Egypt CPD: 25 Hours a Year, and the Team Too

The widely repeated position on Egypt is that continuing professional development there is a voluntary matter for the professional body. IFAC's own country page says the national framework does not require continuing professional development for all professional accountants, and attributes the 120-hour figure to the Egyptian Society of Accountants and Auditors rather than to any law.

Both statements are accurate. Together they create a misleading impression, because Egypt does have a binding regulatory CPD requirement — it is simply attached to a register rather than to the profession at large.

Where the binding rule actually lives

The instrument is Financial Regulatory Authority Board Decision No. 244 of 2023, dated 8 November 2023, setting the rules for registration in, continued registration in, and removal from the auditors' register. The FRA publishes a consolidated text on its own site, as amended to 21 May 2025.

Article 9 is headed, in translation, "Data update and conditions for continued registration". Its third item requires compliance with continuing professional education requirements by submitting evidence that the auditor has obtained a minimum of 25 hours of professional education per year, and not less than 120 hours over three years, in accounting and auditing or related subjects, in accordance with the forms and rules laid down by the Authority.

The distinction that matters: this is a condition of continued registration, not merely of entry. CPD also appears among the entry conditions, phrased as a requirement concerning new developments in accounting and auditing standards. But Article 9 is the one that bites every year.

The obligation reaches the engagement team, not just the signing auditor

This is the most unusual feature of the Egyptian rule and the reason it is worth reading closely.

Article 9's wording requires evidence that both the auditor and the engagement team have obtained the 25 hours a year. The obligation does not stop at the person who signs the opinion.

Almost every regime examined in this series binds only the licence-holder. A junior on an audit team in most jurisdictions has whatever obligation their own membership body imposes, and nothing from the audit regulator. Egypt attaches the regulator's requirement to the team performing the work.

The nearest parallel we have found is Austria, whose scope rule reaches audit-firm staff who materially contribute to audits rather than only licence-holders. Egypt goes further by naming the engagement team directly and making the firm's evidence of their training a register condition.

For an audit firm, that converts CPD from an individual compliance matter into a resourcing one. Staffing an engagement means staffing it with people whose training evidence will stand up at the annual update.

Filing, and the escalation ladder behind it

Registered auditors must update their FRA-held data by the end of June each year, and the update form requires submission of evidence of CPE compliance together with a signed undertaking to comply. Notably, the form itself carries no hours table — the numbers live only in Decision 244 of 2023, so anyone working from the form alone would never see them.

Failure to update for two consecutive years is referred to the board for removal, after the matter has been put to the auditor.

Non-compliance with the CPE requirement is separately an enumerated violation under Article 12. The measures available under Article 13 escalate through compulsory training to raise professional competence, temporary suspension of registration for up to three years, removal from the register with a bar on re-registration of between six months and five years, and permanent removal.

That is a considerably harder enforcement design than most of the regimes we have surveyed in what happens if you do not comply with CPD, where the usual consequence is a warning or a fine. Egypt's ladder ends at a permanent bar.

A 2026 commencement that is live now

Decision 244 of 2023 has been amended three times: by Decision No. 305 of 25 December 2024, Decision No. 66 of 12 March 2025, and Decision No. 105 of 2025, taken at the board session of 21 May 2025, gazetted in the Egyptian Official Gazette on 29 May 2025 and in force from the following day.

Decision 105's transitional provision is the part to note. The revised conditions — including the CPE undertaking — apply to already-registered auditors when they update their data at the 2026 deadline, that is, by the end of June 2026. For auditors already on the register, this year's update was the first under the revised conditions.

A further decision, No. 108 of 2026, was taken in May 2026 and gazetted in July 2026. It concerns an exception to listed-company auditor tenure and contains nothing on continuing education, which is worth saying explicitly because its timing invites the assumption that it does.

The professional body's rule, which is the one usually quoted

Separately, and with identical arithmetic, the Egyptian Society of Accountants and Auditors operates its own requirement. Its bylaws make continuing professional education a condition of membership — membership terminates if the required hours are not completed — without stating a figure, which is delegated to board rules.

Those rules, as published by the society, have been binding on all active members since 1 January 2009:

• 120 CPD hours per rolling three calendar years
• A minimum of 25 hours a year
• A maximum of 55 hours a year counted toward the total
• New members exempt for the remainder of their joining year, with the clock starting from board approval of membership rather than from the application date
• Retired members fully exempt if no longer practising
• Trainers and presenters may count both preparation and delivery toward their own requirement

The society's own filing with IFAC adds that 84 of the 120 hours must be verifiable, and dates the programme's board approval to July 2008 with first courses in January 2009.

The 55-hour annual maximum is the unusual element here. Capping how much can be counted in a single year prevents the whole triennial total being discharged in one burst, which is the same policy objective that Czechia pursues through a statutory ceiling, by a quite different mechanism.

Two regimes, the same numbers, different kinds of force

So Egypt has 25 hours a year and 120 over three years twice over: once as a membership condition enforced by a voluntary society, and once as a register condition enforced by a financial regulator with the power to remove you permanently.

IFAC's attribution is therefore right about the society and incomplete about the state. If you are an FRA-registered auditor, the operative rule is the gazetted decision, and the sanction for ignoring it is not loss of membership.

This pattern of identical totals resting on completely different authority is one we have now seen repeatedly — most sharply in the European convergence on 120 hours, where ten jurisdictions reached the same figure through unrelated instruments, and in Jordan, where the rule sits in a subordinate regulation rather than the law it is usually credited to. The 120-hour figure's origin as an illustration in an international education standard is covered in where accountant CPD requirements come from.

What we are not stating

Several deliberate gaps, because the sources do not support filling them.

We are not saying whether Accounting Practice Law No. 133 of 1951 imposes CPD. No primary text was reachable. There is an indirect indication that it does not: the society's own IFAC filing describes a draft new practice law that would bar auditors from obtaining or transferring licences without completing set continuing education hours, which reads as a future reform rather than existing law. But that is an inference, and we are not publishing it as a finding in either direction.

No ethics minimum, no subject-specific quota and no verifiable/unverifiable split appears in Decision 244 of 2023. Article 9 defers the detail to forms and rules laid down by the Authority, and the forms we reached contain only an undertaking — no hours schedule, no accredited-provider list, no evidence template. Whether a standalone FRA guidance document exists is unresolved. Unlike Indonesia's four annual ethics credits, nothing in the Egyptian regulation reserves hours for a named subject.

No CPD-specific deadline. The only date in the regulation is the end-of-June annual data update, which is when evidence is submitted rather than a separate CPD return.

The FRA publishes its board decisions and register forms at fra.gov.eg. For what to keep by way of evidence under a regime that asks for proof annually but specifies no format, our CPD record examples assume you keep more than any minimum demands.

In short

Twenty-five hours a year and 120 over three years, binding on auditors on the FRA's register and on their engagement teams, evidenced at the annual data update each June, with non-compliance an enumerated violation carrying suspension or permanent removal. The same figures also bind members of the professional society, where the consequence is loss of membership rather than loss of the right to audit.