How Long to Keep CPD Evidence: Six Years to Twelve Months

How long you must keep your CPD evidence varies by a factor of six between regulators, and almost nobody checks before they shred. An Alberta physician needs six years of records. An Ontario lawyer needs roughly twelve months. A Victorian lawyer can be asked about any of the last three years. These are not rounding differences.

The longest: six years

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta is the longest we have verified anywhere: "A regulated member must keep records in a form satisfactory to the Registrar, of any activities undertaken for the purpose of CPD for a period of six years." The manual is published by CPSA and was reissued in August 2026.

Ohio nursing also runs to six years, and Michigan requires six for its implicit bias hours specifically while asking only four for general nursing continuing education — two different retention periods inside one licence.

The shortest: about twelve months

The Law Society of Ontario sits at the other end. By-Law 6.1, section 4(1): "A licensee shall keep all documents substantiating the licensee's completion of the eligible activities reported by him or her in a year until December 31 of the year following the year in which the activities were reported."

Because activities are reported in the following year, the practical window runs somewhere between twelve and twenty-four months depending on when in the year you did the learning. It is published in full by the Law Society.

And the response window, when it comes, is short. Section 5(3): the licensee "shall provide to the Society the specific information required of him or her not later than ten days after the date specified on the notice". Ten days, against HPCSA's twenty-one and Victoria's twenty-one.

The ones that matter most: audit lookback, not retention

Here is the trap. Retention and lookback are different numbers, and the one that determines your exposure is the lookback.

Victoria's legal regulator states that audits can relate to any of the three previous years. So a Victorian lawyer with a one-year filing habit is three years short of what can be asked. Selected lawyers have 21 days to verify and 90 days to complete rectification — the detail is in our guide to Victoria's CPD audit.

Where a regulator publishes a lookback longer than its stated retention period, keep to the lookback.

The spread, in one list

Everything below is from the instruments and guidance we verified directly:

• Six years — Alberta physicians (CPSA); Ohio nurses; Michigan implicit bias hours
• Five years — Pennsylvania nurses
• Four years — Michigan nursing continuing education generally
• Three years — North Carolina nurses (five for nurse practitioners); Victoria lawyers by audit lookback; HPCSA providers, who "must" hold the attendance register "for three years following the activity"
• Two years — Virginia nurses; HPCSA practitioners, who "shall keep these for at least two years"
• About twelve to twenty-four months — Ontario lawyers

Note the HPCSA mismatch in particular: the provider keeps the register a year longer than the practitioner keeps the certificate. If you are reconstructing a lost record in South Africa, the provider may still have what you do not — which is covered alongside the audit mechanism in what happens at an HPCSA CPD audit.

Ontario's deadline, and the fee that no longer exists

Worth correcting because pre-2021 sources get it backwards. By-Law 6.1 section 3(3) sets the default: a licensee is in default "if the requirement is not met by March 31 of the year following the year to which the requirement relates."

The Law Society's own guidance then explains what replaced the old penalty: "A late fee no longer applies for failing to report CPD Hours. However, lawyers and paralegals who do not report their previous year's CPD by March 31 will be in default as of that day and may be administratively suspended immediately thereafter."

So the sanction got harsher, not softer. A fee became exposure to administrative suspension, effective from 1 January 2021. Reinstatement is available by completing the missing hours and providing proof.

One thing that does not exist, despite being widely assumed: there is no published list of CPD defaulters. Names go to what the Law Society calls the summary suspension bencher, which is an internal step. Suspensions surface individually on the public directory rather than as a CPD cohort.

Two things we could not establish

By-Law 6.1's own amendment history records a change on 30 April 2026. We have not isolated what changed, so we are not characterising it — check the Convocation materials for that date before relying on the sections above.

And the Law Society publishes no count of licensees administratively suspended for CPD non-compliance. The mechanism is documented; the volume is not.

What to actually do

Three rules that work across every regulator here.

Keep to the longest number that applies to you, and if your regulator publishes an audit lookback, use that rather than the retention period. Keep the evidence yourself rather than relying on an employer system — several of these periods outlast an average job tenure, and a six-year Alberta requirement certainly does. And keep it in a form you can produce in ten days, because Ontario's window is that short and assembling a year of certificates from scratch inside it is not realistic.

Finally, remember that what you keep is evidence for a declaration you have already made. If that declaration turns out to have been wrong rather than merely incomplete, the consequences are on a different footing entirely, which we set out in shortfall versus false declaration.

This article quotes the instruments and published guidance named above. Retention periods are amended from time to time; verify with your own regulator before disposing of anything.