What’s New in the 2025 ICF Core Competencies (2019 vs 2025)

You trained on the 2019 ICF Core Competencies. Maybe an earlier version still. You can run a clean session in your sleep, and then someone mentions that ICF released an updated model in 2025, and the old question returns: do I have to relearn all of this?

You do not. The 2025 update is a delta, not a teardown. The eight competencies you already practice are still the eight competencies. This guide walks every change precisely: why ICF updated the model, the five genuinely new markers with their exact numbers and wording, the revisions that sharpened existing markers, the new glossary, and a side-by-side look at 2019 versus 2025 across all eight competencies.

Why ICF Updated the Competency Model

The 2025 model did not come out of a committee room. ICF (the International Coaching Federation), the global standard for professional coaching, ran an evidence-based job analysis, the kind of research that asks two plain questions: what do coaches actually do, and which skills matter most for effective coaching today. Nearly 3,000 coaches from around the world took part, representing every credential level (ACC, PCC, and MCC), a range of specialties, and many cultural contexts.

That scale matters, because it means the changes are not anyone’s opinion about how coaching should work. They describe how competent coaching is already practiced across the full diversity of the profession, and they represent a calibration of global coaching standards rather than a change in direction. ICF looked at a model that was working, asked thousands of coaches what the work requires now, and made focused additions and clarifications. The result is best summarized as evolution, not revolution. You keep almost everything you already know and add a contained set of new expectations on top of it.

What Stayed the Same (and What a “Marker” Is)

Before the changes, hold the constants, because they are most of the model. The 2025 update keeps the same eight competencies, in the same order, organized into the same four domains: Foundation, Co-Creating the Relationship, Communicating Effectively, and Cultivating Learning and Growth. The underlying philosophy did not move at all. Coaching is still client-centered and non-directive, with the client as the meaning-maker and the coach as partner rather than director. For the foundational picture that anchors the whole model, see the ICF coaching competency framework.

One distinction keeps this guide clear. A competency is one of the eight named categories. A marker is an observable behavior underneath it, the specific thing an assessor listens for in a recorded session. The 2025 update did not add or remove competencies. It worked at the marker level and in the shared vocabulary that defines what the markers mean. At the PCC level, the practical expression of these changes lives in the updated ICF PCC markers.

One more constant worth naming: the markers for Competency 1, Demonstrates Ethical Practice, were not changed in this update. The ICF Code of Ethics that sits beneath it, however, was separately revised in 2025 to address AI disclosure, expanded applicability, and role transparency. If ethics is your focus, read what changed in the 2025 ICF Code of Ethics alongside this competency update.

The Five New Sub-Competency Markers

Five entirely new markers were added in 2025. Two of them land in the same competency, Embodies a Coaching Mindset, and both point inward at the coach. The other three are spread across Agreements, Presence, and Client Growth. Each one names something experienced coaches were already doing and makes it explicit enough to teach and assess.

Read the five together and one direction of travel appears. First, a higher bar on coach self-awareness: 2.09 makes your openness and curiosity an active practice (notice the verb nurtures, not has), and 2.10 asks you to own the influence your presence, questions, and reactions have in the room. Second, a recognition that coaching is dynamic: 3.12 treats agreements as living documents you revisit with the client across the engagement, acknowledging that the coaching relationship shifts as goals clarify and new work emerges, and 5.03 names the improvisational tracking of what is emerging right now, in the client and in you. Third, attention to the full arc: 8.07 lifts your gaze from a single session to how learning compounds across the whole engagement. These are not five unrelated additions. They are one signal about where the profession is heading.

Key Revisions to Existing Markers

Beyond the new markers, ICF reworded eleven existing ones. The edits are subtle, often a clause or a single word, but each carries a real expectation about how you practice and how you are assessed. The six below are the most significant, and they show the pattern clearly.

Three of these sit in the Coaching Mindset competency. Marker 2.02 makes staying current explicitly include technology, the AI tools and virtual platforms reshaping the field. You do not have to adopt them, but awareness is now part of the marker. Marker 2.04 adds bias recognition to the use of intuition. The expectation is not to eliminate bias, which is not possible, but to notice when your filters are shaping the session and choose the open question over the loaded one. Marker 2.07 widens the scope from session-level readiness to overall well-being, treating sustained self-care as a professional responsibility on par with ethics or confidentiality.

The other three reach into three competencies. Marker 3.01 asks you to articulate your own coaching philosophy and approach in that first conversation, not just the profession’s definition, so a client knows what they are signing up for. Marker 8.08 trades celebrates for acknowledges: a quieter, more culturally inclusive way to honor progress that meets clients where they are, rather than performing an enthusiasm some do not share.

