Mandatory Ethics CPE Runs From Zero to Seven Hours a Year

"Ethics CPE" gets written about as though it were one thing with one number attached. It is not. Across the bodies we have documented from primary sources, the mandatory ethics requirement runs from nothing at all to ten hours per three-year cycle. The rule sits variously in a statute, a government regulation, a council regulation, a by-law, a board-adopted programme or a policy annexure. And in several jurisdictions the hours are the easy part — what counts is gated by who approved the course.

A practitioner holding two qualifications cannot assume one ethics course satisfies both. Often it cannot satisfy either.

The quantum, from zero upward

No mandatory ethics hours at all: CIMA prescribes no hours or units of any kind, so no ethics quantum either. ICAB in Bangladesh names no ethics requirement — its practising-member mandatory areas are financial reporting, auditing standards, taxation and corporate laws. SOCPA publishes none. Kenya's ICPAK sets no ethics quota, mandating competence-based training by licence category instead. CA Sri Lanka's material describes development covering "skills, values, ethics and attitudes" without attaching a figure. And Prince Edward Island's binding regulations contain no ethics requirement anywhere, although whether CPA PEI imposes one administratively we could not establish.

ACCA is a separate case and worth getting right. There is no ethics quota and no requirement that ethics sit inside verifiable activity. But Membership Regulation 4(4)(d)(v) does require all members, regardless of role, to maintain competence in professional ethics. An obligation without a number is still an obligation — it is simply not a quantum.

One hour: ICAEW's Regulation 8(c) mandates a single hour of ethics, and it is the only subject ICAEW mandates at all.

Two hours a year: the most common figure. HKICPA requires two verifiable ethics hours a year for all members in cycles beginning 1 December 2026. The CMA requires two of its thirty annual hours in ethics, and the CSCA the same. JICPA has required two credits a year in professional ethics since financial year 2006, under its training bylaws. SAIPA requires two structured ethics hours for every designation a member holds, without exception.

Four hours per three-year cycle: the Canadian standard, which annualises to about 1.33. Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador all land on four verifiable ethics hours per rolling three years.

Seven hours a year: the highest annual figure we have found. The Institute of Public Accountants in Australia requires, from 1 July 2026, at least 7.0 hours in each of three competency areas including Professional and Ethical Standards, of which 5.0 verified and 2.0 unverified. That is part of the restructuring that replaced the IPA's 120-hour triennium with 40 hours a year, and it is a materially heavier ethics obligation than anything else in the set.

Ten hours per three-year cycle: CPA Australia's By-Law 4.1(b), with at least two in each year, inside the 120. On its own phase-in table, the triennium ending 31 December 2026 is the first in which the full ten-hour obligation applies.

So the spread, annualised, runs from zero to seven. For a figure that gets quoted as if it were settled, that is a wide range.

Where the requirement legally sits — five different answers

This matters more than the number, because it tells you who can change your requirement and how fast.

In Ontario it is in the binding regulation itself: section 3 of Regulation 7-2 provides that the 120 hours "shall include four Verifiable hours of professional ethics". In Alberta it is in a Directive. In British Columbia the hours are in the bylaw regulation at 600/2(2)(b) — but the content criteria are not, because Regulation 600/1 defines ethics hours as those "satisfying criteria approved by the Membership Committee". The quantum is fixed in the instrument; what satisfies it is delegated to a committee.

In Saskatchewan the drafting is different again. Bylaw 23.4 does not state four hours as its own rule — it makes the requirement "the standard as specified by CPA Canada, as amended from time to time", and then gives four hours as "the current standard". The figure moves if the national standard moves.

In Quebec the ethics hours are not in the regulation at all. The government-approved instrument is silent on ethics hours; the four structured hours come from the Ordre's board-adopted continuing education programme, approved 6 June 2025 and in force 1 September 2025. A board can revise a programme considerably faster than a government can revise a regulation.

