Why CPD Hours Do Not Convert Between Countries

CPD and CPE describe the same obligation in different dialects. CPD is continuing professional development, the term used across the UK, Ireland, the Commonwealth and in IFAC’s own international standard. CPE is continuing professional education, used in the United States and parts of Asia.

If that were the whole story this would be a short page. The real difficulty is not the two acronyms — it is that the units underneath them do not convert. An hour is not always an hour, a credit is not always a credit, and one US state measures the obligation in minutes.

The terminology, briefly

IFAC’s International Education Standard 7 is titled for continuing professional development, and that is the term most national bodies outside the US adopted when they implemented it. Where you see CPE in an accounting context, it is usually either American or follows an American lead.

If the plain terminology question is all you need, our guide to CPE vs CPD answers it directly. This page is about the harder problem underneath it: comparing one regime against another when the units themselves differ.

There is a faint difference of emphasis — “development” gestures at competence outcomes, “education” at instruction received — but it would be a mistake to read much into it. IES 7 permits member bodies to measure by input, by output, or by a combination, and plenty of CPD regimes are purely input-based while plenty of CPE regimes care about outcomes. The label does not predict the design.

The hour that is not an hour

This is where cross-border planning goes wrong. Several regimes do not use a clock hour at all:

• Poland counts a godzina lekcyjna — a lesson hour — of 45 minutes. So 120 lesson hours is 90 clock hours.
• Austria counts a Lehreinheit of at least 45 minutes as one unit, across both its audit regime and its separate bookkeeping professions.
• Germany measures its quality-control reviewer obligation in Unterrichtseinheiten of 45 minutes — 24 of them over three years.
• North Carolina abandoned hours altogether and measures CPE in minutes, at 2,000 a year, from 1 June 2026.

The United States has its own convention again, built on a 50-minute credit with its own rounding rules — set out in our guides to what a CPE credit is and how CPE credit is calculated. So the three conventions in play are 45 minutes, 50 minutes and 60, and none of them is a safe default.

A practitioner comparing “120 hours” in Poland against “120 hours” in Spain is comparing 90 clock hours against 120. That is a 25% difference hiding inside an identical headline figure.

Credits, units and points

The non-hour currencies are harder still, because each regime defines its own:

• Italy uses crediti formativi professionali — CFP. Its accountancy body requires 90 per triennium; its statutory auditors owe 20 credits a year under a different ministry entirely.
• Portugal uses credits where 1 credit = 1 training hour for classroom and certified-provider training — but also awards 30 credits for a scientific book and 6 for a technical article, so the equivalence breaks down outside the classroom.
• ACCA counts units, with units equal to hours — 40 units a year, 21 of them verifiable.
• Saudi Arabia uses points, and several Asian bodies use their own credit scales.

There is no conversion table, because these are not measurements of the same thing. Each is a regime’s own accounting unit.

The split that matters more than the total

Every regime divides its obligation into a harder and a softer half, and the vocabulary for that split changes in almost every jurisdiction:

• Verifiable vs non-verifiable — ACCA (21 of 40 verifiable), ICAEW, and Romania’s accountancy body (60 of 120 verifiable).
• Structured vs non-structured — Romania’s audit regulator, which abbreviates them FPCS and FPCN.
• Certified vs non-certified — Portugal’s auditors, who need 20 of their 30 annual credits certified.
• Formal measures vs Selbststudium — Germany, where only 20 of the 40 hours must be formal and the rest may be self-study, expressly including reading professional literature.
• Chamber-delivered vs other — Poland, where 72 of the 120 must come from the chamber or an entitled unit.
• Seminars vs other categories — Greece, which caps each non-seminar category separately.

These are not synonyms. “Verifiable” asks whether you can evidence it; “certified” asks who issued the certificate; “chamber-delivered” asks who ran the course. A single activity can be verifiable but not certified, or certified but not chamber-delivered. Our guide to whether webinars count as CPD works through what each test actually requires.

The German special case: soll versus müssen

Worth isolating, because it concerns the strength of the obligation rather than its unit. The German by-law says training soll — should — not fall below 40 hours a year, which in German regulatory drafting is a target. The 20 formal hours are expressed with müssen — must. So the real obligation is a 20-hour floor beneath a 40-hour target, and summaries rendering it as “40 hours mandatory” have hardened the softer limb. See our guide to Germany’s CPD rules.

A US-specific warning

If you are reading about American CPE, two things are routinely misstated.

There are 55 state boards, not 50. The jurisdictions include territories and the District of Columbia, and they genuinely differ — annual floors run from zero in Illinois to forty in Michigan.

The AICPA’s 120 hours is a membership rule, not a licensing requirement. The Uniform Accountancy Act names no hours figure at all. An American CPA has a state licensing obligation and, separately, possibly an AICPA membership obligation; conflating the two produces the wrong number.

So how should you compare regimes?

Four questions, in this order — and the headline total is not among them:

• What is the unit, in minutes? Forty-five, sixty, or something else entirely.
• What proportion sits in the hard half, and what is the hard half called? Verifiable, structured, certified and chamber-delivered are four different tests.
• Who is permitted to deliver it? Poland, Spain and Romania all restrict this, and a course that fails the test counts for nothing regardless of quality.
• Is the total a floor or a target? Germany is a target with a floor inside it.

Get those four right and the arithmetic follows. Get them wrong and a correct-looking total will still leave you non-compliant. For why so many regimes land on the same number anyway, see why European CPD converges on 120 hours over three years.

Frequently asked questions

Is CPD the same as CPE? Substantially yes. CPD is the term used in the UK, Ireland, the Commonwealth and IFAC’s standard; CPE is used in the US and parts of Asia. The label does not tell you how the regime is designed.

Is a CPD hour 60 minutes? Not always. Poland, Austria and part of the German regime use 45-minute units. North Carolina measures in minutes.

Can I convert credits to hours? Not reliably. Portugal equates one credit to one classroom hour but awards 30 for a book. Italy’s CFP has no hour equivalence stated.

Does the AICPA’s 120 hours apply to all US CPAs? No. It is a membership rule. Licensing is set by 55 state boards, and the Uniform Accountancy Act names no figure.

Which split should I track? Whichever your own regime uses. Verifiable, structured, certified and formal test different things and are not interchangeable.

Train once, evidence it anywhere, with Learnsignal

Practitioners qualified in more than one jurisdiction are reconciling different units, different splits and different delivery rules against the same learning. Our certificated CPD courses record hours, dates, subject and delivery method — the set of fields these regimes ask you to declare. See also whether hours can be carried forward. IES 7 is published by IFAC.