The EU Statutory Audit Directive Sets No CPD Hours

Ask what the CPD requirement is for a statutory auditor in the European Union and there is no single answer, because the EU does not set one. The obligation is European; every number attached to it is national. That is why an auditor in Milan owes twenty credits a year, one in Paris owes a hundred and twenty hours across three years, and one in Frankfurt owes a figure that is not, strictly, a requirement at all.

What Article 13 actually says

The governing provision is Article 13 of Directive 2006/43/EC on statutory audits, headed “Continuing education”. In the consolidated text of 9 January 2024 it requires Member States to ensure that statutory auditors take part in appropriate programmes of continuing education, in order to maintain their theoretical knowledge, professional skills and values at a sufficiently high level — and to ensure that failing to respect those requirements attracts appropriate sanctions under Article 30.

That is the whole of it. No hours. No credits. No cycle length. No ethics minimum. No declaration deadline. The directive sets an outcome and a duty to sanction, and leaves the quantification entirely to Member States.

We are paraphrasing rather than quoting here, deliberately: the text had to be reassembled from four separately extracted fragments, and we would rather describe the requirement accurately than present a stitched-together sentence in quotation marks.

Why that produces such different national regimes

Because “appropriate programmes” is a standard, not a measure, each Member State answered the same question in its own legal idiom. Three distinct patterns emerge, and they are worth recognising because they predict where the binding rule will be found:

• The number sits in a legal instrument. France put it in the Code de commerce; Spain in a Real Decreto and an ICAC resolution; Italy in a legislative decree plus an annual ministerial programme. Look in the gazette.
• The number sits in a professional by-law. Germany transposed Article 13 with a single sentence of statute carrying no figure, and left the hours to a chamber by-law. Look in the Berufssatzung, not the statute.
• There is no number, only a duty. For professions outside the statutory-audit perimeter — French experts-comptables, German Steuerberater — the obligation to keep knowledge current exists in law with nothing quantifying it.

This is the single most useful thing to know before looking up any European jurisdiction. If you search a statute for an hours figure and find none, that may well be the correct answer rather than a failed search.

The national regimes, one by one

We have written each of the four largest Member States up separately, because the differences are in the detail rather than the headline and a summary table would flatten exactly the distinctions that matter:

• France, commissaires aux comptes — 120 hours over three years with 20 a year, set in the Code de commerce, declared by 31 March, records kept six years. The most prescriptive of the four.
• France, experts-comptables — no hours figure in law at all. The widely quoted 120 hours is the Ordre’s own recommendation, tested at quality control.
• Germany — a one-sentence statute with no figure, and a by-law whose 40 hours is a target while only 20 formal hours are a floor. Tax advisers face no number at all.
• Italy, commercialisti — 90 credits per fixed triennium and, contrary to almost every summary, no annual minimum.
• Italy, revisori legali — 20 credits a year under an annual ministerial programme, no exemptions of any kind, and it stacks on top of the professional-body regime.
• Spain — 120 hours over three years on an October-to-September cycle, with unusually strict rules on how hours are evidenced.
• Poland — 120 lesson hours of 45 minutes over three calendar years, 72 of them from the chamber or an entitled unit, and a draft second ESG cycle from 2027 that would take sustainability-authorised auditors to 144.
• Portugal — 30 credits a year for accountants and auditors alike, but accountants face an automatic practice bar on a missed filing while auditors add a 120-credit triennium with a certified-credit floor.
• Belgium — two professions on an identical 120 hours over three calendar years, with different categories, different deadlines and different retention — plus a 60-hour ESG requirement due 31 December 2026.
• Denmark — choose 90 hours plus an annual competence evaluation or 120 flat, on fixed three-year blocks. Miss one evaluation filing and you are moved to 120 for the whole period.
• Sweden — the regulator wants 100 verifiable hours per five years at renewal; the professional body wants 120 per three. Meeting the body clears both; the reverse does not hold.
• Norway — the cleanest two-tier split in Europe: 120 hours for auditors, 80 for accountants, both tested at year-end with nothing to file. Reached through the EEA rather than the EU.
• Finland — 120 hours with 60 verifiable on a July-to-June year, and the figures sit in a regulator’s guideline rather than in any statute or decree.
• Austria — 120 hours per three years, 30 a year, plus a new sustainability add-on of 40 hours per three years. The 2026 instrument changed legal form from a Richtlinie to a Verordnung. See Austria CPD requirements.
• Switzerland — outside the EU, and the only jurisdiction here with no federal hours figure at all; the audit regulator defers to the professional associations. See Switzerland CPD requirements.
• Romania — recast to an annual 40 hours in 2025, with 20 structured, 10 on audit and a 2-hour structured ethics floor. See Romania CPD requirements.
• Czechia — the statute sets a maximum of 60 hours a year and no minimum; the Chamber requires 40, and a shortfall carries forward. See Czechia CPD requirements.
• Greece — 120 hours per three years with a 20-hour annual floor; the 30-hour sustainability assurance route closed to new licensees on 1 January 2026. See Greece CPD requirements.

