Switzerland CPD: No Statutory Hours for Auditors

Across Europe, the answer to "how many CPD hours does an auditor need?" is almost always a number set by the state or by a regulator acting under statute. France, Spain, Poland, Portugal, Austria and Greece all land on 120 hours over three years. Romania recast its rule to 40 hours a year. Czechia's professional chamber sets 40.

Switzerland does not do this. There is no federal hours figure for Swiss accountants or for licensed auditors — and that absence is deliberate, not an oversight.

The Swiss audit regulator sets no hours of its own

Audit licensing in Switzerland runs through the Revisionsaufsichtsbehörde (RAB), known in French as the Autorité fédérale de surveillance en matière de révision (ASR). It licenses audit experts, auditors and state-supervised audit firms, and it inspects the firms that audit public-interest entities.

What the RAB's own guidance does not do is state a number of training hours. It treats continuing education as something a licensed person and their firm must be able to evidence, and it looks at how the firm controls that — not at whether an individual hit a quota the regulator wrote down.

This is a genuinely different design from the one the EU Statutory Audit Directive produced in member states. The Directive also sets no number, but member states filled the gap with national figures. Switzerland, outside the EU, left the gap open and pointed at the professional bodies instead.

The mechanism is an exemption, and it is the most interesting part

The way the RAB defers to the associations is worth understanding precisely, because it tells you where the real obligation sits.

Audit firms are ordinarily expected to submit documentation showing how they control the continuing education of their licensed staff. A firm whose licensed people all hold membership of EXPERTsuisse or TREUHAND|SUISSE is excused from submitting those training-control documents.

Read that again as an incentive rather than a rule. The regulator is not telling Swiss auditors to do 40 hours. It is telling firms that if their people are members of a recognised professional body — which runs its own continuing education regime and enforces it — the regulator will take that as sufficient and stop asking. Association membership becomes the compliance route.

The practical effect is that in Switzerland the binding CPD rule for most licensed auditors is a private rule, written and policed by a membership body, that the state has chosen to rely on.

The one figure we can state at source: TREUHAND|SUISSE

TREUHAND|SUISSE, the Swiss association of fiduciary and trust professionals, publishes its continuing education requirement:

• 32 hours a year, expressed as four days
• 12 days across a three-year period
• Self-study does not count at all — it earns no credit whatsoever
• Failure is sanctioned with a fine of CHF 2,000 to CHF 10,000, or expulsion from the association

Two of those four points are more unusual than the headline number.

Zero credit for self-study is a European outlier

Most European regimes allow unverifiable or self-directed learning, usually capped. Austria permits 10 hours a year of self-study. Czechia caps soft skills at 5 hours. Poland and Portugal both recognise private study within limits. The IES 7 framework that most of these rules descend from explicitly contemplates both verifiable and non-verifiable learning.

TREUHAND|SUISSE allows none. Reading on your own, working through a standard, following a technical update on your own time — none of it counts toward the 32 hours. Every hour has to come from something the association recognises as structured.

If you are used to a regime where you can log an hour for reading an IFRS update, this is a real behavioural difference and not a technicality. It makes the Swiss requirement harder in practice than its arithmetic suggests, because 32 structured hours is a larger commitment than 40 hours of which 10 may be self-directed.

A fine, not a licence consequence

The second unusual feature is the sanction. In Portugal, the professional body's CPD rule can bar you from practice. In Austria, repeated failure attracts a fine of up to EUR 5,000 under the bookkeeping-professions regime, with random selection for audit. Romania and Poland route enforcement through the licensing authority.

TREUHAND|SUISSE's escalation is a monetary penalty of CHF 2,000 to CHF 10,000 or expulsion from the association. Expulsion matters precisely because of the exemption described above — losing membership does not directly remove an audit licence, but it removes the firm's shortcut with the regulator, and the training-control documentation obligation comes back.

So the consequence is indirect, and it lands on the firm as much as on the individual.

Why Switzerland breaks the convergence pattern

We have written separately about why so many European CPD regimes land on exactly 120 hours over three years. The short answer is that they all trace back to the same illustrative figure in an international education standard, even though no EU instrument requires it.

Switzerland is the control case for that argument. It sits in the middle of Europe, its profession is deeply integrated with Germany's and Austria's, and its audit standards are closely aligned. If the 120-hour figure were a natural consequence of how auditing works, Switzerland would have arrived at it too. It did not, because it was never inside the EU transposition process that carried the figure into national law.

That strengthens rather than weakens the convergence finding: the number travelled through a specific institutional channel, and a country outside that channel did not pick it up.

What we are deliberately not telling you

EXPERTsuisse is the larger of the two bodies named in the RAB's exemption, and it operates its own continuing education requirement. We are not publishing a figure for it. Its own published materials were not retrievable to a standard we would print from, and we would rather leave a gap than print a number we cannot attribute.

If you are an EXPERTsuisse member, the requirement that binds you is the one in your own membership rules, and that is the document to check — not a third-party summary, including this one.

We are also not stating a figure for Swiss accountants who are not licensed auditors and not members of either association. As far as we can establish from primary sources, no such figure exists in federal law. The obligation attaches through licensing and through membership, and someone outside both is outside the quota system entirely.

The practical summary

If you hold a Swiss audit licence, the question to ask is not "what does the law require?" but "which association am I in, and what does it require?" The federal regulator has made that the operative question by design. For TREUHAND|SUISSE members the answer is 32 structured hours a year, no self-study credit, and a fine or expulsion for falling short.

For a cross-border practitioner, the Swiss case is a useful reminder that a jurisdiction with no statutory hours figure is not a jurisdiction with no CPD obligation. The obligation has simply been placed somewhere other than the statute book. You can read the RAB's own description of its licensing and oversight remit at rab-asr.ch.