Greece CPD: 120 Hours and a Window That Closed

On 1 January 2026, a door closed in Greek audit regulation. Auditors who held a licence before that date can qualify to perform sustainability assurance through a 30-hour seminar route. The instrument does not say what route applies to anyone licensed afterwards.

That is the most practically important thing in Greece's current CPD rule, and it is easy to miss behind a headline figure that looks like everyone else's.

The instrument

Greek statutory audit oversight sits with ΕΛΤΕ, the Hellenic Accounting and Auditing Standards Oversight Board. Its current continuing education rule is Regulatory Act 001/2024, published in the Government Gazette at ΦΕΚ B' 7599 of 31 December 2024 and effective from that date. It replaced Regulatory Act 005/2017.

The core requirement is the figure most of Europe arrived at:

• 120 hours over three years
• With a 20-hour annual minimum

Greece therefore belongs to the group we examined in why European CPD requirements converge on 120 hours — alongside France, Spain, Poland, Portugal, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Norway and Finland. None of them was required by EU law to pick that number, and all of them did.

The 20-hour annual floor is on the low side of that group. It permits a far more uneven distribution across a cycle than Austria's 30 or Portugal's annual structure allow, which is a real planning difference for anyone who has read our post on when a CPD cycle actually starts.

The sustainability grandfathering window, and why it matters now

The provision worth understanding in detail is article 9, which handles the transition to sustainability assurance.

Greek auditors who held a licence before 1 January 2026 can establish competence for sustainability assurance work by completing 30 hours of seminars. It is a one-off qualifying route, not an ongoing annual add-on, and it exists because the sustainability assurance market needed qualified auditors faster than a full education pathway could produce them.

The window is now closed. An auditor licensed in 2026 or later cannot use it, and the regulatory act does not state what route replaces it. We are not going to speculate about what that route is, because the instrument is silent and a guess would be worse than an acknowledged gap.

If you were licensed before the cut-off and have not yet used the 30-hour route, that is the single most valuable piece of information in this article: the entitlement attaches to your licence date, not to the date you take the seminars.

How Greece's sustainability route compares

Three neighbours solved the same problem three different ways in roughly the same period.

• Greece — a one-off 30-hour seminar route, available only to auditors licensed before 1 January 2026
• Austria — an ongoing addition of 40 hours over three years, with a 10-hour annual floor, applying generally
• Romania — an ongoing 6 hours a year, attaching to auditors who actually do sustainability assurance

Greece treats sustainability competence as a threshold you cross once. Austria treats it as a permanent component of the general obligation. Romania treats it as role-specific maintenance. Czechia, as of its November 2024 regulation, has no sustainability provision at all.

Four jurisdictions, one EU policy driver, four incompatible designs. This is the pattern that makes cross-border CPD planning genuinely hard, and it is why hours totals are a poor basis for comparison — a point we develop in why CPD hours do not convert between countries.

Who collects the records

Greece runs a two-step reporting chain that is worth knowing if you are tracking compliance.

Auditors report their continuing education annually to ΣΟΕΛ, the Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Greece, which in turn transmits the records to ΕΛΤΕ.

So the professional body is the collection point and the oversight board is the recipient. The auditor files once, to the institute. This resembles the Polish design, where reporting obligations were shifted onto providers, more than it resembles the Austrian or Turkish models where the individual files directly with the regulator.

It also means that if you are an auditor trying to establish what the regulator holds on you, the institute is where your record originates. Our guidance on what a defensible CPD record looks like applies regardless of which body receives it.

A drafting defect in the act itself

This is unusual enough to state plainly. Article 8 of Regulatory Act 001/2024 cross-references the wrong article for the hours requirement.

The hours are clear from the act read as a whole — 120 over three years with a 20-hour annual minimum is not in doubt. But the internal reference in article 8 points elsewhere, which means a reader following the cross-reference alone will not land on the figure.

We mention it for two reasons. First, if you are reading the act yourself and the cross-reference seems not to work, the problem is in the drafting and not in your reading. Second, it is a reminder that national CPD instruments are ordinary administrative documents with ordinary errors, and that a secondary summary which silently resolves such an error can look more authoritative than the source it is summarising.

What we are not stating

Two deliberate omissions.

We are not publishing a 60-hour seminar figure in connection with the Greek sustainability route, in either direction. Two readings of the relevant text were extracted and they are mutually inconsistent, so we have published only the 30-hour figure that is unambiguous and left the rest alone.

We are also not publishing any CPD figure for Greek accountants and tax practitioners — the population regulated through the Economic Chamber rather than through audit licensing. Figures circulate, but we could only find them in secondary sources, and the standard we apply is that a number without a primary source does not get printed. That population's requirement is genuinely different from the auditor requirement set out above, and should not be inferred from it.

In short

Greece looks conventional at 120 hours over three years and is not. Its annual floor is unusually low, its reporting runs through the institute rather than the regulator, its act contains a known cross-reference error, and its sustainability assurance route was a time-limited entitlement that expired at the start of this year.

The underlying EU instrument that produced none of this detail — because it sets no hours figure at all — is Directive 2006/43/EC on statutory audits, which we examine in our post on why the Statutory Audit Directive names no number.