The Short Answer
PIP assessment questions follow the 12 assessment activities: preparing food, eating, managing treatment, washing, toilet needs, dressing, communicating, reading, engaging with people, budgeting, planning journeys and moving around. Assessors add a typical-day question and follow-ups from your PIP2 form. Answer for the majority of your days, include the bad ones, and name every piece of help you need.
What questions do PIP ask on phone assessment?
Phone assessments use the same question set as every format, structured around the 12 activities of The PIP Assessment. The opening is normally a typical-day question. Expect follow-ups on anything your PIP2 form said, plus context questions about work, hobbies and pets. Nothing about the phone changes the scoring behind the questions.
How to answer PIP assessment questions?
Answer for the majority of your days, and finish each answer with the part people leave out: the help, the risk and the cost. Citizens Advice recommends describing bad days concretely, in the shape of what you cannot do at all on them. An answer of yes, I can cook is incomplete if the truth is yes, with a perching stool, on good days, and my partner cooks the rest of the week.
What questions are asked in a PIP telephone assessment?
Each activity generates two or three predictable questions, listed in the bank below. The assessor works through them conversationally rather than as a checklist, which is why answers drift towards understatement. Keeping the activity list in front of you during the call keeps your answers anchored.
Assessment Questions in Detail
The question bank below pairs each activity with the questions it generates and the honest-preparation note that matters most. The questions are built directly from the legal descriptors, which is why complete answers score accurately.
| Activity | Questions to expect | What a complete answer includes |
|---|---|---|
| Preparing food | Can you cook a simple meal from fresh ingredients? Do you use aids? | Prompting, supervision, microwave-only cooking, days you cannot cook |
| Taking nutrition | Do you eat and drink without help or prompting? | Cutting food, prompting to eat, any therapeutic feeding |
| Managing therapy | Do you take medication or manage treatment yourself? | Reminders, dosette boxes, supervision, weekly therapy hours |
| Washing and bathing | Can you wash and get in or out of the bath or shower? | Help below the waist, hair washing, falls risk, days you cannot wash |
| Toilet needs | Do you manage toilet needs without help? | Aids, incontinence management, cleaning yourself afterwards |
| Dressing | Do you dress and undress yourself? | Lower-body help, prompting to dress, choosing appropriate clothing |
| Communicating verbally | Do you have difficulty speaking or hearing? | Hearing aids, support to understand complex or basic speech |
| Reading | Can you read signs, symbols and written information? | Aids beyond glasses, prompting to read and understand |
| Engaging with people | Do you meet people, go out socially, feel anxious with strangers? | Prompting to engage, social support, distress or risk in engagement |
| Budgeting | Do you manage money and pay bills? | Help with complex decisions, help with simple purchases |
| Planning journeys | Can you plan and make journeys alone? Do you go out? | Overwhelming distress, needing another person, familiar-route limits |
| Moving around | How far can you walk? Do you use aids? | Your reliable distance in metres, aids, pain and stops along the way |
Last checked: 7 August 2026
Three question types sit outside the table and catch people out. The typical-day question invites a good-day answer; give the whole week instead. Context questions about hobbies, pets or driving feed activity scoring, so complete them with the difficulties involved. And observation is continuous through the appointment, from how you handle the call or the walk from the waiting room; there is nothing to perform, only accuracy to maintain.
The distance question deserves its own preparation. Points for moving around turn on reliable distance in metres: more than 200, 50 to 200, 20 to 50, or 1 to 20. Estimate yours against a real landmark, and state it with the aids, the pain and the recovery it actually involves. Descriptor wording for every activity sits in the full reference tables, and deeper preparation in Preparing for a PIP Assessment.
