Jordan CPD: 20 Hours, Filed Every July

IFAC's own country page attributes Jordan's continuing professional development requirement to the Accountancy Profession Law No. 73 of 2003. Having gone looking for that provision, we can report that it is not there — or at least, not in the way the attribution implies.

The Law delegates the power to issue regulations. The 20-hour CPD rule lives in a subordinate practice regulation made under that power. The distinction matters, because the regulation has just been replaced and the Law has not.

The requirement, verified at the professional body's own source

The Jordanian Association of Certified Public Accountants (JACPA) publishes the requirement on its own site in both Arabic and English. A certified public accountant practising the profession must submit, during the month of July each year, upon renewal of the practice licence, a continuing education certificate of not less than 20 hours.

Two features of that sentence are worth separating out.

First, this is not a free-standing annual declaration. It is a condition of licence renewal, filed inside the renewal window. In most jurisdictions we have examined, CPD reporting and licence renewal are separate administrative events on separate timetables. In Jordan they are the same event, which means a CPD shortfall is not a reporting problem that gets chased later — it arrives at the moment the licence is up.

Second, the window is a month, not a deadline. July is when you file. That is a tighter operating constraint than a year-end cut-off, and it is the kind of detail that makes the difference between a clean renewal and an awkward one. If you are used to asking when your CPD cycle starts, Jordan's answer is organised around its renewal month rather than around January.

Half the requirement can be met by writing and presenting

This is the most unusual feature of the Jordanian regime, and we have not found anything comparable in the other jurisdictions in this series.

JACPA credits continuing education as follows:

• Training courses and attendance at professional conferences — one hour of actual attendance counts as one training hour
• Presenting research at a scientific conference — equivalent to 10 training hours
• An article published in the profession's journal or another specialist journal — equivalent to 5 training hours
• Research and articles together are capped at 10 training hours

Read the arithmetic. The cap is 10 hours against a requirement of 20, which means up to half the annual obligation can be discharged through published output rather than attendance. A single conference paper covers it.

Compare that with the regimes we have covered elsewhere. Austria caps writing and lecturing at 20 hours a year against a 120-hour triennial requirement — roughly a sixth. Czechia credits one hour per standard page published. Türkiye allows up to 40 credits a year for teaching core subjects, but against a much larger total. Jordan's proportion is the most generous we have measured.

For a practising accountant who writes or speaks, that is a materially cheaper requirement than the headline number suggests. For one who does neither, 20 hours of attendance is still among the lightest annual obligations in this series — roughly half Vietnam's 40 and a sixth of the European norm.

Forty hours to re-enter the practising register

Jordan maintains separate practising and non-practising registers, and the CPD obligation attaches to the practising licence only. A member on the non-practising register carries no annual CPD duty.

Coming back is a different matter. A CPA on the non-practising register who wishes to return to the practising register must submit a continuing education certificate of not less than 40 hours before their name is transferred.

So the structure is a clean gate rather than a rolling obligation: nothing while you are out, double the annual requirement to come back in. That is a tidier design than most regimes manage — the question of what happens on the way back into practice is one we address generally in returning to practice after retirement, and in CPD for non-practising and retired accountants, where most jurisdictions turn out to be considerably vaguer than Jordan is here.

Where the rule actually sits, and why IFAC's attribution misleads

The governing statute is the Temporary Law Regulating the Certified Accounting Profession No. 73 of 2003, dated 16 June 2003. Note the title: it is a law regulating the certified accounting profession, not an "Accountancy Profession Law", and not a law on auditing as such.

Article 5 of that Law gives the oversight body the power to issue regulations, approve standards, form the licensing committee, grant practice licences and revoke them. The CPD requirement is made under that delegated power, in the practice regulation — the predecessor being the 2006 regulation on practising the profession, published in Official Gazette No. 4744 of 2 February 2006 at page 187.

IFAC's attribution of the 20 hours to the Law itself is therefore misleading by one level. The Law is the enabling instrument; the operative rule is in the regulation. If you are checking Jordanian CPD against the statute, you will not find it.

We are not citing an article number for the CPD provision. JACPA's published wording reads like a transcription of regulation text but cites no article, and we could not open the regulation PDFs — their addresses exceed what our retrieval tooling can fetch. A number we cannot attribute is worse than an acknowledged gap, which is the standard we applied to Thailand's CPA figure as well.

A 2026 regulation is now in force, and we have not read its CPD article

This is the live caveat on everything above, and we would rather lead with it than bury it.

JACPA lists Regulation No. 56 of 2026 on practising the certified accounting profession among its current instruments, uploaded to its site in October 2026. It replaces the 2006 regulation under which the 20-hour rule was made.

We could not read it. The PDF address is too long for our retrieval tooling, and Jordan's Official Gazette index is unreachable. Secondary Jordanian press reporting from August 2026 describes the Cabinet-approved regulation as providing for committees to regulate the provisions of training and continuing education, and quotes no hours figure at all.

So the honest position is this: 20 hours filed in July is the requirement per JACPA's current published guidance, and the regulation that guidance rests on has been superseded by one whose CPD article we have not seen. The guidance page may already reflect the new regulation, or it may predate it. We cannot tell from the outside.

If you are renewing a Jordanian practice licence in July 2027, that is a question to put to JACPA directly rather than to any summary, including this one. Its published continuing education page is at jacpa.org.jo.

The oversight body is chaired by a government minister

One structural observation worth recording, because it is unusual and because it is commonly misdescribed.

Jordan's audit profession oversight body is an Authority, not a council. JACPA's own English rendering is "Higher Committee of the Profession"; IFAC calls it the "Higher Council for the Accountancy Profession", which is not the body's own name for itself. A defensible English form is the Higher Authority for the Regulation of the Certified Accounting Profession.

Under Article 4(A) of the Law it is chaired by the Minister of Industry and Trade, with the Minister of Finance as vice-chair, and its membership includes the Governor of the Central Bank, the head of the Audit Bureau, the chair of the Securities Commission, the Director General of the Insurance Commission, the Companies Controller and JACPA's own President.

That is a heavily governmental board by European standards, where audit oversight is typically vested in a specialist independent authority rather than chaired by a serving trade minister. It places Jordan at one end of a spectrum whose other end is Switzerland, where the federal regulator sets no CPD figure at all and defers to private membership bodies.

What is not published

Stated as absences rather than as findings, because we could not prove a negative from the sources we reached:

• No ethics or subject-specific minimum is published. Unlike Indonesia's four ethics credits a year or Romania's two structured hours, nothing in JACPA's published guidance reserves any part of the 20 hours for a named subject.
• No structured/unstructured split. The 10-hour cap on research and articles is the nearest analogue, but it is a cap on output-based learning, not a verifiability split, and relabelling it as one would misdescribe the rule.
• No record-retention period and no stated sanction for non-compliance. The structural consequence — no certificate, no renewal — is an inference, not a sourced statement, so we are not presenting it as a penalty regime. Our CPD record examples assume you keep more than any minimum requires, which is the right posture when the minimum is unstated.
• No cycle longer than one year. The 40-hour re-entry requirement is a gate, not a cycle.

In short

Twenty hours a year, filed in July as a condition of practice-licence renewal, of which up to half can come from a conference paper or journal articles. Forty hours to re-enter the practising register, and nothing at all while you are off it. The rule sits in a practice regulation rather than in the Law that IFAC attributes it to — and that regulation was replaced in 2026 by one whose continuing education article is not publicly readable.