CPA Australia CPD Requirements: Hours, Ethics and Deadlines for 2026

CPA Australia members are required to have 120 hours of CPD every three years, with a minimum to hit each year and a set amount of ethics training inside that total. This article covers the CPD requirements, the deadlines, what counts, what records to keep, and what happens if those records are checked.

1. CPA Australia CPD Requirements at a Glance

Everything in that table is a rule, not a suggestion. Where something is guidance rather than an obligation, this article says so.

2. Who Must Comply with CPA Australia's CPD Requirements

Every member. Your designation doesn't change the number. An ASA, a CPA and an FCPA are all required to complete 120 hours. Suspended members are included, which the By-Laws state outright at By-Law 4.1.

Where you work doesn't change it either. The rules follow the members wherever they live, which matters given how much of CPA Australia's membership sits outside Australia.

Three groups are exempt: Life Members, Honorary Members, and anyone on the Retired Membership List.

The retired exemption has a catch, and it's the one people miss. It stops applying the moment a retired member provides public accounting services, and the rules are explicit that unpaid work counts. Do a set of books for your local sporting club as a favour and you're back on the full 120 hours.

If you hold a practising certificate

Your hours don't go up. Your paperwork does. You sign a declaration of compliance when you renew the certificate, and as CPA Australia's practice guidance sets out, that declaration sits alongside quality review and insurance obligations. The membership renewal also requires you to confirm your practice ABN and the services you provide.

If you're a registered tax agent, auditor or liquidator

You have two sets of obligations running at once. CPA Australia requires its 120 hours. Your registration requires whatever CPD its own regulator sets.

The roles this covers include company and SMSF auditors, liquidators, tax and BAS agents, trustees in bankruptcy, financial services licensees and credit services roles.

Doing one doesn't cover the other. CPA Australia doesn't publish the regulator numbers, so check them at the source. Approved SMSF auditors in particular should work from CPA Australia's current SMSF auditor guidance, which now points to the superannuation legislation, AUASB standards, APES 110 and ASIC's registration requirements.

3. How Many CPD Hours You Need, and How They're Counted

CPA Australia counts in hours. Not points, not credits. You enter them in your CPD Diary as decimals, so two hours and 45 minutes goes in as 2.75.

The ethics hours come out of the 120. They aren't extra. Plenty of members read the rule as 130 and do work they never needed to do.

The 20-hour annual minimum is a floor you clear every year. Doing all 120 in year one doesn't buy you two quiet years afterwards.

Two rules work in your favour. Pass a Professional Level Segment of the CPA Program and it records as 120 hours for that year automatically. Fail it or skip the exam and you still get 20. Tertiary study works the same way: 120 hours per subject passed, 20 hours for a subject failed.

4. Your Three-Year Cycle and Annual Deadlines

Your cycle is personal to you, and it's set by when you were admitted.

Joined before 30 June in a year? Your cycle started 1 January of that same year. Joined on or after 30 June? It started 1 January of the following year. Joining in July hands you a head start of nearly six months.

Each year inside the cycle is a calendar year. So your 20-hour minimum and your 2-hour ethics minimum both fall due on 31 December.

Your CPD Diary shows your actual dates. Check there rather than working it out yourself, because some members had their cycle recalculated during CPA Australia's system migration.

5. Ethics, Verifiable Hours and the Myths About Structured Learning

CPA Australia does not impose a separate overall verifiable-hours quota beyond its ethics requirement, nor does its published guidance prescribe a fixed ratio of structured to unstructured learning. Nonetheless, it's important to keep a record of your CPD activities each year to ensure you're meeting your annual requirements.

Members generally need 120 CPD hours per triennium, including at least 20 hours each year and verifiable ethics CPD of at least 2 hours each year and 10 hours per triennium.

What the ethics requirement actually asks

Ethics became mandatory in October 2023, and it phased in. What you owe depends on which cycle you're finishing, as CPA Australia's ethics guidance sets out.

What counts as ethics

Seven topics:

• Regulatory updates covering the Act, By-Laws, Regulations and Code of Professional Conduct
• Regulatory updates relevant to your role or industry
• Corporate codes of conduct
• Independence and conflicts of interest
• Ethical business culture
• Whistleblowing
• Bribery and corruption

A general professional development course doesn't count just because "professional" is in the title. The subject has to land inside that list.

You need proof for every ethics hour

This is where members come unstuck at review. Ethics hours are the only ones needing evidence, and CPA Australia is specific about what it will and won't take.

A "you're registered!" email proves you signed up, not that you finished. That's the whole distinction.

For ethics training done outside CPA Australia, upload your proof when you log the activity. Without it, those hours may not be accepted.

One more condition. Divisional webinars count toward ethics only if the event was booked through CPA Australia's own registration platform.

6. What Counts as Eligible CPD

The test is broad: anything that increases your knowledge, skills and ability to do your job. Which activities you pick is up to you. The limits CPA Australia applies are not.

Authorship, teaching and mentoring all have a place. Writing technical material and delivering lectures or webinars carry no limit. Mentoring caps at 10 hours a year.

One exception on wellbeing: members who completed the Counting on U program can claim up to 15 hours in total.

What doesn't count

• Hours over a limit: Log 25 hours of reading and 10 of them count. The rest disappear.
• Wellbeing activities with no learning in them: Fitness classes, yoga and meditation are named as activities CPA Australia won't accept.
• The same learning twice: You can't re-claim hours you've already claimed.
• Anything unrelated to your work: Reviews assess your records against relevance to your career, so a course with no connection to your role is a weak entry.

