HKICPA's CPD Rules Change on 1 December 2026

Almost every description of HKICPA's continuing professional development requirement in circulation is correct today and will be wrong on 1 December 2026. The Institute has revised Statement 1.500, and the bulk of the revision takes effect in the CPD cycle starting on that date.

What the requirement is until then

HKICPA requires members to complete at least 120 hours of relevant professional development activity in each rolling three-year period, of which 60 hours shall be verifiable, and to complete at least 20 hours of relevant professional development activity in each year. It binds all members, except those exempt from complying with the CPD requirements.

Note the annual figure precisely, because it is the detail that separates HKICPA from its neighbours. Those 20 hours a year are 20 hours of relevant professional development activity, of any evidential quality. They do not have to be verifiable. Singapore's ISCA requires 20 verifiable hours a year, and Malaysia's MIA requires 20 that are structured and verifiable. Three bodies, three nominally identical annual figures, three quite different obligations — and a member of all three could satisfy HKICPA's annual 20 with technical reading and fail both of the others.

What changes on 1 December 2026

Three new requirements, reported by HKICPA in its Technical News of 19 November 2025 alongside Members' Handbook Update No. 335.

First, all members must undertake a minimum of 2 verifiable hours annually on ethics-related CPD activities.

Second, Practising Certificate holders and Responsible Persons of registered public interest entity auditors must complete a minimum of 5 verifiable hours annually on accounting or auditing-related CPD activities.

Third, and structurally the most significant, all members must complete a minimum of 50% of the required 60 verifiable CPD hours on structured learning activities in each rolling three-year period.

HKICPA's own member magazine adds a fourth change in the opposite direction: all caps on non-verifiable CPD activities are removed, while caps on certain verifiable activities are retained. The 120-hour total is unchanged, and the new requirements sit inside it rather than on top.

One of the changes is already live. The ethics requirement for Responsible Persons of registered PIE auditors and for Practising Certificate holders took effect on 1 December 2025.

Why the structured requirement matters more than it looks

Until now HKICPA has operated a two-level taxonomy: a total, and a verifiable sub-quota within it. Verifiable, in HKICPA's words, means activities that can be objectively verified by a competent source; non-verifiable activities do not require evidence to substantiate the hours claimed.

From 1 December 2026 there is a third level. Thirty of the sixty verifiable hours must also be structured learning. That makes HKICPA the only one of the three major Asian bodies running a three-tier structure — total, then verifiable, then structured. ISCA has two tiers and no structured concept at all; MIA has two, with structured and verifiable fused into a single test that an activity must satisfy on both counts.

The practical consequence for a HKICPA member is that activities which are verifiable but not structured — board or committee attendance, mentoring, workplace learning with documentary proof — can no longer fill the whole verifiable allocation. Half of it now has to be formal learning.

The cycle is not a calendar year, and that is the thing to check first

A HKICPA CPD year runs from 1 December to 30 November of the following year, and the rolling three-year reporting cycle also begins on 1 December each year.

So the current cycle runs 1 December 2023 to 30 November 2026, and the next begins on 1 December 2026. HKICPA is the only one of the three bodies not on a calendar-year basis, which matters for anyone holding more than one membership: December hours fall into different cycle-years for HKICPA than for a calendar-aligned body.

It also means the practical question for members right now is not whether they comply with the new rules, but whether they close out the current cycle before 30 November and then start the new one knowing the rules have moved.

CPD here is statutory, and the sanction is removal

Hong Kong is structurally unlike Singapore, where the institute and the statutory regulator are separate bodies with separate requirements. HKICPA is itself the statutory registrar, and CPD compliance is a statutory precondition of renewal. HKICPA's own training material calls CPD one of the statutory requirements for CPA membership renewal.

The Institute's FAQ cites section 28(2)(c) of the Professional Accountants Ordinance, under which renewal is refused unless CPD requirements are met, and section 27(1)(a)(iii), under which registration may be revoked for repeated non-compliance. A member who does not comply is not renewed and is removed from the register of CPAs, and a removal notice is published in the Government Gazette.

There is no published automatic grace period. Compare ISCA, which gives members a default six-month extension to 30 June of the renewal year to make good a shortfall, and which reaches non-renewal only after a second failed audit. HKICPA's audit outcomes run from pass, through shortfall with an increased probability of future selection, to refused renewal or removal for repeated non-compliance — and non-response or non-completion means the member simply cannot renew.

Monitoring is annual and risk-based, with members who have a history of non-compliance more likely to be selected. That is a real difference from MIA, which states that its sample is selected at random. No sample size or percentage is published by any of the three bodies, so treat any figure you see as unsourced.

The exemption is the tightest of the three

A member qualifies for exemption only if the whole of a cumulative list applies: they do no accountancy or accountancy-related work, paid or unpaid, and do not plan to for a significant period; they do not hold a Practising Certificate; they do not hold a Specialist Designation; they are not a Responsible Person of a registered PIE auditor; and they are not a company director.

Three points follow. There is no age-based exemption at all — no equivalent of ISCA's Member-in-Retirement category at 63 or MIA's senior member category at 60. Being a director of any company is an absolute bar, so a retired CPA sitting on any board cannot be exempted. And Practising Certificate holders can never be exempted. HKICPA also states that exemptions granted by other accountancy bodies are not recognised, and that the Global Accounting Alliance mutual recognition arrangement does not apply to Practising Certificate holders.

What counts as accountancy-related work is not exhaustively defined. HKICPA's material gives financial accounting, auditing and corporate taxation as examples and says the list is not exhaustive.

And on the regulator question, the answer is narrower than expected

It is often assumed that Hong Kong's Accounting and Financial Reporting Council sets CPD requirements for registered PIE auditors. On the AFRC's own Guide for the Registration of PIE Auditors, last updated September 2026 and effective 1 October 2026, it does not.

The Guide contains two CPD references. One is a requirement of at least five verifiable continuing professional development hours in Hong Kong relevant laws, Listing Rules, guidance issued by the local standard-setters, and regulatory requirements and expectations — and it applies to a narrow population: a network-firm engagement quality control reviewer who is not a Hong Kong practising CPA, and who therefore falls outside HKICPA's CPD net entirely. The other is an example of a condition the AFRC may impose on a registration, namely implementation of training programmes including additional continuing professional development hours.

So CPD for Hong Kong PIE auditors is set by HKICPA under Statement 1.500, not by the AFRC. The AFRC has one narrow standing requirement aimed at overseas reviewers, and a reserved power to add hours as a registration condition.

A sourcing caveat worth stating

We were unable to retrieve Statement 1.500 itself. Every HKICPA handbook PDF we attempted returned the Institute's page-not-found response to automated retrieval, including both the current and prior editions of the Statement and the handbook update that revised it. Everything above comes from HKICPA's own requirements page, its CPD FAQ, its Quick Guide, its compliance audit material and its Technical News item — all primary, all one step removed from the instrument.

The consequence is that we cannot give the Statement's edition line, its own effective-date clause, or any paragraph number from it, and neither should anyone else who has not read it. If you see a citation in the form of a Statement 1.500 paragraph number in a secondary summary, treat it with suspicion.

For the structural reason these requirements differ so much between jurisdictions, see our explainer on where accountants' CPD requirements come from; for how differently two bodies can interpret the same freedom, our comparison of ACCA and CIMA; and for how a single ethics requirement can mean four different things, the four US ethics regimes. HKICPA's announcement of the revised Statement is in its Technical News of 19 November 2025.