Chiropractic Board of Australia CPD: 20 Hours, No Interactive Requirement

The Chiropractic Board of Australia requires 20 hours of continuing professional development a year and does not require any of it to be interactive. That is unusual enough in the national scheme that the Board says so explicitly in its own guidelines rather than leaving the absence to be inferred, which is a more useful position for a practitioner than silence would be.

Twenty hours, and an absence the Board states outright

The requirement is at least 20 hours of CPD each year. There is no interactive minimum, no peer consultation quota and no board-approved-topic share. The Board's guidelines put it directly: the CPD standard does not require practitioners to complete interactive or interprofessional CPD activities, while noting there is strong evidence that such activity facilitates effective learning.

That distinction between a stated absence and an unverified one matters more than it sounds. Where a regulator is silent, a practitioner cannot safely conclude anything. Where it says expressly that it does not require something, the practitioner has a defensible position. Chiropractic is one of only a small group of boards in this category, alongside physiotherapy and dental, as set out in our guide to physiotherapy CPD and the absent interactive floor.

The CPR requirement sits outside the hours

Separately from the 20 hours, chiropractors must maintain a first aid qualification at least equivalent to the cardiopulmonary resuscitation unit, and may instead satisfy the requirement by holding a broader first aid qualification, which carries a three-year validity.

This is a standing requirement rather than an annual one, and it does not count toward the CPD total. A practitioner who completes a resuscitation refresher has not earned CPD hours by doing so. For an employer, it is a separate budget line with its own renewal clock, and because the broader first aid qualification runs for three years while the CPD obligation runs annually, the two cycles do not align.

The portfolio is where the real work is

The hours are the smaller part of the obligation. Chiropractors must maintain a portfolio documenting their learning goals, recording all planned CPD activities, and setting out reflection on how those activities are expected to improve, or have improved, their practice.

So the standard asks for intent and evaluation, not just attendance. A log of twenty hours with no learning goals and no reflection does not meet the requirement even where every hour was completed and relevant. That is the part a training provider cannot supply: a certificate evidences attendance, and the reflection has to come from the practitioner.

Records of CPD activity must be kept for five years, with the guidelines putting the clock at five years from the date each activity was completed.

Part-year registration is pro-rated

A chiropractor registering part-way through a registration period completes five hours of CPD for every three months of registration remaining. The standard does not state the calendar start and end dates of the registration period itself, so a practitioner needing the exact dates should confirm them against the Board's own renewal information rather than assuming the dates another board uses.

What a provider can honestly offer, and what it cannot

Because there is no interactive requirement, the qualifying question a chiropractor has to ask of a course is narrower than it would be in most other registered professions. Any activity relevant to their scope of practice can fill any part of the 20 hours, and no part of the total is reserved for a format that costs more to deliver.

What a provider cannot supply is the portfolio. The learning goals have to be the practitioner's own, set before the activity rather than reconstructed after it, and the reflection has to connect the activity to that practitioner's practice. A catalogue that promises to handle a chiropractor's CPD compliance is overselling, because the documentation half of the obligation is not transferable. The honest offer is hours plus evidence of completion, with the portfolio left where the standard puts it.

How it compares across the scheme

Twenty hours with no sub-quota is the lightest structured requirement among the boards whose standards set a figure. The contrast with paramedicine is stark: 30 hours including eight interactive, the highest participatory share in the scheme, as set out in our guide to paramedicine CPD and its interactive floor. Two professions under one regulator, one with no participatory requirement at all and one with the largest.

What chiropractic does carry, which paramedicine does not, is the standing resuscitation qualification. So a direct comparison of hours totals misses obligations on both sides. Our comparison of why Ahpra CPD hours are not comparable across National Boards sets out each board's published position with its sub-quotas attached, which is the only form in which the figures can be read against each other honestly.

One currency warning, and it bears directly on this board

A joint consultation covering fourteen National Boards, chiropractic among them, closed on 17 July 2026. The draft proposed a common requirement of 20 hours a year including a minimum of five interactive hours. For chiropractic the hours figure would be unchanged and the interactive floor would be new — so the feature this article describes is precisely what the pending review would remove.

Nothing has been approved. The standard in force is the one without an interactive requirement. Before relying on that for planning, check the dated standard on the Chiropractic Board of Australia's registration standards page, because this is the board where the position is most likely to change.