China Moved CPAs From 80 Hours Every Two Years to 40 a Year

Most English-language sources describing continuing education for Chinese certified public accountants give 80 hours over a two-year cycle, with at least 30 in any one year. Those figures were correct until the end of 2021. The requirement has been 40 hours a year, on a calendar-year cycle, since 1 January 2022.

The statute does not create the obligation

We read the current Law of the People's Republic of China on Certified Public Accountants, as published by the institute itself — adopted in 1993, first amended in 2014, and amended a second time on 26 June 2026 by the standing committee of the National People's Congress.

No article of it imposes continuing education on a certified public accountant. The nearest provision is addressed to the association rather than to the individual, requiring it to strengthen work on development planning and talent-force building for the profession — our translation. We also found no Ministry of Finance instrument imposing continuing education on CPAs.

The obligation therefore sits in the institute's own system document, which puts China in the same structural position as Malaysia, Nigeria and Sri Lanka: a statutory profession with a non-statutory continuing education duty.

The instrument, and why we could not read it

The governing text is the Continuing Education System for Chinese Certified Public Accountants, revised and issued by the institute on 8 December 2021 and effective from 1 January 2022. The institute's own announcement states that it takes effect on that date.

We did not read it. The institute publishes it only as a word-processing attachment that returns no extractable text, and the one provincial institute copy we found in readable form is disallowed to automated retrieval. We do not work around that kind of restriction.

So everything below about the current regime comes from the institute's own annual national work documents and notices, and in two places from a municipal institute's member notice, which we flag where it matters. A document number for the 2021 instrument circulates in secondary sources, and because we could not confirm it on an institute page we are not printing it as fact.

We did read, in full, the superseded English translations the institute publishes itself: the 2006 regulations, effective 1 January 2007, and the 2008 supplementary provisions. Those are the source of the 80-hour figure, and both carry the institute's own note that the Chinese text is the official version.

Forty hours a year, and what changed

The institute's national work-points document for 2022 states the requirement directly: strictly implement the continuing education system, ensuring that members receive at least 40 hours of education and training each year — our translation. It names the 2021 instrument and its companion document for non-practising members, and separately requires local institutes to run 16 hours of face-to-face training.

A municipal institute's 2025 member notice puts the cycle beyond doubt: continuing education has an assessment cycle of one year, running from 1 January to 31 December.

So the change from the old regime is structural rather than numerical. Eighty hours over two years averaged 40 a year, but allowed 50 in one year and 30 in the other. Forty a year on an annual cycle removes that flexibility entirely, and removes the carry-over the old cycle implied. Anyone still working to the two-year figure is working to a cycle that no longer exists.

Input method and output method — the institute's own categories

China does not use structured and unstructured, or verifiable and non-verifiable. Its two categories are the input method and the output method.

The input method is time-based learning — course attendance and online study. The output method covers profession-related professional activities and outputs, claimed through the industry management information system with evidence uploaded.

A clean split between the two exists, but we could only verify it for non-practising members, where the input-method component must be at least 16 of the 40 hours. For practising CPAs we could not verify an input and output split in the instrument, and we are not going to assume the same numbers apply.

What we could verify for practising CPAs, from the municipal notice, is a different constraint: face-to-face training must be no fewer than 16 hours, with live-streamed courses treated as face-to-face, and online video course study capped at 24 recorded hours. That shape — a face-to-face floor plus an online ceiling — is unusual. Most bodies that distinguish delivery modes do it through a verifiability test rather than by mandating attendance in a room.

Four hours of ethics, and a ten per cent political education share

The institute's national notices for both 2025 and 2026 restate two subject requirements: strictly implement the requirement that professional ethics courses be no fewer than 4 hours, and strictly implement the requirement that the share of ideological and political courses be no less than 10 per cent — our translations.

The four-hour ethics figure is continuous with the 2006 regulations, which required no fewer than four hours of ethics training per cycle, and the municipal notice repeats it. It places China in the middle of the range we set out when comparing mandatory ethics requirements across bodies — four hours a year is more than Hong Kong's two and less than the Australian IPA's seven.

The ten per cent ideological and political component has no counterpart in any other body in this programme. Against a 40-hour requirement it is four hours a year, which is to say as much as ethics.

What we could not establish is whether either requirement appears in the 2021 system document itself or only in the annual notices. That distinction matters, because an annual notice is easier to change than a system document, and we could not read the latter.

Monitoring is local, and tied to annual renewal

The 2006 regulations placed confirmation and registration of hours with local associations, and provided for inspection or spot-checks. Current practice runs through the industry management information system and connects to the annual inspection: a municipal notice warns that failure to complete continuing education on time will affect passing the annual inspection.

No national sample rate is published. The institute publishes planning figures rather than compliance rates — its 2022 work points planned training for around 309,000 people in total, of whom some 97,000 practising CPAs. Those are targets, not outcomes.

The only genuine compliance statistics we found are in the institute's own English-language profession overview, updated in 2018 with data to the end of 2017, and they are for non-practising members only: completion of required training at roughly 54 per cent in 2014, 44 in 2015, 57 in 2016 and 60 in 2017. Those figures predate the current regime and cover a different population, so they should not be used to describe practising CPAs today.

Sanctions include being named in public

Under the 2006 regulations, the escalation ran: hours not recognised where a required test is failed, with the firm informed; public announcement by the local association of CPAs who have not completed their hours and do not qualify for an exemption; compulsory training within a set period; and, in current practice, failure of the annual inspection.

Public naming as a continuing education sanction is rare. Japan does it too, publishing each member's completion result individually, but almost nowhere else does. Whether the 2022 instrument preserves this escalation we could not establish, for the same reason as everything else here.

Record retention under the 2006 regulations was three years for the member, with entrusted training institutions keeping records for five. Whether three years survived into the 2022 instrument is unverified.

Exemptions, as last published in readable form

The 2006 regulations allowed written application to the local association on five grounds: staying outside the country for more than six months; maternity leave; illness preventing normal work for more than six months; newly registered after 1 July; and other circumstances approved by local associations. Where an exemption applied in the first year of a cycle, the CPA had to complete no fewer than 40 hours in the second.

A current-regime reduction appears in the municipal notice — reductions capped at 24 hours in aggregate, with the 40-hour requirement still to be met after reduction — and as quoted that reads as self-contradictory. We are not publishing it as a rule, because we could not reconcile it against the instrument.

The institute has been a member of the international federation since 1997. Its continuing education documents, including the superseded English translations, are indexed at the institute's own laws and regulations page.