Portugal: 30 Credits a Year for Accountants and Auditors Alike

Portugal is the clearest of the European regimes to read, because both relevant professions have their own numbered regulation published in the official gazette, both set concrete figures, and both landed on the same headline number — 30 credits a year. The architecture underneath that shared figure is sharply different, and so are the consequences of missing it. Certified accountants face an automatic bar on practising; auditors face a second, triennial obligation on top.

Two bodies, two regulations

• Ordem dos Contabilistas Certificados (OCC) — certified accountants.
• Ordem dos Revisores Oficiais de Contas (OROC) — statutory auditors.

Audit supervision sits with the securities market commission, the Comissão do Mercado de Valores Mobiliários (CMVM). We should be straight about one limit here: the CMVM’s own site is closed to automated retrieval, so while the designation is almost certainly correct we did not read the supervision law itself and are not citing its number or date.

Certified accountants: 30 credits a year, and a hard consequence

Instrument: Regulamento n.º 352/2024, the OCC’s continuing professional training regulation. Approved 15 March 2024, published in Diário da República, 2nd series, no. 63, of 28 March 2024, in force the day after publication.

• 30 credits per year, pro-rated for part-years of practice.
• Annual only. There is no multi-year cycle at all — unusual in Europe, where the three-year frame dominates.
• 1 credit = 1 training hour for Ordem training, certified-provider training and equivalents.
• No structured/unstructured split. No category carries a mandated share.
• No ethics quota. The regulation says training must cover, among other things, accounting, taxation, ethics and deontology, and law — a content list, not a floor.
• Declaration by the end of the first quarter of the following year, so 31 March.

The sanction is the part worth knowing: once the declaration deadline passes without compliance, the regulation imposes an automatic bar on practising. Not a disciplinary referral, not a fine — a bar. Among the European regimes we have examined this is the sharpest automatic consequence.

Alternative credit routes

The OCC regulation is generous about what counts, which partly offsets the annual pressure:

• 30 credits for passing or teaching a degree, postgraduate, master’s or doctoral course, provided at least 25% of curricular units were passed in the year — a full year’s obligation in one route.
• 30 credits for a scientific book.
• 16 credits for an article in a scientific journal.
• 6 credits per technical or professional article.
• 6 credits for sitting on an examination or professional-test jury.

An unusual provider rule: silence is consent

Where a member wants training from a non-certified provider recognised, the request must go in at least 30 days ahead and the Ordem answers within 15 days — and if the Ordem does not answer, approval is deemed given. Tacit approval by administrative silence is a rare mechanism in CPD regulation and a genuinely useful one for members using international providers.

The Ordem carries its own duty too: it must publish the annual training plan by the end of November of the preceding year.

Statutory auditors: the same 30, plus a triennium

Instrument: Regulamento n.º 137/2025, the OROC training regulation. Approved by the representative assembly on 9 January 2025, published in Diário da República, 2nd series, no. 16, of 23 January 2025, in force the day after. It revokes the previous regulation approved in June 2016, so material written before 2025 describes a superseded regime.

• 30 credits a year, of which at least 20 must be certified.
• 120 credits per triénio, of which at least 60 certified.
• Cycle length three years.
• By the end of the triennium, half the hours must fall within listed subject areas — which include ethics and independence as one of four.
• Declaration by the last day of April, covering the previous calendar year.

Note the terminology. OROC does not use “structured” and “unstructured”. It distinguishes certified from non-certified credits, with non-certified activity — including self-study — governed separately and subject to annual caps on some routes. If you are mapping Portugal onto a template built for the UK or Irish vocabulary, that distinction will not translate cleanly.

Ethics has no standalone quota here either. Ethics and independence is one of the four listed subject areas caught by the 50% triennial subject-mix rule, which means it may be satisfied entirely by the other three.

The comparison that matters

Both professions carry 30 credits a year and both count one credit as one hour of classroom training. Everything else differs:

• Accountants: purely annual, no certified-credit floor, no cycle, filing by 31 March, and an automatic practice bar on failure.
• Auditors: annual and triennial, a hard floor of 20 certified credits a year and 60 a triennium, a 50% subject-mix rule, and filing by 30 April.

So an auditor can do 30 credits in a year and still fail, if fewer than 20 were certified. An accountant doing 30 credits of anything qualifying has complied. The totals are identical and the compliance tests are not — which is the general European pattern we set out in our guide to why European CPD keeps converging on 120 hours over three years.

Portugal is also one of the few places where the general accountant profession has a quantified obligation at all. In France and Germany the equivalent professions carry a statutory duty with no number — see France’s experts-comptables. Portugal puts 30 credits and a practice bar behind it.

What we are not stating

Two gaps, named rather than filled:

• Neither regulation specifies a record-retention period. The OROC regulation requires auditors to keep a record of training hours and produce it when the Ordem asks, with no period attached. We are not going to supply a number that is not there.
• The OCC regulation contains no revocation clause and names no predecessor, so we cannot tell you what it replaced.

We also found no 2026 or 2027 amendment to either regulation. The OROC regulation of January 2025 is itself the recent change.

Frequently asked questions

How many CPD credits do Portuguese accountants need? 30 a year, pro-rated for part-years, with no multi-year cycle.

And auditors? 30 a year of which at least 20 certified, plus 120 per triennium of which at least 60 certified.

What happens if an accountant misses the deadline? The regulation imposes an automatic bar on practising once the 31 March deadline passes without compliance.

When are the filings due? Accountants by 31 March, auditors by 30 April, both for the previous calendar year.

Can training from a foreign provider count? For accountants, yes, subject to a recognition request at least 30 days ahead — and if the Ordem does not reply within 15 days, approval is deemed given.

Satisfy a certified-credit floor with Learnsignal

Portugal’s auditor regime turns on whether credits are certified, not on how many hours you sat through, and its accountant regime turns on a filing date with a practice bar behind it. Our certificated CPD courses are designed to be evidenced on both counts. For the legal frame these national rules sit inside, see our guide to the EU Statutory Audit Directive. The OCC regulation is published in the Diário da República.