Read across those thirteen and the pattern in the previous section becomes concrete: several states put the number in a gazette, one puts it in a by-law and softens it, and two professions in two different countries have no number at all.

Something else emerges once they sit side by side. Most of them land on exactly the same total — 120 hours over three years — even though this directive sets no figure and each state wrote its own rule. That convergence has a traceable cause, and the composition rules underneath it diverge completely. We follow it through in why European CPD keeps landing on 120 hours over three years.

The statutory-audit perimeter matters more than the country

In most of these jurisdictions, the quantified obligation attaches to the statutory auditor — the person on the audit register — and not to professional accountants generally. Spain is the starkest case: the CPD regime effectively is the audit regime, and we found no equivalent statutory requirement for Spanish accountants who are not on the ROAC register.

France and Italy run two regimes in parallel, which means a practitioner holding both titles is looking at two sets of rules rather than one. Italy’s stack in particular is additive, not alternative.

So the first question for any European jurisdiction is not “how many hours?” but “which register am I on?”

Sustainability reporting changed the picture, unevenly

Article 14a, inserted into the directive by Directive (EU) 2022/2464 — the CSRD — routes sustainability competence for auditors already approved before 2026 through Article 13’s continuing education. Article 13 itself was not amended. So the EU again creates a competence obligation and leaves the measurement to Member States, and the results diverge sharply:

• Italy transposed and set numbers. Legislative Decree 125/2024 gives auditors certified for sustainability attestation 25 credits per calendar year, at least ten in statutory-audit subjects and at least ten in sustainability subjects, with a transitional route requiring five credits a year.
• France transposed and set numbers. A new category of sustainability information auditor carries 20 hours per calendar year, declared to the audit regulator rather than to the auditors’ professional body, with a transitional initial requirement of at least 90 approved hours.
• Germany had not enacted its transposition law as at 23 March 2026. The government draft was before the Bundesrat as BR-Drucksache 435/25 of 5 September 2025. Two competing training figures were in circulation — 32 structured hours from the chamber’s board, at least 40 from the draft’s explanatory memorandum — and neither was law.
• Spain had not transposed as at 27 November 2024, per a joint statement by the securities regulator and the accounting institute. A later joint statement of November 2025 exists but could not be retrieved, so we are not asserting the current position either way.

The practical consequence for anyone planning training across borders is that the sustainability layer is the least settled part of the picture and the part most likely to have moved since any given article was written. Our guides to CSRD compliance, ESG assurance under ISAE 3000 and ISSA 5000 and the ISSA 5000 standard cover the assurance side.

How this sits above the international layer

Europe is not the only layer here. IFAC’s International Education Standard 7 sets the CPD framework that member bodies adopt, and its widely quoted 120 hours over three years is an illustration in application material rather than a requirement — a distinction we set out in our guide to where accountant CPD requirements come from.

That matters here because several European professional bodies have adopted the IES 7 illustration as their own benchmark without any legal instrument behind it. The French Ordre des experts-comptables is the clearest example: its 120-hour and 20-hour figures are a recommendation it traces to IES 7, tested in quality control rather than enforced as law.

For the national regimes outside this directive’s perimeter, see our guides to statutory auditor CPD in Ireland and to CPD for accountants generally.

A note on sourcing

The EUR-Lex consolidated page for the directive runs to over 122,000 characters and only the first 100,000 were read for this article, so later articles were not examined. The Article 13 and Article 14a positions above are verified; we are not making claims about the rest of the instrument.

Frequently asked questions

How many CPD hours does EU law require for statutory auditors? None. Article 13 of Directive 2006/43/EC requires appropriate continuing education and sanctions for failure, and sets no figure. Every number is national.

Does the CSRD impose a training requirement? Indirectly. Article 14a routes sustainability competence for auditors approved before 2026 through Article 13, so the quantification is again national — and as at early 2026 two of the four largest Member States had not enacted it.

Do these rules apply to all accountants or only auditors? Only to statutory auditors. Several Member States impose an unquantified duty on other accounting professionals, and some impose nothing at all.

Where should I look for my own requirement? Identify which register you are on first, then check whether your jurisdiction puts the number in legislation or in a professional by-law. Both patterns are common.

Study European reporting and audit with Learnsignal

Cross-border practice means holding several of these regimes in mind at once, and the differences are in the detail rather than the headline. Our CPD courses cover European reporting and audit requirements for finance professionals. The directive itself is published on EUR-Lex.