Medical Board of Australia CPD: 50 Hours and the CPD Home Rule

The Medical Board of Australia sets the most prescriptive continuing professional development requirement in the national scheme, and the headline figure conceals almost all of it. Doctors must complete a minimum of 50 hours a year. Inside that 50 sit four separate floors, and the whole obligation has to be discharged through an organisation the regulator has accredited.

Fifty hours, with four floors inside it

The requirement is a minimum of 50 hours each calendar year of CPD relevant to the practitioner's scope of practice and individual professional development needs. The standard then allocates those hours:

• At least 12.5 hours, a quarter of the minimum, in educational activities.
• At least 25 hours, half the minimum, across reviewing performance and measuring outcomes — and within that, a minimum of five hours for each of those two categories.
• The remaining 12.5 hours, and anything above the 50-hour minimum, across any of the three types.

So a doctor can complete 50 hours, be comfortably over on educational activity, and still fail the standard by having done four hours of measuring outcomes. Four separate minima have to clear independently, and only a quarter of the total is genuinely discretionary. No other Australian National Board comes close to that degree of prescription.

The Board's guidance adds a further constraint that the standard itself does not spell out: relevant specialist high-level requirements and CAPE requirements must be included within the 50 hours rather than sitting on top of them.

The CPD home: Australia's one mandatory accredited intermediary

This is the structural feature that sets medicine apart. A doctor does not simply complete CPD and record it. They must meet the requirements of a CPD program run by an accredited CPD home — an organisation accredited by the Australian Medical Council, which is the Board's accreditation authority.

A CPD home may be an education provider, another organisation with a primary educational purpose, or an organisation whose primary purpose is something else entirely. There are 23 AMC-accredited CPD homes, and five of them are not colleges.

Which home applies depends on the doctor's position. Specialists choose: the home is an accredited one of their own choice, relevant to their specialty or scope of practice. Specialist trainees do not choose — their home is the accredited specialist medical college for their training position. Nor do specialist international medical graduates under assessment, whose home is the college conducting that assessment.

The common belief that an Australian specialist must do their CPD through their own college is therefore wrong, and it is an expensive thing to be wrong about. A specialist who assumes no choice exists never looks at the other 22 options.

Why this is the same pattern as provider accreditation elsewhere

Most regulators approve no CPD provider at all and leave relevance entirely to the registrant. A minority run real accreditation schemes, and where they do, provider status is a regulatory fact rather than a marketing claim. The clearest UK example is optics, where the regulator registers providers against published standards and a share of a registrant's points must come from registered providers, as set out in our guide to GOC CPD provider registration and the UK exception.

The Medical Board's CPD home model is a stronger version of the same idea. In optics a proportion of activity must come through registered providers. In Australian medicine the entire obligation is routed through an accredited home. For anyone selling CPD to Australian doctors, that is the threshold question, and it is answered by the AMC's accreditation list rather than by anything a provider can assert about itself.

Plan, self-evaluate, and keep records three years

The standard requires a written annual professional development plan, and a self-evaluation of the year's CPD activity as the following year's plan is prepared. The plan is not optional documentation; it is part of the requirement.

Records of annual CPD activity must be retained for three years after the end of each one-year cycle, for audit by both the CPD home and the Board. Note the dual audience: the home audits its own participants, so a doctor is accountable to the intermediary as well as to the regulator.

One thing that does not apply here

A joint consultation on revised recency of practice and CPD registration standards closed on 17 July 2026. It covered fourteen National Boards. The Medical Board was not one of them.

Its standard took effect on 1 January 2023, following its own separate review, and replaced a standard dated 1 October 2016. So while most Australian health professions face figures that may move, the medical figures above are settled. That is the opposite of the position for the other boards, as set out in our comparison of why Ahpra CPD hours are not comparable across National Boards — where the draft would push fourteen professions toward a common 20 hours including five interactive hours.

Who the standard applies to is also wider than commonly described: all registered medical practitioners, excluding only students, interns and postgraduate year 2 doctors in structured programs, certain short-term limited registrations, non-practising registration, and practitioners granted an exemption for an extended absence. Provisional registrants and most limited registrants are in scope. Confirm the current wording on the Medical Board of Australia's registration standards page before relying on it.