CPA Australia vs CA ANZ CPD: Two Clocks, Six Months Apart

CPA Australia and CA ANZ are usually treated as two routes to the same place. Their CPD obligations are not the same place. The headline total matches for one of CA ANZ's four membership classes and diverges for the rest, the two trienniums are six months out of phase, the ethics requirements differ fivefold, and one body can exclude you for a shortfall while the other has to offer you a chance to make it up first.

For anyone who belongs to both, the practical consequence is that the learning counts twice but the compliance does not.

A note on what each half of this rests on

CPA Australia's constitution and by-laws are public, dated and versioned, with superseded editions archived and a published summary of what changed. The current By-Laws took effect 1 October 2026.

CA ANZ's current Regulation CR 7 is behind its MyCA member login. The only publicly downloadable CR 7 is marked "Issued 8 October 2019" and is superseded, contradicting CA ANZ's own guidance on at least five points. So every current CA ANZ figure below is sourced to CA ANZ guidance — its key-changes document updated June 2021 and its CPD frequently asked questions of July 2025 — rather than to the regulation. We are confident in the substance because two independent CA ANZ documents corroborate each other, but we cannot give clause numbers or an effective date.

How much

CPA Australia, By-Law 4.1(a): at least 120 hours per triennium, of which at least 20 in each year. The by-law makes no distinction by membership class — Associate, CPA and FCPA are identical — and it expressly catches suspended members.

CA ANZ tiers by class. Chartered Accountants and Affiliate Members: 120 hours, 90 of them verifiable, 20 a year. Associate Chartered Accountants: 90 hours, 67 verifiable, 15 a year. Accounting Technicians: 60 hours, 45 verifiable, 10 a year. Fellowship changes nothing.

So the two bodies agree on 120 only for CA ANZ's Chartered Accountants and Affiliates, and the agreement is superficial, because of what comes next.

Verifiability: a binding sub-quota against no sub-quota at all

This is the sharpest structural difference and it runs the opposite way to most people's expectation.

CA ANZ requires 90 of the 120 hours to be verifiable, as a hard sub-quota. Up to half of that verifiable total may be on-the-job training, on a prescribed form verified by the person the work was done for.

CPA Australia's By-Laws impose no verifiable, structured or technical sub-quota anywhere. By-Law 4.1(a) requires hours and nothing else. Its guidance does require that ethics CPD be verifiable, with specified evidence — certificates or confirmations of attendance, and expressly not slides, registration emails or general course materials. But By-Law 4.1(b) does not contain the word verifiable, and the only binding evidential duty is the By-Law 4.2(a) record, whose test is production rather than verification.

It is the same guidance-versus-instrument gap we found in ACCA's rulebook, where the famous three-question test for verifiable CPD is guidance while the regulation's own test is provability alone. Our piece on ACCA's three routes sets that out.

Ethics: ten hours against two

CPA Australia, By-Law 4.1(b): within the 120 hours, at least 10 hours of Ethics and Professional Responsibility, of which at least 2 in each year of the triennium. The triennium ending 31 December 2026 is the first in which the full 10-hour figure applies.

CA ANZ: a minimum of 2 verifiable hours of ethics training per triennium, across all classes, which CA ANZ states cannot be pro-rated.

A fivefold difference. For a dual member the binding constraint is simply CPA Australia's ten, because neither body ring-fences its ethics hours from the other's. Meeting CA ANZ's requirement leaves you eight hours short.

Two clocks, six months out of phase

This is the trap that actually catches dual members, and it is frequently stated wrongly.

CPA Australia's triennium is calendar-year aligned: 1 January to 31 December across three full years, cohorted by date of admission under By-Law 4.3. Admitted before 30 June, your triennium started 1 January that year; on or after 30 June, 1 January the following year. It is not the financial year and not an anniversary cycle.

CA ANZ's runs 1 July to 30 June. The large legacy cohort of former ICAA and NZICA members reset on 1 July 2021.

The hours are fungible — the same activity counts toward both totals. The annual minimums are not. A dual member who front-loads January to June satisfies CPA Australia's calendar year and CA ANZ's financial year that ends in June, leaving CA ANZ's next year empty. You can be fully compliant with one body and in breach of the other on identical learning.

Records: three fields against five, twelve months against five years

CPA Australia, By-Law 4.2(a): maintain a record of the precise nature of the CPD including dates, time expended and topics covered; retain it for at least 12 months after the end of each triennium; produce it on request. Three fields. No provider, no outcome, no reflection, no evidence of verification required by the by-law.

CA ANZ's Australian schedule prescribes five fields: date, provider, description, relevance and hours — and, as published, states no retention period at all. The New Zealand schedule required at least five years, though we could not confirm whether that survived the 2021 amendments.

So CA ANZ demands richer records and, in Australia, for an unstated duration; CPA Australia demands thinner records for a defined and surprisingly short period. For a dual member the answer is to keep one log in CA ANZ's format for five years, which satisfies both.

