CPD for Accountants: A Complete Guide

"What is my CPD requirement?" has no single answer, and that is the main thing to understand before you start recording anything. It depends on which body you belong to, and for some bodies it depends on your role and whether you work in practice. Two accountants sitting at the same desk can owe different amounts of CPD.

This guide sets out what each of the main bodies actually requires, explains the verifiable and non-verifiable distinction that governs most of the work, and links to the detailed guide for each body.

ACCA: 40 units, at least 21 verifiable

Most ACCA members use the unit route: 40 units of CPD a year, of which at least 21 must be verifiable and up to 19 may be non-verifiable. One unit equals one hour of learning, so the arithmetic is simpler than it looks.

There are three alternatives to the standard unit route, and they are underused because members do not know they exist:

• Unit route for part-time or semi-retired members — available if you are employed for 770 hours or less in a CPD year. It requires 19 non-verifiable units, and you set your own level of verifiable CPD appropriate to your role. Conditions apply, and ACCA says it should not be used by members preparing accounts that investors rely on, or by non-executive directors of listed companies.
• ACCA Approved Employer route — you follow your employer's approved development programme, including its appraisal process and personal development plan.
• IFAC body route — for members who are also full members of another IFAC body whose CPD policy meets International Education Standard 7.

Every route still requires an annual CPD declaration. The declaration mechanics, the review process and the record retention period are set out in our guide to the ACCA annual CPD declaration, and the requirement in full in our guide to ACCA CPD requirements.

ICAEW: three categories, and the figure depends on where you work

ICAEW's CPD Regulations, in force since 1 November 2023, put every member into one of three categories and set hours accordingly. The part most summaries get wrong is that the verifiable hours differ between members in practice and members not in practice at the same category.

So a Category 1 member in practice owes 30 verifiable hours; a Category 1 member outside practice owes 15. Same category, same 40 total, half the verifiable burden. If you have been working from a figure someone quoted you, check which column it came from.

Separately, Regulation 8(c) requires every member to undertake a minimum of one hour's ethics training, met either through the ICAEW ethics module or through alternative training aligned with the ICAEW Code of Ethics. It is a small requirement that is easy to overlook precisely because it is small. Our guide to ICAEW CPD requirements covers how the categories are assigned.

The other bodies

Each sets its own requirement, and if you hold more than one membership you owe each separately — though the same learning can often count towards both, provided you record it to each body's standard.

• CIMA CPD requirements — CIMA takes a competency-based approach rather than an hours target, which changes how you evidence it.
• AAT CPD requirements
• CPA Ireland CPD requirements
• Chartered Accountants Ireland CPD requirements

If your work is regulated as well as your membership, you may have a second, separate obligation. Anyone in a controlled function in Irish financial services sits under the Central Bank's Minimum Competency Code, which has its own CPD requirement that runs alongside the professional body one rather than replacing it — see our guide to the Minimum Competency Code CPD requirements.

Verifiable versus non-verifiable: the distinction that does the work

Almost every requirement above is split between the two, so it is worth being precise about what separates them. Verifiable CPD is learning you can evidence, that is relevant to your role, and from which you can show you learned something. Non-verifiable CPD is everything else that still develops you — reading, informal discussion, keeping up with technical updates.

The common mistake is treating "verifiable" as meaning "a certificate". The test is evidence plus relevance plus an outcome. A recorded webinar with a completion record and a note of what you will do differently is verifiable. A full-day conference you attended and cannot describe the relevance of is weaker evidence than a thirty-minute module you can.

The practical consequence: the non-verifiable allowance is a ceiling, not a target. Members who fill the easy half first and leave the verifiable hours to the final weeks are the ones who end up short.

Recording, and what happens at review

Bodies sample. You are not asked to prove your CPD every year, but you can be asked, and the request arrives after the year has closed — which is why contemporaneous recording matters more than any other single habit. A reconstructed record is the pattern regulators consistently identify as failing, across professions.

Record as you go: what you did, when, how long, why it was relevant to your role, and what you took from it. The last of those is the one people omit and the one reviewers look for. Our guide to CPD record keeping and evidence covers what a defensible record looks like, including retention periods.

If you are going to be short

This is the part worth knowing before you need it, because the instinct — say nothing and catch up quietly — is the wrong move and makes the position worse.

ACCA's position is that you must still make a declaration, confirming that you have not met the requirement and that you understand CPD is a requirement of continuing membership. ACCA then contacts you about making up the shortfall and asks for an updated declaration once you have. Its own guidance asks members having difficulty to say so early, on the basis that you may qualify for a different route or a waiver without realising it — which, given the part-time, Approved Employer and IFAC routes above, is more likely than most members assume.

