Psychology Board of Australia CPD: 30 Hours, 10 Peer Consultation

The Psychology Board of Australia sets the largest annual hours requirement of any National Board that counts in hours: 30 hours of continuing professional development a year. The number is not the interesting part. A third of it has to be peer consultation, and that is a requirement a practitioner cannot satisfy by buying a course.

Thirty hours, of which ten must be peer consultation

The requirement is 30 hours per registration year, with a minimum of 10 hours of peer consultation inside that total. Peer consultation means engagement with other practitioners about professional practice — supervision, peer review, structured case discussion — rather than attendance at a presentation. It is participatory by definition.

That makes the Psychology Board's sub-quota structurally different from the interactive-hours minimums several other boards impose. An interactive hour can usually be met by a workshop, a facilitated webinar or an assessed online module, all of which a provider can sell. Ten hours of peer consultation requires access to peers, and no catalogue supplies that.

Why the sub-quota is the binding constraint

For a psychologist in a large public service or a group practice, 10 hours of peer consultation is usually the easy part: colleagues are present and arrangements already exist. For a sole practitioner in private practice, it is the hardest part of the whole requirement, and it is the part most likely to be left to the end of the year, when it is least possible to arrange.

The 20 remaining hours can be filled from the open market. The 10 cannot. A psychologist tracking a single total of 30 will therefore see a comfortable position that is not actually comfortable, and this is the failure mode worth designing around: record the peer consultation hours as their own running figure from the start of the registration year, not as a subset of a combined tally.

For an employer, the implication is that a CPD budget is not a sufficient response to the psychology requirement. Access to structured peer consultation time, and protected hours in which to use it, is the scarce resource. Money buys the 20; rostering buys the 10.

How it compares with the other National Boards

Thirty hours is higher than the 20 that most of the National Boards set, but comparing the headline figures directly is a mistake, because the boards do not measure the same thing. The Medical Radiation Practice Board counts 60 hours over a three-year period with a 35-hour substantive share, which works out close to 20 a year, as set out in our guide to the medical radiation 60-hour triennium. The Pharmacy Board counts weighted credits rather than hours, so its apparently larger total can represent considerably less time. The nursing and midwifery total varies with dual registration and endorsements, as explained in our guide to NMBA CPD hours, dual registration and endorsements.

Set against that spread, 30 hours with a 10-hour peer consultation floor is not simply a bigger version of a 20-hour requirement. It is a different kind of requirement, with a component that is not purchasable. Our comparison of why Ahpra CPD hours are not comparable across National Boards sets out the full published position board by board, with the sub-quotas attached to each figure.

What a provider can and cannot honestly offer

The line here is worth being precise about, because it is easy to blur in marketing copy. A provider can supply activity that counts toward the 20 non-peer-consultation hours. A provider can host or facilitate a forum in which peer consultation takes place, and where it genuinely involves practitioners engaging with each other about practice, the hours may count. What a provider cannot do is convert a lecture, a recorded module or a self-paced course into peer consultation by describing it that way.

A psychologist buying CPD should therefore ask of any activity which of the two totals it contributes to, and treat a vague answer as a no. A provider claiming to meet the peer consultation requirement should be able to say what the practitioner will actually be doing and with whom.

A note on record-keeping

Because the requirement has two components, the record has to show two things rather than one: the total hours completed, and which of those hours were peer consultation. A log that records dates, titles and hours without identifying the peer consultation entries cannot demonstrate compliance even where compliance was achieved, because the 10-hour floor is not visible in it. Where peer consultation took place, the record should be specific about the form it took and who was involved, since that is what distinguishes it from attendance at a presentation.

One currency warning

A joint consultation on revised CPD registration standards across the National Boards closed on 17 July 2026. The total, the peer consultation share and the definition of qualifying activity could all change as a result. Before relying on any figure here for a compliance decision, check the current published standard on the Psychology Board of Australia's registration standards page.

The structural point is more durable than the numbers. Wherever a regulator sets a participatory sub-quota, that sub-quota and not the headline total is what determines whether a practitioner is actually on track, and it is the figure that has to be tracked separately from the first month of the year.