Czechia CPD: A Statutory Maximum, Not a Minimum

Every CPD rule in this series sets a floor. Do at least this much. Czechia's statute does the opposite: it sets a ceiling.

Section 9 of the Czech zákon o auditorech — the Act on Auditors — provides for continuing education of up to 60 hours a year, and states no minimum at all. The number in the law is a maximum.

Of the European regimes we have examined at primary source, this is the only one drafted that way, and it tells you something about how Czech audit regulation allocates authority.

Why a statutory maximum, and where the real floor comes from

The ceiling is not a licence to do nothing. It is a boundary on what the profession's own regulator may demand.

The binding minimum is set by the Komora auditorů České republiky (KA ČR), the Chamber of Auditors of the Czech Republic, in its own continuing education regulation. The current version took effect on 12 November 2024, and it requires 40 hours a year.

So the practical position is a 40-hour annual requirement, imposed by the Chamber, operating inside a 60-hour statutory headroom. Parliament decided how much the Chamber could ask for; the Chamber decided how much to ask.

Compare this with the structures covered elsewhere in this series. The EU Statutory Audit Directive sets no number and leaves it to member states. Most member states put a figure in a ministerial instrument. Czechia put a limit in primary legislation and delegated the figure. Switzerland went further still and put nothing anywhere, relying on association membership instead.

The requirement, as the Chamber actually writes it

• 40 hours a year
• At least 8 hours a year on audit subjects, ethics included within that block
• Soft skills capped at 5 hours a year
• Lecturing counts double — an hour delivered earns two
• Published writing earns 1 hour per standard page
• Filing due 31 January
• Records retained 5 years

Two of these are worth dwelling on, because they are unusual enough to change behaviour.

A shortfall does not lapse. It compounds.

This is the single most consequential feature of the Czech regime, and the one most likely to catch out an auditor who assumes it works like everywhere else.

In most jurisdictions, falling short of a year's CPD is a compliance failure handled as a failure: you are warned, or fined, or asked to explain. The deficit itself does not travel. In Czechia, an unmet shortfall carries forward and increases the following year's requirement.

Miss 10 hours this year and next year's obligation is 50, not 40. The arrears are additive, which means a bad year followed by a normal year leaves you non-compliant again.

That is the mirror image of the question we address in our post on carrying CPD hours forward. Most regimes that allow carry-forward let you move a surplus into the next period, capped. Czechia moves the deficit instead. If you are used to a regime where a missed year is a discrete problem you settle and move past, this is a different risk profile entirely, and it is the specific reason Czech auditors are advised not to let a year slip.

For what happens when a regulator does catch a shortfall in other jurisdictions, we have covered CPD penalties and non-compliance separately.

Filing can be excused entirely

The second unusual provision concerns reporting rather than hours. An auditor whose entire year of continuing education was delivered by Chamber-organised activity is excused from filing a declaration at all.

The logic is clean: the Chamber already holds the attendance data, so asking the member to report it back is duplication. Nowhere else in the European set did we find a regime that waives the declaration outright on this basis.

It also creates a quiet commercial effect. The administratively simplest path for a Czech auditor is to take all 40 hours from the Chamber, because doing so removes a filing obligation. A third-party provider is competing not only on content and price but against the convenience of not having to file.

Five years of records — the longest retention period we found

Czech auditors keep their continuing education records for five years. Across the European regimes examined, that is the longest explicit retention period: most either set three years or say nothing at all, and a surprising number of national instruments are silent on retention entirely.

Five years is also materially longer than the period over which the hours themselves are assessed, which is annual. If you want a practical sense of what a defensible record looks like under a regime like this, our post on CPD record examples works through the formats regulators accept.

Lecturing doubles, writing is paid by the page

The Chamber credits an hour of lecturing as two hours. That is a common enough device — Austria allows up to 20 hours a year for writing and lecturing, Türkiye allows up to 40 credits a year for teaching core subjects — but the doubling is cleaner than most, and it is not capped in the way the soft-skills allowance is.

The writing provision is more distinctive: one hour per standard page published. A unit of measurement borrowed from Czech publishing convention rather than from education policy, and a rare instance of a CPD rule denominated in output rather than time.

What Czechia does not have

No sustainability add-on. This is worth stating explicitly, because it makes Czechia an outlier in a year when most of its neighbours added one.

Austria added 40 hours over three years with a 10-hour annual floor. Romania added six hours a year for sustainability assurance. Italy counts 25 hours a year. Greece opened a one-off 30-hour seminar route. Poland has a draft provision for 2027. Czechia's current regulation, in force since November 2024, contains nothing equivalent.

We are not reading that as an oversight, and we are not predicting a change. It is simply where the Chamber's regulation stands, and an auditor planning their year should plan against the rule as written. The Chamber publishes its regulations and continuing education programme at kacr.cz.

The summary that matters

Czechia's 40 hours a year is unremarkable as a number. What makes the regime demanding is that the deficit compounds, and what makes it unusual is that the statutory figure is a ceiling on the regulator rather than a floor for the auditor.

It is a useful corrective to reading CPD rules by their headline totals, which is the argument we make at greater length in why European CPD regimes converge on 120 hours while composing those hours completely differently.