Why Ahpra CPD Hours Are Not Comparable Across National Boards

Fifteen National Boards regulate the registered health professions in Australia under one national scheme, administered by one agency. It is natural to assume their continuing professional development requirements are variations on a single template. They are not. The totals differ, the periods differ, the sub-quotas differ, and in one case the unit of measurement itself differs. A table of headline numbers is actively misleading unless each number carries its structure with it.

The published figures, with their structure attached

The following are the requirements as published by each Board. They are set out with their sub-quotas because the sub-quota, not the total, is usually what determines what a registrant can count.

• Medical Radiation Practice — 60 hours across a three-year period, at least 35 of them substantive, with a minimum of 10 hours in any one year.
• Pharmacy — 40 CPD credits, not hours, in a 12-month period ending 30 September. Activities earn one, two or three credits an hour depending on their group.
• Psychology — 30 hours a year, of which at least 10 must be peer consultation.
• Osteopathy — 25 hours a year, including 4 hours in Board-approved topics, with a first aid requirement sitting separately from the hours total.
• Podiatry — a base of 20 hours a year including 5 interactive, plus 10 more for a scheduled medicines endorsement and 20 more for a podiatric surgeon. The add-ons stack, so the possible totals are 20, 30, 40 and 50. Resuscitation training sits outside the hours.
• Paramedicine — 30 hours a year including at least 8 interactive hours, the heaviest participatory share in the scheme. Planning and reflection time cannot be counted toward the 30.
• Medical — a minimum of 50 hours each calendar year through an AMC-accredited CPD home, with at least 12.5 hours of educational activities and at least 25 hours across reviewing performance and measuring outcomes, including a 5-hour floor in each of those two. Records kept 3 years.
• Dental — 60 hours over a three-year cycle running 1 December to 30 November, with at least 48 hours (80 per cent) clinically or scientifically based. One figure for all five divisions, and dual-division registrants owe no more. No annual floor.
• Chiropractic — 20 hours a year with no interactive requirement, which the Board states expressly rather than leaving to inference. A CPR qualification is required separately from the hours.
• Optometry — 20 hours a year, rising to 30 for registrants with a scheduled medicines endorsement, including at least 5 interactive hours.
• Occupational Therapy — 20 hours a year, including at least 5 interactive hours.
• Chinese Medicine — 20 hours a year, including at least 5 interactive hours and 4 hours on professional issues, with the content requirement varying by division of registration.
• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Practice — 20 hours a year, including at least 5 interactive hours.
• Physiotherapy — 20 hours a year, with no interactive minimum specified.
• Nursing and Midwifery — 20 hours a year, with the total rising where a registrant holds dual registration or an endorsement.

That is all fifteen National Boards, each figure read at the Board's own published standard. Where a Board states that it does not impose a sub-quota, that is recorded as a stated absence; where a standard is silent, nothing is inferred from the silence.

Three reasons the numbers do not line up

First, the period. Most of these figures are annual. Medical radiation practice is not: it is a three-year block, so 60 is roughly comparable to 20 a year, and placing 60 beside 20 in the same column overstates it threefold. Pharmacy's period ends on 30 September rather than at the registration year, which moves when the demand actually falls. Our guide to the medical radiation 60-hour triennium sets out how the annual floor and the substantive sub-quota interact inside that block.

Second, the unit. Pharmacy counts weighted credits, not contact hours. A registrant whose activity sits in the highest-weighted group earns three credits for each hour, so the 40-credit requirement can represent roughly 15 hours of actual activity. That makes the Pharmacy Board's apparently largest annual figure one of the smallest in time terms, as explained in our guide to why 40 Pharmacy Board credits is not 40 hours.

Third, the sub-quota. Psychology's 30 hours contain a 10-hour peer consultation requirement that cannot be met by reading or by attending a lecture. Several boards specify a minimum of interactive hours, and physiotherapy specifies none. Osteopathy puts four hours into Board-approved topics and keeps first aid outside the hours count altogether. Nursing and midwifery changes with endorsement, which is covered in our guide to NMBA CPD hours, dual registration and endorsements. Two boards with the same headline 20 can therefore impose very different constraints on what a registrant is allowed to buy.

What this means for employers and training buyers

An Australian employer with a mixed clinical workforce cannot run one CPD budget line per head and assume parity. The practical planning unit is the sub-quota, not the total: interactive hours, peer consultation hours, Board-approved topics and substantive hours are the scarce items, and the general hours are usually the easy ones to fill. A catalogue that advertises a volume of hours without saying which sub-quotas those hours can satisfy does not answer the question an employer is actually asking.

Record-keeping diverges too

The divergence does not stop at the hours. Where the Boards address how long CPD evidence has to be kept, they do not agree on the unit for that either. The Pharmacy Board expresses its expectation in CPD periods rather than years, and the figure is three periods. Because the period is a fixed 12-month window with a fixed end date, three periods and three years from the date of an activity are not the same span, and a registrant who counts anniversaries will drop evidence early.

The Medical Radiation Practice Board, by contrast, publishes no retention period at all. That is an absence rather than a permission: a practitioner selected for audit still has to produce evidence covering the period under review, and that period is three years long. Only those two Boards were checked at source on this point for this article, so the position for the remaining thirteen should be read from each Board's own standard rather than inferred from either of them.

One currency warning

A joint consultation on revised recency of practice and CPD registration standards closed on 17 July 2026. It covered fourteen of the fifteen Boards — the Medical Board was not part of it, its own standard having taken effect on 1 January 2023 after a separate review. The draft proposed moving the fourteen to a common 20 hours a year including 5 interactive hours, with records kept 5 years. If approved as drafted that would materially change dental, paramedicine, chiropractic and osteopathy, and would add an interactive floor to physiotherapy and chiropractic where none exists.

Nothing has been approved, and every figure above is the standard currently in force, not a proposal. Do not plan against the draft. One caution: the Dental Board's CPD guidance page still carries a banner describing the consultation as open until 17 July 2026, which it no longer is, so check the dated standard itself rather than the surrounding guidance. Each Board's standards are reached from its own site via the Ahpra registration standards index.