CA ANZ's 120 Hours Is Wrong for Half Its Membership Classes

Two things about CA ANZ's continuing professional development requirement are worth knowing before you plan around it. The familiar figure of 120 hours a triennium is wrong for half its membership classes. And the exemption for members over 60 that still appears on CA ANZ's own public website was abolished five years ago.

A caveat first, because it shapes everything below

We normally quote the binding instrument. For CA ANZ we cannot, and that is itself the finding.

CA ANZ's CPD requirements live in Regulation CR 7. The only version of CR 7 we could obtain from charteredaccountantsanz.com is marked "Issued 8 October 2019", carries no version number and no effective date, and is superseded. The apparently current edition sits behind the MyCA member portal, which refused automated access. CA ANZ's publicly downloadable By-Laws are marked "Revised March 2022" while CA ANZ's own By-Laws page states that the most recent changes were approved on 25 January 2024, so that PDF appears to lag its own stated amendment date by nearly two years. Several of CA ANZ's member-facing CPD guidance pages returned errors.

So every current CA ANZ figure in this piece is sourced to CA ANZ's own guidance — principally its key-changes document updated June 2021 and its CPD frequently asked questions of July 2025 — and not to the regulation. We are confident in the substance, because two independent CA ANZ documents corroborate each other. We cannot give you clause numbers or an effective date for the current rule.

That contrast is sharp when you set it beside CPA Australia, whose constitution and by-laws are public, dated, versioned, with superseded editions archived and a published summary of what changed in each. One body's binding CPD instrument is readable by any member or prospective member; the other's is not.

120 hours is right for two classes out of four

CA ANZ tiers its requirement by membership class. On the current guidance, for trienniums commencing on or after 1 July 2021:

Chartered Accountants and Affiliate Members: 120 hours per triennium, of which 90 must be verifiable and 30 may be non-verifiable, with a minimum of 20 hours in each year.

Associate Chartered Accountants: 90 hours per triennium, of which 67 must be verifiable, with a minimum of 15 hours in each year.

Accounting Technicians: 60 hours per triennium, of which 45 must be verifiable, with a minimum of 10 hours in each year.

And across all classes, a minimum of two verifiable hours of ethics training every triennium, which counts toward the verifiable requirement and which CA ANZ states cannot be pro-rated.

Two details that catch people. Affiliate Members are bound at the Chartered Accountant level, which is easy to miss. And there is no distinction between CA and FCA — fellowship does not change the quantum at all.

So a blanket statement that CA ANZ members must complete 120 hours is wrong for Associate Chartered Accountants and for Accounting Technicians, and incomplete for everyone because it omits both the 90-hour verifiable sub-quota and the ethics hours.

The terminology changed, and the public document still uses the old words

Under the 2019 regulation, members resident outside New Zealand needed 90 hours of "formal" CPD and the vocabulary was formal and informal; New Zealand residents needed 60 hours of "verifiable" CPD on a verifiable and non-verifiable split.

CA ANZ's guidance says that changed for trienniums beginning 1 July 2021. The categories were renamed from formal and informal to verifiable and non-verifiable, and the split became 90 and 30 across all residences — so New Zealand's verifiable quota rose from 60 to 90. Anyone quoting 60 verifiable hours for New Zealand is five years out of date, and is quoting the version still published on CA ANZ's public website.

A useful addition in the same changes: on-the-job training now counts as verifiable CPD and may make up to half of the total verifiable requirement, on a prescribed form completed and verified by the person the work was done for, usually a manager or supervisor.

The age-60 exemption no longer exists

This is the one to act on, because it is wrong in the direction that causes members to under-comply.

The publicly downloadable CR 7 exempts a member who is at least 60 years of age and does not hold a Certificate of Public Practice and is not a specialist. That text is still there, which is why the belief persists.

CA ANZ's June 2021 guidance states that the exemption now applies to members who are retired, meaning they have permanently and completely withdrawn from the workforce, and that this replaces the previous age-based exemption for members over 60 without a certificate of public practice. The July 2025 FAQ repeats it: an exemption applicable to all members who have permanently retired from the workforce, irrespective of age.