Follow-up questions and how to meet them
Assessors probe first answers, and the follow-ups have recognisable shapes. Frequency probes ask how often: the anchor is the majority of days, so answer in days per week. Method probes ask how exactly: walk through the task step by step, including where it goes wrong. Consequence probes ask what happens if you try: pain, falls, panic and exhaustion are evidence, not complaints. And consistency probes compare your answers against your form or your observed behaviour, which honesty makes harmless.
Short answers invite the wrong descriptor. The strongest response pattern is answer, example, cost: state whether you can do the task, give a recent concrete example, and name what it takes out of you. A cooking answer in that shape covers prompting, supervision, aids and safety in three sentences without any coaching.
Two answers, side by side
A concrete pair shows the gap between an accurate answer and a losing one, for the same person and the same question. Asked whether they can prepare a meal, the losing answer runs: yes, I cook sometimes. The accurate answer runs: I can microwave meals, but I cannot use the hob safely because I have burned myself twice this year when my hands gave way; my partner cooks most evenings, and on bad days I do not eat until she is home. The first answer recommends descriptor a and 0 points. The second puts descriptors c, e and the safety rules in play.
The same transformation applies everywhere. Asked about walking, I get to the shops loses to I can manage about 40 metres to the postbox with my stick, then I need to stop because of the pain, and I could not do it again without a long rest. The details doing the work are always the same four: distance or frequency, aids, help, and consequence.
Mental health questions, specifically
Claims led by mental health meet the same activities with different follow-ups, and preparation helps most here. Expect questions about motivation and prompting across cooking, washing and dressing; about anxiety in shops, queues and unfamiliar places for the engagement and journey activities; and about how you manage medication and appointments. The scoring wording was written for these answers: prompting, social support and overwhelming psychological distress are descriptor terms, not sympathy phrases, and using plain descriptions of panic, shutdowns and avoidance lets the assessor map them to the right lines.
The observation risk also inverts for mental health: composure at the appointment is routinely read as coping. Saying plainly that today is a managed performance, and what it will cost afterwards, is accurate evidence and belongs on the record.
Questions about medication, treatment and appointments
A block of questions always covers your treatment, and it feeds two scoring purposes at once. What you take and attend corroborates the condition's seriousness; how you manage it scores the therapy activity directly. Expect: what medication do you take, who reminds you or organises it, what therapy or exercises do you do at home, how many hours a week, and who helps. Dosette boxes, phone alarms set by someone else, supervised physiotherapy programmes and family nagging are all scoreable answers, and all routinely go unmentioned because they feel like life rather than help.
Side effects belong in this block too. Drowsiness, brain fog and nausea that impair cooking, driving or concentration are effects of the condition's treatment, and the descriptors do not distinguish difficulty caused by illness from difficulty caused by managing it.
After the questions end
The closing minutes have their own small agenda. The assessor typically asks whether there is anything you want to add: this is the slot for the two or three points your preparation flagged as must-say. You can ask what happens next and when to expect the report's completion, though the decision timing belongs to the DWP rather than the assessor. Afterwards, write down what was asked and answered while it is fresh; if the eventual report misdescribes the appointment, your same-day note is the strongest contradiction a reconsideration can cite.
Questions you can ask back
The appointment permits questions in both directions, and three are worth asking. Ask for a question to be repeated or rephrased whenever it lands unclearly; guessing at meaning produces wrong evidence. Ask for a break when you need one; how you manage the appointment is itself being observed, and pushing through a crisis helps nobody. Ask your companion to add what you forgot; their account of daily help is evidence the assessor can record. Requests like these do not lower a score, and the appointment is designed to accommodate them.
The questions end where they began: twelve activities, honestly answered. Everything in this bank exists to make the honest answer complete rather than clever.
Every question in the bank above traces to a descriptor, and every descriptor is public: preparation is nothing more than reading your own days against the law's words before someone else does.
Questions asked, answers structured, record kept: the appointment holds no surprises for a claimant who has read its script.
Work Out Your Number
The questions end in points, and the points are checkable in advance. Score your own answers with the interactive score check before the appointment.