ten areas you are weakest in. Four questions is enough to lose the paper if you drop all four and stumble elsewhere.
Practise reading the stem twice and the options once. Open-book papers punish the reverse order.
Yes. Training through an Accredited Training Organization or ITIL Official eLearning is mandatory, and your result is not released without proof that you completed it.
Twenty-eight correct answers out of forty. The published figure is 70%.
Any ITIL 4 certification, or ITIL Foundation (Version 5), or ITIL Foundation Bridge (Version 5). One of the three is enough.
Nine: Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil) and Spanish.
Yes. Service, Product, Experience, Strategy and Transformation are all open book. Foundation is the closed-book exception.
Same shape — 40 questions, 90 minutes, 70%, open book — but a different syllabus. Service looks at the service across its lifecycle; Product looks at the product as an integrated value stream.
Sources. Every figure on this page comes from PeopleCert’s own published certification pages, checked in September 2026.
Service cannot be self-studied: without proof of an accredited course your result is never released. That rules out the self-study Exam Bundle here. eLearning is the package that satisfies the rule — the accredited course itself, alongside the official eBook, the exam voucher, a learning resource kit and auto-marked sample papers. It is on sale here, with eLearning+ adding the Official Mock Exam and a free re-take.
See the packagesNot sure yet? Create a free account and try 10 free practice questions first: original questions with an explanation after every answer.
BITIL.COM is an ATO (Accredited Training Organization) and an AEO (Approved Examination Organization) of PeopleCert. ITIL® is a registered trade mark of PeopleCert.