A 62-year-old Chartered Accountant still working is therefore not exempt. Nor, on the same changes, is an Associate Chartered Accountant admitted before June 2006 — the old concession for that cohort was abolished, and all ACAs now owe 90 hours regardless of admission date.

What CA ANZ does have, and CPA Australia does not, is a binding pro-rata regime. CR 7.4(b) allows an application to exempt a member on a pro-rata basis by reason of exceptional circumstances causing particular hardship or difficulty, or where the member has been or will be absent from public practice or employment because of parenting leave, unemployment or illness, or is not employed full-time or has part-time or casual employment, or holds a Certificate of Public Practice but is not currently engaged in practice. CPA Australia's by-laws contain none of those.

One administrative shift worth knowing: since 1 July 2021, exemptions are recorded in the member's own CPD log rather than submitted to CA ANZ, though they may still be requested through MyCA. That moves the burden of proof onto the member and is poorly known.

The schedules split by residence, not by where you practise

CR 7 is divided into schedules for members not resident in New Zealand, members resident in New Zealand, and licensed auditors and engagement partners for public interest entities.

That is a residence test, not a jurisdiction-of-practice test. An Australian-resident CA auditing in New Zealand is on the first schedule; a New Zealand-resident CA is on the second wherever they work. The requirement is commonly described as "Australian requirements versus New Zealand requirements", which is not what the instrument does.

Since the 2021 changes the quantum and the split no longer differ by residence anyway. What still differs is retention: the New Zealand schedule required records to be kept for at least five years, while the Australian schedule, as published, states no retention period at all. We could not confirm whether the five-year rule survived the amendments.

Non-compliance, and a second trigger most members do not know about

CR 7.7 provides that members who fail to comply may be excluded from membership in accordance with By-Law 23(c). By-Law 23(c) lets the Board exclude a member who fails to fulfil continuing professional development requirements as prescribed.

Note what that permits: exclusion for the shortfall itself. There is no mandatory remedial step in the binding text, which makes it a more direct sanction than CPA Australia's, where a shortfall triggers a formal make-up agreement and only breach of that direction becomes a membership breach.

And By-Law 23(c) has a second limb. It also covers a member who fails to notify CA ANZ of his or her compliance or otherwise for two consecutive years. So a fully compliant member who simply does not complete two renewal declarations is exposed. CA ANZ describes those Mandatory Notifications as a legal declaration of CPD undertaken during the membership period, which must be completed even by exempt members, with hours re-entered during renewal even if logged elsewhere.

In New Zealand the stakes are higher still: for licensed auditors, NZICA may vary, add to, suspend or cancel a licence for CPD non-compliance. There is no CPA Australia equivalent of losing an audit licence this way.

On monitoring, CA ANZ states that it reviews the CPD records of a random selection of members, and publishes no sample size or percentage anywhere we could find. CPA Australia publishes a number — 850 members selected in 2024. Neither publishes a rate, so treat any percentage you see as invented.

What to do with this

Identify your class, not just your body: if you are an ACA or an Accounting Technician the headline figure overstates your obligation, and if you are an Affiliate it understates nothing but surprises people. Confirm your triennium, which runs 1 July to 30 June, with the large legacy cohort having reset on 1 July 2021. Count your verifiable hours separately from your total, because 90 of the 120 is the binding constraint for a CA. And if you have been relying on turning 60, stop.

For the other major Australian body, whose ethics requirement is five times CA ANZ's and whose triennium runs on the calendar year instead, see our piece on CPA Australia's 10-hour ethics rule. The same guidance-versus-instrument gap we describe here appears in other bodies' rulebooks too, as our comparison of ACCA and CIMA CPD sets out, and the reason no two bodies express any of this the same way is covered in our explainer on IES 7. CA ANZ's by-laws and regulations are indexed on its member obligations page, and if you hold a MyCA login, read the current CR 7 there rather than the public 2019 edition.