7. Online Learning, Self-Study and On-Demand Courses

Self-study counts, and there's no limit on how much of your 120 hours you build this way. Worth knowing if you learn mostly online.

There is a real distinction inside online learning. A structured self-study course sits in the uncapped category. Reading an article or watching a recording sits in the reading and media category, capped at 10 hours a year. Structure is what keeps your hours out of the capped bucket.

The overarching requirement is that the learning increases your knowledge, skills and ability to do your job. It also has to be formalised. CPA Australia judges CPD one member and one activity at a time, against that member's own role.

EverCPE.com provides online self-study learning for accountants that may help you fulfil your CPD requirements — with one exception: we don't cover the ethics component - CPA Australia makes ethics courses available to members directly on its website, often at no cost.

EverCPE.com is interactive, structured self-study rather than passive reading. Each learning session comes with:

• Content shaped around the exact accounting and auditing questions you have, instead of generic off-the-shelf courses
• Substantive material organised around clear learning objectives
• Knowledge checks with feedback as you go, so you fix any misunderstanding while you work through the learning session
• Scored multiple-choice questions that check whether you understand the material
• A certificate of completion once you complete the learning session, naming you, the session and the hours
• A full downloadable handout covering the session, its learning objectives, and its content

In short, EverCPE.com leaves you with documentation and evidence of the learning you completed.

8. Records, Declarations and the Annual CPD Review

You have three duties. Keep a record of each activity showing what it was, the dates, the time you spent and the topics covered. Hold that record for at least 12 months after your three-year cycle ends. Produce it if CPA Australia asks.

Your CPD Diary is the record that counts

This gets missed. Whatever transcript or learning history a third-party platform gives you, the record CPA Australia inspects is your CPD Diary. Only CPA Australia's own activities load into it automatically. Everything else, you enter yourself.

The diary asks for your hours as a decimal, a summary of the activity, details of what you learned relative to your role, start and end dates, the category, the delivery method, the provider and the location. You can attach files.

A good provider record makes that faster to fill in and gives you the certificate to attach. It doesn't replace the diary entry.

Do you need certificates for everything?

For ethics, yes in practice, since every ethics hour needs proof. For the other hours, the stated requirement is the record itself. Keep certificates anyway. A review can ask for more evidence on any activity, and finding a certificate two years later is harder than saving it now.

The annual declaration

CPA Australia added mandatory questions to the online renewal form. From the 2026 renewal you confirm where you work and that you're meeting your CPD obligations. Practising certificate holders answer more. Membership runs on the calendar year, with renewal due 31 December.

How a review works

Five stages. CPA Australia selects members. It sends a notice asking you to update your diary for the three-year period. It assesses what you submit, including whether the activities relate to your career. It asks for extra evidence if it needs it. Then it issues an outcome.

If you come up short

Can't produce enough evidence, or don't respond during the review window? CPA Australia issues a Support Plan setting out what you need to do and by when. Miss that and the matter can go to the Professional Conduct unit.

Ignoring the review entirely can lead to suspension, a disciplinary referral, or both.

Behind all of it sits a rule letting CPA Australia investigate, demand information, and require you to sign a formal agreement to clear the shortfall by a set date. Breaking that agreement counts as a breach of membership and can attract a penalty.

CPA Australia's own advice is to make contact early if you're behind. Worth taking.

Coming back after suspension

9. Exemptions, Reduced Requirements and Special Circumstances

Narrower than most members assume, so don't talk yourself into one.

• Full exemption: covers Life Members, Honorary Members and retired members.
• Getting on the Retired Membership List: needs you to be 55 or over, out of full-time work as an ongoing condition, and not holding or needing a practising certificate. You apply in writing. Minor part-time work up to 15 hours a week is fine. You can't hold a specialist certificate. Anyone already on the list as at 9 December 2024 may keep their practising certificate.
• Reduced-fee members: A 50 per cent fee reduction, granted for reasons like time out of the workforce, heavily reduced hours or unpaid parental leave, keeps all your membership privileges. If you're selected for a CPD audit, you can also apply to have your CPD requirement reduced.
• Partial exemptions during a review: exist, with one hard limit. The 2-hour annual ethics minimum is never waived, because it's a yearly floor rather than a total.
• Leave, illness and career breaks: CPA Australia doesn't publish a standing exemption policy for these the way some other bodies do. The route that exists is the fee reduction, which asks for dates and reasons and accepts documents like a medical certificate, plus the case-by-case reduction available to those members at audit. If your circumstances are affecting your hours, contact CPA Australia rather than assuming relief applies.
• New members: get no separate pro-rata rule. The relief is built into the 30 June start-date rule.
• Suspended members: stay on the hook for the full 120.

10. Official CPA Australia Sources and Member Responsibility

This article sets out CPA Australia's published rules as at the research date in the verification log below. It doesn't replace the By-Laws, CPA Australia's own guidance, or advice about your situation.

Research verified: 18 September 2026, against the CPA Australia By-Laws effective 1 October 2025.

Disclaimer: CPD requirements can depend on individual membership status, professional circumstances, jurisdiction and other factors. Requirements may also change over time. Members are responsible for confirming their current CPD obligations directly with CPA Australia and, where applicable, their local jurisdiction, employer, regulator or other relevant authority. EverCPE.com does not guarantee that completion of any particular course will satisfy a member's individual CPD requirements.