The CMA Needs 30 CPE Hours a Year, and No State Board Sets Them

If you hold a Certified Management Accountant designation and you have been reading about continuing education for US accountants, almost nothing you have read applies to you. State boards of accountancy set continuing professional education for the CPA licence. They do not set it for the CMA. The CMA requirement is set by the Institute of Management Accountants and administered through its certification arm, and it runs on a completely separate track with a different number of hours, a different ethics rule and a different consequence for missing it.

This post sets out what IMA actually publishes about CMA continuing education, and — just as importantly — what it does not publish. The second part is longer than the first.

The verified requirement: 30 hours a year, two in ethics

IMA's page on maintaining the CMA states that "you will be required to report 30 hours of CPE on an annual basis" and that "a minimum of two hours must be in the field of ethics." That is the whole of the published numerical requirement. Thirty hours a year, two of which must be ethics.

Two things are worth noticing immediately. The first is that 30 hours a year is a flat annual figure with no multi-year cycle behind it — there is no three-year block to average across, no carry-forward and no rolling period of the kind most licensing regimes use. The second is that the ethics rule is a plain two-hour floor with no subject breakdown. If you are used to the four different kinds of ethics requirement that US state boards impose, the CMA's version is strikingly simple by comparison.

The same page states that you must "keep your IMA membership active to retain your CMA status." This is the structural point that separates the CMA from a licence most sharply. A CPA licence does not lapse because you stopped paying dues to a membership body; it is granted by a state board under state law. The CMA is conditioned on membership of a voluntary organisation. Let the membership go and the designation goes with it, regardless of how much continuing education you completed.

The governing document is not publicly available

Here is where this stops being a straightforward summary. The same IMA page that gives the 30-hour figure continues: "A copy of the CPE Requirements and Rules can be found here."

The word "here" is plain text. It is not a hyperlink. No URL appears anywhere on the page, and the document is not retrievable by any public route we could find. IMA's CMA Handbook and CSCA Handbook pages return a JavaScript shell with no document URL exposed. The help-centre articles that formerly carried continuing education guidance sit behind a client-rendered support platform that serves no readable content. And IMA's older domain, imanet.org, no longer serves content documents at all: requests for the old continuing education policy file redirect to the current homepage, discarding the document.

IMA has not published a migration notice explaining this. The old domain is not fully retired either — the current site's footer still links imanet.org subdomains for jobs, the help centre and chapter leaders — so the two estates coexist, with content-bearing pages on the old one collapsed to a homepage redirect.

The practical consequence is that every article you will find citing "IMA's CPE Requirements and Rules" for a detailed proposition is citing a document that is not publicly reachable. We are not willing to do that, so the following list is what we are telling you we could not establish rather than guessing at it.

What IMA does not publish about CMA continuing education

None of the following is publicly stated: the reporting year and the filing deadline; which subject areas qualify; whether any activity type is capped; how a credit hour is defined, including whether IMA uses the fifty-minute convention that governs the CPE credit on the state-board side; whether there is any audit or verification process; what happens if you fall short; and whether any exemption exists for retirement, hardship or a first partial year.

The page says only "on an annual basis" with no calendar year, no anniversary rule and no date. The nearest thing to a monitoring statement anywhere on the site is a membership benefit — "our system will automatically keep track of your completed hours" — which describes a tracking convenience, not a compliance process.

These are absences of publication, not evidence that no rules exist. The rules may well sit inside the handbook pages or the help-centre articles that are not machine-readable. The honest statement is that a CMA holder trying to find out, from IMA's public site, when their reporting year ends or what happens if they miss it cannot do so.

The FMAA is 15 hours, not 30

IMA's entry-level credential, the Financial and Managerial Accounting Associate, carries a different figure that is frequently reported as the same one. The FMAA page states the holder must "earn 15 CPE credits per year" and pay a "$49 annual renewal fee." Fifteen, not thirty. No ethics sub-requirement is stated for the FMAA at all.

The CSCA, and a question nobody answers

The Certified in Strategy and Competitive Analysis credential requires the holder to "complete 30 hours of relevant continuing professional education annually," of which "two hours must be in the area of ethics" — the same shape as the CMA.

The obvious question for anyone holding both is whether those hours stack. Sixty hours a year, or thirty counted twice? IMA's page does not say. What it does say is that the fee position is resolved: "If you are a CMA in good standing, no annual renewal fee is required." The page waives the fee and is silent on the hours. We are not going to infer in either direction from a fee waiver, and neither should anyone else.

IMA is not an IFAC member body — and CIMA is a different organisation

This catches people out constantly. IMA does not appear as a member or an associate of the International Federation of Accountants. IFAC's own country profile for the United States lists one body, the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants, in its AICPA form. IMA appears on that profile only in descriptive prose, as a voluntary professional body focused on management accounting. It is absent from IFAC's members and associates listing for the US. NASBA appears in IFAC's structure, but as an affiliate rather than a member — and NASBA's role is itself narrower than it is usually assumed to be.

The organisation people are often thinking of is CIMA, the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, which is a UK body and does sit inside the IFAC structure through the same AICPA and CIMA association. CIMA and IMA are separate organisations with separate credentials and separate continuing development rules. The similarity of the names does a great deal of damage.

This matters beyond trivia, because IFAC membership is what brings a body within the scope of the international education standards and the compliance programme that monitors adoption of them. A body outside that structure has no external benchmark applied to its continuing education rules and no obligation to publish them in a particular form.

Certification, not licensure

IMA's own vocabulary is consistent and worth taking literally. Its pages use "certification," "certificate" and "designation." No IMA page we retrieved uses the word "license," and none claims state licensure. The CMA is a credential awarded by a private body to its own members. It is not a permission to practise granted by a government, which is what a CPA licence and its continuing education conditions actually are.

So if you hold both, you are complying with two unrelated regimes at once: a state board's hours, categories, reporting cycle and sanctions, and separately IMA's thirty hours with two in ethics plus continuous membership. Meeting one does not discharge the other, and the published guidance on the IMA side runs out well before the questions do.

Primary source for the figures above: IMA, how to maintain the CMA certification. Retrieved 6 November 2026.