Romania CPD: 40 Hours and an Explicit Ethics Quota

Romania did something in 2025 that no other European jurisdiction in this series has done. It wrote a minimum number of ethics hours into its statutory auditor CPD rule and made it enforceable on its own.

That sounds like a detail. It is not. Across every European CPD regime we have examined at source — France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Czechia and Greece — ethics is almost always treated as one eligible subject among many, counted inside a general total. Romania is the exception.

The instrument and what changed

Statutory audit in Romania is overseen by ASPAAS, the Autoritatea pentru Supravegherea Publică a Activității de Audit Statutar. ASPAAS issued Ordin nr. 185 of 28 February 2025, which recast the continuing education requirement for statutory auditors onto an annual footing.

Before the recast, Romania ran the pattern that dominates Europe: a three-year cycle totalling 120 hours. The 2025 order replaced that with a yearly obligation. Arithmetically the totals are close. Structurally the change matters, because an annual obligation removes the ability to back-load a cycle — something we have written about separately in the context of carrying CPD hours forward.

What a Romanian statutory auditor now has to do each year

• 40 hours a year in total
• Of which at least 20 hours must be structured
• A floor of 10 hours a year on audit subjects
• A floor of 2 structured hours a year on ethics
• +6 hours a year for auditors who are engagement partners on public-interest entities
• +6 hours a year for sustainability assurance
• Auditors who are not active are held to 50% of the requirement

One clarification worth making, because it is the kind of thing that gets repeated wrongly. The rule sets a 40-hour total and a 20-hour structured floor. It does not state a separate requirement for 20 unstructured hours. Subtracting one from the other is arithmetic, not a rule — an auditor who does all 40 hours structured has complied, and nothing in the order says otherwise.

Why the two-hour ethics floor is the significant part

Two hours sounds trivial against a 40-hour total. Treat it as a design decision rather than a quantity.

Most European regimes list ethics as an eligible subject. An auditor can satisfy the whole requirement without ever attending an ethics session, because nothing forces the allocation. Romania closes that route. Every active Romanian statutory auditor must put at least two structured hours a year into ethics specifically, and because the floor sits on structured hours, it cannot be met by private reading.

Greece, Austria, Poland, Portugal and the Nordic regimes all list ethics among eligible or core subjects without a dedicated minimum. Outside Europe the picture differs: CPA Canada sets a four-hour professional ethics minimum per rolling three-year period, and Indonesia introduced a four-credit annual ethics quota for institute members in 2025. Romania is Europe's instance of that design.

If your interest is in what actually counts as CPD, this is the cleanest available illustration that the composition rules, not the headline total, decide whether you have complied.

Two sustainability add-ons that behave differently

Romania's +6 hours a year for sustainability assurance sits alongside its +6 for public-interest entity engagement partners. Both are additions on top of the 40, and both attach to a role rather than to everyone.

That is a more targeted design than Austria's, which added a sustainability requirement of 40 hours across three years with a 10-hour annual floor for auditors generally. Romania's six hours apply where the work does; Austria's apply more broadly. Greece took a third route again, offering a one-off 30-hour seminar route tied to a grandfathering window. The same policy objective has produced three different instruments, which is a recurring theme in how European CPD rules diverge beneath similar totals.

The parallel regime: CECCAR

Romania has a second, separate professional population. CECCAR — the Corpul Experților Contabili și Contabililor Autorizați din România — sets its own requirement for chartered accountants and licensed accountants, and it did not follow ASPAAS onto an annual footing.

• 120 hours over three years
• Of which 60 must be verifiable
• With 20 verifiable hours a year as an annual floor
• Online learning capped at 60 hours across the three years

So within one country there are now two live regimes on different clocks: statutory auditors on an annual 40, CECCAR members on a triennial 120. Anyone holding both statuses is subject to both, which is the situation we cover generally in our post on CPD with two memberships.

The rule that matters most if you deliver training in Romania

There is a provision in Romanian CPD law that has little effect on individual auditors and a large effect on anyone providing their training. Order 90/2018, article 4 governs who may teach.

In fields reserved to ASPAAS, programmes must be delivered by ASPAAS-accredited lecturers, and accreditation requires seven years' relevant experience. Non-accredited lecturers are capped at 20% of a programme's duration.

This is a market-access rule dressed as a quality rule. A provider cannot enter the Romanian statutory audit CPD market by hiring generalist trainers; it needs accredited people, and it cannot cover more than a fifth of a programme without them. Of the European regimes we have examined, this is the most explicit lecturer-side gatekeeping we found.

What we are not stating

We are not publishing a filing deadline for Romanian CPD declarations. A date circulates in secondary commentary and we could not confirm it against the order itself, so we have left it out rather than print a date an auditor might rely on.

If you need the deadline, take it from ASPAAS directly rather than from any summary, including this one. ASPAAS publishes its own register and regulatory documents at aspaas.gov.ro.

How Romania compares

Romania's 40 hours a year is, in total, the same commitment as the 120-over-three-years that most of Europe settled on. What distinguishes it is that almost every hour is spoken for by a rule: 20 structured, 10 on audit, 2 on ethics, 6 more if you sign public-interest entity opinions, 6 more if you do sustainability assurance.

That is the opposite of Czechia, where the statute sets a maximum rather than a minimum, and the opposite of Switzerland, where federal law sets no figure at all. Three neighbouring approaches to the same problem, and the hours total tells you almost nothing about which one you are in.