The mechanic that catches people is what happens next. CPD you complete in the current year goes first towards clearing the previous year's shortfall. You only begin accruing towards the current year once the shortfall is cleared and the earlier declaration has been submitted or resubmitted. A missed year does not sit quietly in the past; it eats into the year you are in, which is how one short year becomes two.

The practical reading: a shortfall handled in January is an administrative matter. The same shortfall left until it has absorbed half of the following year's CPD is a membership problem.

Our suggestions

Three things make this straightforward rather than stressful.

Confirm your own number first, from your own body and your own category — not from a figure someone quoted at work, which is where most of the confusion starts. Second, do the verifiable hours early in the year and let the non-verifiable accumulate naturally, because that is the reverse of what most people do and it is why shortfalls happen. Third, write the reflection at the time: the hours can be reconstructed from a calendar, and what you learned cannot.

Plan your CPD with Learnsignal

Learnsignal's CPD courses are built to produce verifiable records — completion evidence, relevance to defined roles, and material you can point to at review. If you are not sure which requirement applies to you, start with the guide for your own body above.

Outside the UK and Ireland

If you hold a qualification from a body outside these islands, or you work with members who do, the figures diverge far more than the headline numbers suggest. The international standard behind most of them is IES 7, and SMO 2 is what makes it binding on a member body.

Canada’s requirement is 120 hours over three years with provincial variation, and CPA Canada itself sets no rule, with deadlines spanning eight months. In the United States, the state boards set the licence requirement and the CMA sits outside it entirely. Australia’s IPA now requires 40 hours a year, while CPA Australia and CA ANZ chose opposites on almost every design question. The Netherlands sets no hours at all.

Two comparisons worth reading before assuming hours transfer between memberships: hours versus outcomes as the unit of measurement, and mandatory ethics requirements across bodies, which range from nothing to seven hours a year.

Two practical starting points

Two pieces go further into how an obligation becomes a programme. What compliance training a finance function is actually required to do separates the mandatory from the merely advisable, and building a CPD programme for a finance team covers the design question that follows — who needs what, and how the evidence is kept.

Working out what counts, and what to keep

Most compliance problems are not about doing too little learning. They are about activity that turned out not to qualify, or evidence that was never recorded in a usable form. These four cover the ground where that goes wrong.

• Do webinars count as CPD? — including where live attendance is treated differently from a recording, and the minimum-attendance thresholds some bodies apply.
• CPD record examples — what a defensible record actually looks like, in the formats regulators accept.
• What happens if you do not comply — how enforcement differs between a warning, a fine, and losing the right to practise.
• When does your CPD cycle start? — rarely 1 January, and in at least one jurisdiction not even aligned to a calendar year.

The US CPE picture, which works differently again

American CPAs do not have a single national requirement. The obligation is set state by state, and the vocabulary differs too — credits rather than hours, with a 50-minute unit. These cover the parts that recur regardless of which state licenses you.

• Who actually sets US CPE requirements — the starting point, because it is not the national institute.
• The AICPA member requirement of 120 hours per three years — which sits alongside, not instead of, your state's rule.
• What happens if you fall short — the remediation routes and their consequences.
• First-renewal rules for newly licensed CPAs — the pro-rating that catches people in year one.
• Working abroad as a US CPA — whether overseas learning counts toward a state requirement.
• Record retention by state — the periods vary, and several states are longer than practitioners assume.
• CPE for CPAs in industry and controllers — the requirement does not disappear when you leave practice.
• Maine and Puerto Rico — two of the less-documented jurisdictions.

For providers and for self-study

• Becoming a NASBA registry CPE sponsor — the requirements on the delivery side rather than the member side.
• NASBA-registered self-study courses — how self-study credit is measured and evidenced.
• Excel and data analysis CPE — and whether it counts as technical.

Running CPD at firm level rather than individually

Most CPD writing addresses the individual. For a practice or a finance team the problem is different: you are responsible for other people's compliance, and for the records that prove it.

• Setting up a CPD programme for your firm — the structure, and who owns it.
• Tracking compliance across a finance team — what to record and at what granularity.
• What employers actually get from it — beyond discharging the obligation.
• Aligning CPD with career planning — using the requirement rather than merely satisfying it.
• Building M&A and corporate finance skills through CPD — a worked example of directing hours at a capability rather than a quota.