The most-discussed revision is 7.11. The word insights became knowledge, and new learning became new insights. Together they acknowledge that coaches already offer models, frameworks, and theories in service of the client, and now the language names it. That prompted a fair question in the coaching community: did this turn coaching into consulting? It did not. The safeguard is right there in the marker, without attachment. Knowledge is offered as a catalyst, with the client’s permission, and the client may take it or set it aside. ICF anchors the boundary to client autonomy and to the clear agreements in 3.01 and 3.02. You contribute, and the client stays the meaning-maker.

The 2025 update took what was living in the background of good coaching and brought it into the foreground, where it can be taught, practiced, and seen. An assessor cannot score an assumption. The model now states what the 2019 version only implied.

The One Competency Whose Definition Changed

Of all eight competencies, only one had its definition itself significantly revised: Competency 2, Embodies a Coaching Mindset. It is also the competency that grew from eight markers to ten, so it carries the most change in the whole update. Three things shifted in the definition. It added an explicit reference to working with coaching supervisors and mentor coaches, placing coaching supervision and reflective practice inside the Coaching Mindset itself rather than treating them as optional professional extras. It added the language “open, curious, flexible and client-centered” to describe the inner stance a coach brings. And it expanded to ten markers, with 2.09 and 2.10 as the additions. If one competency repays a closer look after this update, it is this one.

The New ICF Glossary of Terms: 47 Definitions

The least flashy addition may be the most practical. Coaching borrows its vocabulary from psychology, business, education, and philosophy, so the same word arrives carrying different meanings depending on where you learned it. Two coaches can say autonomy or partnering and mean genuinely different things. That is harmless in a hallway and a real problem when an ICF assessor evaluates your recorded session against the markers. The new glossary fixes one definition for each key term, for everyone, across the whole model.

You do not need to memorize all 47. Know the glossary exists so you can look up a term when you are unsure, watch the words that recur across the markers, and notice where your own working definition might quietly differ from ICF’s. Three of the recurring terms reward a pause:

• Accountability — the responsibility to follow through on commitments and actions agreed upon during the coaching process. Note whose responsibility it is: the client’s. You are not the enforcer of follow-through. You partner with someone who owns their own.
• Autonomy – the client’s ability to make independent decisions and take actions based on their own values and beliefs. Their values, not yours or the organization’s. Autonomy is the spine of Facilitates Client Growth, and the moment you steer a client toward the decision you would make, you have stepped off it.
• Partnering – coach and client working collaboratively toward a common, client-centered goal that supports, encourages, and honors the client’s autonomy. The word appears all over the markers, and it is a defined practice with specific conditions, not a warm synonym for working together.

The definitions are not separate from the competencies. They are the lens you read the competencies through. Get a recurring term right and the marker reads cleanly. Leave it fuzzy and the marker stays fuzzy too.

2019 vs 2025: The Updated Core Competencies at a Glance

Here is the whole update in one frame. The eight competencies and their domains are unchanged, including active listening under Competency 6 (Listens Actively), which has no marker changes in this update. The right column is where 2025 lands.

Hold both columns at once. On one side: five new markers, eleven reworded markers, one revised definition, and a new glossary. On the other side, and it is the larger side, the same eight competencies, the same structure, the same non-directive philosophy, and a large majority of markers untouched. The honest summary is that 2025 is refinement, not reinvention. ICF publishes the complete model and a full 2019-vs-2025 comparison chart on its official ICF Core Competencies page if you want every marker in both versions side by side.

What This Means for Coaches: Credential and Renewal

If you hold or are pursuing an ICF credential, you will be assessed against the 2025 model at your next credentialing performance or renewal. That does not mean retraining from scratch. It means knowing the deltas precisely: the five behaviors that are now named, the markers whose wording sharpened a quiet expectation into a stated one, and the glossary terms that an assessor reads the same way you should. Study the changes that matter for how you actually coach, and let the rest stay the model you already know. For new coaches entering the credential process, or coaches with years of coaching experience pursuing ongoing professional development, the five new markers and the glossary of terms are the most focused starting point.

We built a free course, Master the 2025 ICF Core Competencies, taught by Cherie Silas, MCC, that walks all eight competencies against the current model and devotes a full module to exactly these 2025 changes, marker by marker. Enroll free here. If you are working toward a credential and want the structured path, our ACC certification program and PCC certification program build these competencies as coaching skills, with mentor coaching included, rather than as definitions to memorize.

FAQ

The 2025 ICF Core Competencies ask you to sharpen, not restart. You already know the model. Now you hold the deltas precisely: the five new behaviors, the language that moved, and the vocabulary an assessor shares with you. Carry them into your coaching practice, your reflective work, and your next credential or renewal. You do not need to become a different coach. Let these changes make the coaching you already do well a little clearer.