At SAIPA it sits in an annexure to a board policy, which itself hangs off a single by-law clause making compliance a condition of good standing. At JICPA it sits in the Institute's training bylaws — notably not in the Cabinet Office Ordinance that fixes the 40-credit annual figure, so Japan's hours are governmental and its ethics requirement is not. At the IPA it sits in a board-approved Pronouncement, revised in February 2026.

Five structurally different homes for what looks like one requirement.

In several places the hours are not the constraint — approval is

This is the part that catches dual-qualified practitioners out, and it is where most published comparisons stop.

In the United States there is no single ethics regime but four distinct ones, which no yes-or-no column can represent: states requiring state-specific content, states requiring the course itself to be board-approved, a state requiring sponsor registration with the national registry, and states accepting plain general ethics. Among the board-gated states there is no overlap at all. A licensee holding two of those licences takes two separate courses on two different clocks, and neither counts for the other.

Quebec goes further than any of them. Its programme requires that a course on the CPA Code of ethics be pre-approved by the Order, except for the independence rule — so Quebec is the only jurisdiction we examined that approves ethics course content itself rather than publishing criteria and letting members self-assess. On top of the four structured hours, Quebec imposes a one-time mandatory three-hour training on the CPA Code of ethics, plus a further hour for members providing services to third parties. An ethics course accepted in Ontario or British Columbia will not automatically satisfy any of it.

British Columbia adds a different kind of specificity: 1.5 anti-money-laundering hours are due by 31 December 2026, they are unique in Canada, and they may be counted as ethics hours. So a BC member can discharge part of their ethics obligation with an AML course, which is not true anywhere else.

What "ethics" has to mean

Where bodies publish a content standard, it tends to push past awareness. CPABC's position is that "professional ethics learning activities must go beyond an awareness of the law, standards or guidelines", with eligible topics including regulatory updates, professional conduct, independence and conflicts of interest, ethical decision-making, whistle-blowing and anti-money-laundering. CPA Ontario's guidance says ethics courses "must go beyond rule awareness and include scenarios or dilemmas" — though that is guidance rather than regulation.

The IPA points directly at a code, giving as an example "knowledge and application of the APES 110 Code of Ethics". ICAI in India went further in a different direction: from calendar year 2026 it mandates one structured hour each in Standards on Auditing, the Code of Ethics and Digital Technology, having moved from a two-plus-two mandatory regime through a recommendatory period and back to mandatory.

And some bodies confine ethics to a role rather than to the membership. ICAP in Pakistan imposes no ethics requirement on its general members; ethics appears only as one of six eligible areas within a 30-hour engagement partner block — and that block is itself optional, because the partner may instead meet IES 8's learning outcomes, among which ethical principles is competence area (n). So no standalone Pakistani ethics figure exists to quote.

The international layer, which sets no hours either

Neither IES 7 nor IES 8 prescribes ethics hours. IES 8 lists ethical principles as one of fourteen competence areas and attaches no proficiency level and no quantum to any of them. IES 7 supplies the measurement machinery without specifying subjects.

The substantive international pressure comes from elsewhere. The ethics board's technology revisions, effective 15 December 2024, state that professional accountants must understand, be able to explain and evaluate the technology they use, that relying on opaque or unexplained outputs is not acceptable, and that professional responsibility cannot be delegated to a machine. Those are conduct requirements rather than training requirements — no body we have examined has turned them into mandatory ethics hours on artificial intelligence, and none requires AI continuing development at all.

What to do with this if you hold more than one qualification

Three practical conclusions.

First, find your quantum, and find it in your own body's instrument rather than in a summary, because the range is zero to seven hours a year and the summaries average it into something that is true of nobody.

Second, check whether your jurisdiction gates the course as well as the hours. If it does — any of the US board-approval states, or Quebec — then the question is not how much ethics you have done but who approved what you did.

Third, do not plan on one course serving two memberships. Where both bodies accept any evidenced ethics learning, it will. Where either gates approval, mandates specific content, or runs a different cycle, it will not, and the fact that the hours look identical on paper is exactly what makes the assumption tempting.

IES 8's competence areas, including ethical principles, are published at IFAC's accountancy education e-tool.