Modern Pentathlon Rules

The Rules for Modern Pentathlon are published annually by the International Federation, UIPM. These rules are primarily aimed at international events and can be downloaded here.

Pentathlon GB publishes its own rules for competitions held in GB which can be downloaded from the resources page. These follow closely the rules of the UIPM but which do have some variations to take account of local circumstances and different competition formats, such as biathlon, triathlon and tetrathlon. These rules are reviewed each year. Separate rules are published for the Schools' Biathlon competition series.

Modern Pentathlon is based on a system of scoring pentathlon points depending on the score or time that you record in each discipline. For each discipline there is a target time or score which is equivalent to 1000 pentathlon points.  If you do better (or worse) than that target score you accumulate more (or fewer) pentathlon points. What the target times and scores are depends on your age group.

The rules are very detailed and competitors should make themselves familiar with them before they compete. Modern Pentathlon rules differ in significant ways from the rules for their separate sports so it is important that you read and understand the rules.