Exemptions that do not recognise each other

CA ANZ has a binding pro-rata regime. CR 7.4(b) permits application for pro-rata exemption on grounds of exceptional circumstances causing hardship, absence from practice or employment because of parenting leave, unemployment or illness, part-time or casual employment, or holding a certificate of public practice while not currently in practice.

CPA Australia's By-Laws contain none of those. The only binding reliefs are Life Member, Honorary Member and the Retired Membership List — age 55 or over, not in full-time gainful employment, and no public practice certificate. Its guidance refers to a partial CPD exemption which we could not locate in any binding instrument.

The trap is obvious once stated: a dual member on parental leave may hold a valid CA ANZ pro-rata exemption while remaining fully liable for CPA Australia's 120 hours. In the other direction, CPA Australia's retirement threshold is more generous on age, while CA ANZ now requires permanent and complete withdrawal from the workforce irrespective of age — the old age-60 exemption having been abolished, as our piece on CA ANZ hours by membership class explains.

And CPA Australia's retired exemption carries a trap of its own: it is withdrawn where the member provides any public accounting services, whether or not provided for reward, including pro bono work.

Consequences: make it up, or be excluded

CPA Australia is remedial-first. By-Law 4.4(a) provides that a shortfall or a failure to produce records leads to a formal agreement to complete the required CPD within a prescribed timeframe, expressly excluding the following triennium's requirements so make-up hours cannot be double-counted. Only breach of that direction becomes a breach of membership under Article 9(a) and an Adverse Event. CPA Australia cannot discipline a member merely for being short.

CA ANZ can. CR 7.7 provides that members who fail to comply may be excluded in accordance with By-Law 23(c), and By-Law 23(c) permits the Board to exclude a member who fails to fulfil CPD requirements as prescribed — the shortfall itself. Its schedules add a softer gloss about repeated failure, but that word is not in CR 7.7 or in By-Law 23(c).

By-Law 23(c) also has a second limb with no CPA Australia equivalent: exclusion for failing to notify CA ANZ of compliance or otherwise for two consecutive years. A fully compliant CA ANZ member who skips two renewal declarations is exposed.

One counter-intuitive note on CPA Australia's side. In its own guidance, failing to produce a record goes straight to the Professional Conduct Unit for investigation and disciplinary action, while failing to meet the requirement goes to a CPD Support Plan. Not producing the records is handled more harshly than not doing the learning.

Public practice: one body sets a proportion, the other imports the regulator

Neither body adds CPD hours for holding a practising certificate. What they do instead differs completely.

CA ANZ's Australian schedule requires 40% of minimum CPD to be in the relevant area for registered company auditors, liquidators, trustees in bankruptcy, AFS licence holders, SMSF auditors, tax agents and CR 6 specialists.

CPA Australia has no proportional rule. By-Law 4.5 instead makes the external regulator's own CPD requirement a membership obligation: a tax agent who misses the Tax Practitioners Board's requirement breaches a CPA by-law as well. By-Law 4.6, as amended in October 2026, requires members to meet applicable statutory, regulatory, technical and professional standards including the APESB's.

A dual-member SMSF auditor therefore faces CA ANZ's 40%, CPA Australia's imported ASIC requirement, and the regulator itself — three overlapping specifications on one body of learning.

And no reciprocity in either direction

CPA Australia has no provision at all recognising another body's CPD.

CA ANZ has CR 7.6, and it is widely overstated. Its four conditions are cumulative: membership of a CA ANZ-recognised body, residence outside Australia and New Zealand, no certificate of public practice and not a CR 6 specialist, and compliance with that other body's requirements. It is an expatriate provision, unavailable to any domestic dual member. The list of recognised bodies is not published in CR 7.

Worth separating from a thing that looks similar: CA ANZ's Global Accounting Alliance reciprocal list concerns membership admission pathways, not CPD recognition — and CPA Australia is not on it.

The composite that satisfies both

If you hold both, this is the useful answer. Keep CA ANZ's record format, five fields, for five years. Work to CA ANZ's 90 verifiable hours out of 120, since that is the stricter structural requirement. Complete CPA Australia's 10 ethics hours, two in each calendar year, since that is the stricter ethics requirement. And run the whole thing on CPA Australia's calendar-year clock while checking CA ANZ's 20-hour annual minimum separately at each 30 June, because that is the only place the two cycles can catch you out.

Do that and you are compliant with both. Every component of it comes from one or other body's own instrument or guidance.

Two final asymmetries worth knowing. CPA Australia publishes a monitoring figure — 850 members selected for CPD review in 2024, from a sample across its global membership. CA ANZ publishes no sample size or percentage anywhere we could find, and neither publishes a rate, so treat any percentage you see as invented. And in New Zealand, CPD non-compliance can cost a licensed auditor their licence, since NZICA may vary, add to, suspend or cancel it — a consequence with no CPA Australia analogue, and part of a genuinely different regime we cover in CA ANZ's output-based CPD for New Zealand auditors.

CPA Australia's by-laws are published on its governance page, with each superseded edition marked as such. That is the document to read for the CPA Australia half; for the CA ANZ half, read CR 7 inside MyCA rather than the public 2019 edition.