Technical Versus Non-Technical CPE Is Not a National Concept

"Technical versus non-technical" is discussed as though it were a feature of US CPE generally. It is not. Of ten large states, four impose such a split, they draw the line in three incompatible ways, and the state with arguably the strictest technical posture of all achieves it without ever using the words.

The four that impose it, and how differently they define it

California defines it by subject list, and is the only one with an annual technical floor. Its rule requires a minimum of 50 percent of the required continuing education hours in technical subject matter — 40 of the 80 — and the Board states the cap from the other side: no more than 40 hours, 50%, in non-technical subject areas. What makes California distinctive is the annual layer: 20 hours in each year of the two-year period, and within that, a minimum of 12 hours of the required 20 in technical subject areas. The classification is by enumerated subject, with accounting, auditing, fraud, taxation, consulting and financial planning on the technical side and communication skills, sales and marketing on the other. Usefully, ethics counts as technical, and so does the Regulatory Review course, so California's state-specific obligations help satisfy its technical floor rather than competing with it.

Texas defines it by the licensee's own job, which is the most unusual design we found anywhere. Courses are classified as technical or non-technical based on the benefit of the course to the licensee's current area of employment, and no more than 50% of the total credit hours required may be claimed as non-technical. The consequence is that the same course is technical for one Texas licensee and non-technical for another. No other state classifies by reference to the individual rather than the subject, and we have not seen it reported.

Georgia's technical floor, where it exists, replaces an accounting and auditing mandate rather than supplementing it. The version of the rule published by the Board requires at least 50% of credits in technical fields of study, caps carried-over non-technical credits at fifteen, and provides that carry-over cannot satisfy the technical requirement. But that version does not appear in the Secretary of State's official code, which instead mandates 16 hours of accounting and auditing and says nothing about a technical split. Georgia therefore either has a 50% technical floor or a 16-hour accounting and auditing mandate, and which is live is genuinely unresolved — see the caveat below.

Illinois does not use a technical split at all, but constrains the soft subjects harder than anyone. Its rule caps personal development CPE at 24 hours per renewal period: 20% of 120, a tighter constraint than a 50% technical floor though applied to a narrower category. And it adds an axis nobody else uses: not more than 60 hours per renewal period may consist of a combination of all non-verifiable activities. Illinois is the only one of the ten that caps by verifiability rather than by subject.

One that looks like it belongs here and does not

Florida caps behavioural subjects at 20 hours of the 80. That is a cap on a named category, 25% of the total, structurally much closer to Illinois's personal-development cap than to California's technical floor. Florida should not be listed as a technical/non-technical state, and it usually is.

New York is stricter than all of them, by whitelist

This is the finding worth carrying away. New York imposes no technical split and no non-technical cap, because it has no non-technical bucket to cap.

Its regulation requires all hours to fall within enumerated recognised areas of study: accounting, attest, auditing, taxation, advisory services, specialized knowledge and applications related to specialized industries, and professional ethics. Anything outside the list does not count at all.

Functionally that is a 100% technical requirement achieved by whitelist rather than by quota, and it is arguably the strictest technical posture of the ten. It is never described that way, because the vocabulary everyone searches for is absent from the rule.

The rest constrain by other means

Ohio uses positive subject mandates instead of subject caps: 24 credits in accounting and auditing if the permit holder performs attest work, 24 in taxation if they do tax work, and three in professional standards and responsibilities. A permit holder doing both carries 51 of 120 credits as mandated subjects — the heaviest mandated burden among the ten — while facing no cap at all on soft subjects. That is a genuinely different regulatory philosophy: prescribe what must be there rather than limit what may be.

North Carolina caps by activity type rather than subject: no more than 50% of required credits in aggregate from college courses, preparing or presenting CPE, or instructing college courses, and no more than 25% from published articles or books.

Michigan and Pennsylvania: we found no split in either. For both, and for the other states above, treat the absence as unverified rather than established — we did not read every section of every rule, and in Pennsylvania's case the administrative code refused automated access entirely, so every Pennsylvania figure we have is from the Board's own published pages rather than from the rule.

The activity caps diverge even more widely

If a CPA teaches or writes, the caps matter more than the subject rules, and they are nowhere near aligned.

For instruction: Ohio allows up to 90 credits per triennium, three times what a participant would earn. Illinois allows 60 hours. Pennsylvania allows 40. Texas allows 20 credits, Michigan 20 hours. New York and North Carolina cap at 50% of the requirement. A prolific instructor licensed in Ohio and Texas can satisfy three-quarters of Ohio from teaching and one-sixth of Texas.

For authorship: Illinois caps at 30 hours, Texas at 10 credits, North Carolina at 25%, Georgia at 25% under the official code or 50% under the Board's version. Pennsylvania folds authorship into the same 40-hour pot as self-study, which materially changes the arithmetic for anyone who writes. And Michigan appears to grant no authorship credit at all — we found no authorship activity in its rules, which if correct makes it the only one of the ten with no authorship route. We flag that as an unverified absence rather than a finding.

Where we cannot give you a number

Georgia is the serious one. The Secretary of State's official administrative code, marked current through October 2026, and the Board's own website describe two different CPE regimes — the code mandating 16 hours of accounting and auditing with no ethics requirement, the website mandating four ethics credits with no accounting and auditing requirement and a 50% technical floor. The Board's own copy of the amended rule is headed "Draft Revised CPE Rules and Regulations" with no effective date, while the Secretary of State's printed amendment history stops in April 2016. We could not establish which is operative, and we are not going to publish either as settled.

That is not a research failure so much as a regulatory one, and it is worth knowing about before building a compliance plan on a Georgia figure from any source.

The one-line version

Technical versus non-technical is not a national concept. Four of ten states use it; three set the line at 50% and the fourth at 20% of a narrower category; two define technical by subject list, one by the licensee's own employment, and one by whether the activity is verifiable; and New York reaches a stricter result than any of them without using the words at all.

Which is the same conclusion we keep reaching about this whole subject. The totals look comparable and the constraints are not, as our piece on annual floors running from zero to forty hours sets out, and the ethics column is the wrong shape entirely, which we cover in the four different ethics regimes. The structural reason is that there is no national rule-maker to impose a common vocabulary, as explained in who actually sets CPE for a US CPA. California's own summary of its technical requirement is in the Board's overview of the renewal process.