Singapore Lawyer CPD: SILE Points and the Private Half

Singapore lawyer CPD is set by the Singapore Institute of Legal Education, not the Law Society, and it has a feature most points-based regimes lack: roughly half of every lawyer's requirement can be met with learning that nobody has to accredit.

There is also a timing rule that can reduce the requirement to nothing.

Three bodies, three distinct roles

This is the first thing to get right, because it determines who you ask about what.

SILE makes the rules. The Legal Profession (Continuing Professional Development) Rules 2012 were made under section 10 of the Legal Profession Act, and SILE states that "The CPD Scheme is administered by the Institute through the work of three main committees." The Rules have been amended three times, most recently with effect from 1 January 2025.

The Law Society is a provider and a publisher, not the rule-maker. Its own materials describe programmes offered under the mandatory ethics component "published by SILE".

The Supreme Court issues the practising certificate. CPD compliance is declared as part of that application rather than filed separately.

Within SILE, four bodies do different jobs: the Accreditation Committee accredits activities, the Director of Continuing Professional Development accredits short activities worth up to two points, the Programmes Committee designates mandatory categories, and the Compliance Committee handles waivers, verification and enforcement. A CPD Review Board reviews decisions on application.

Points by years' standing

On top of that, from CPD Year 2025 there is a mandatory ethics component: at least 3 points under the Mandatory Ethics and Professional Standards category, of which at least 1.5 must be Public. It applies to lawyers and section 36B foreign lawyers who hold a practising certificate or foreign practitioner certificate for more than eight months in a CPD year.

Note two different years are in play. The CPD year runs 1 January to 31 December, and requirements must be met by 31 December of that year. The practice year runs 1 April to 31 March. They are not the same period and the Rules define them separately.

The months-held rule, which can take you to zero

The requirement is tiered not only by seniority but by how long you held the certificate during the year:

• More than 8 months — the full requirement in your group, plus the 3 ethics points
• More than 5 but not more than 8 months — the full group requirement, but no minimum ethics points
• 5 months or less — no minimum points at all

So a lawyer called in, say, August, holding a certificate for five months or less in that CPD year, owes nothing for the year. This is not a waiver you apply for; it falls out of the tiering.

Public versus Private points: the half nobody has to accredit

This is the structural feature worth understanding, and it is unusual.

Public CPD points come only from accredited CPD activities listed in the official calendar. Private CPD points are, in SILE's description, obtained by undertaking a range of other activities — including "in-house seminars and reviewing multimedia or audio-visual materials."

Because only half of each group's requirement must be Public, the other half is addressable without any accreditation at all. For a Group 1 lawyer that is eight of sixteen points. For Group 2, four of eight.

Two consequences follow. For a firm, in-house training is not a supplement to CPD — it is a recognised route to half the requirement. And for an individual, documented review of recorded material counts, which makes the private half genuinely practical to accumulate rather than theoretical.

The ethics component is the exception that proves the rule: 1.5 of its 3 points must be Public, so you cannot discharge the ethics requirement entirely in-house.

Foreign lawyers: it depends which registration you hold

The split is clean, and it turns on what you are registered to do rather than where you qualified.

Section 36B — a foreign lawyer registered to practise Singapore law and/or foreign law — is expressly named in the Rules and owes 8 points plus the 3 ethics points.

Section 36C — registered to practise foreign law only — is not named in the Rules or in SILE's published requirements. On the face of the published material, foreign-law-only practitioners fall outside the scheme.

Section 36E — a Singapore solicitor practising in a foreign law practice, joint law venture or qualifying foreign law practice — holds a Supreme Court practising certificate and is therefore caught as a solicitor.

Declaration and consequences

There is no separate CPD filing. The declaration rides on the practising certificate application, offering three options: that you complied with every applicable requirement in the preceding calendar year; that the Compliance Committee granted a waiver; or that no requirement applied to you.

On non-compliance, the Compliance Committee may, after a reasonable opportunity to be heard, issue a written notice directing compliance, recommend a private reprimand, recommend a complaint or referral under section 85 of the Act, or take no action. Review by the CPD Review Board must be sought within 14 days of notification.

The Committee may also grant full or partial waivers or extend time, and it does so in practice — SILE issued extension waivers for CPD Year 2025 in December 2025 for lawyers unable to meet their requirements by 31 December.

Caveats worth stating

The points table above was read on a Law Society page headed CPD Year 2024, and corroborated in shape by a 2015 publication showing the same 16 / 8 / 4 structure — so the architecture has been stable for a decade. But we could not confirm the figures for CPD Year 2026 from a SILE source, because the Schedules to the Rules do not render on the legislation portal and SILE's CPD detail sits on a separate site we could not retrieve.

That same inaccessibility means we cannot tell you whether a foreign provider may apply for SILE accreditation, or what the process involves. The Rules say who decides; nothing readable says who may apply.

We also found only the ethics category as a mandatory one. The Rules permit the Programmes Committee to designate others, and the designations themselves are not published in the rule text — so treat "ethics is the only mandatory category" as what we could verify rather than as certainly complete.

For the accountancy position in the same market, where a chartered accountant who is also a registered public accountant faces two separate regimes at once, see ISCA and ACRA CPE. For a jurisdiction with no provider accreditation route at all, see why there is no national CLE accreditation in the United States. And for a points regime that varies by state rather than by seniority, see Australian lawyer CPD by state.