Why the CPE Numbers on a Vendor Blog Can Be Wrong Even When They Used to Be Right
If you searched for Washington's CPA continuing-education requirement recently, there's a good chance you landed on a guide published in 2018 by a widely-read practice-management vendor. It still ranks. It still gets read. And on two of its four numbers, it's wrong.
The guide says Washington CPAs need 120 CPE credits every three years, with at least 4 hours of board-approved ethics, and "no more than 72 non-technical courses." Two of those four figures are correct. Two are not, in ways a practitioner would only discover by missing them.
What the current rule actually says
WAC 4-30-134, verified directly against the Washington State Legislature's own code site:
- 120 CPE credit hours within the three-year reporting period — correct in the 2018 guide.
- A 4-hour Washington-board-approved ethics course — correct in the 2018 guide.
- At least 20 CPE credit hours during each individual calendar year — absent from the 2018 guide entirely. It isn't wrong about this one; it just doesn't mention it. A CPA who front-loads their three-year total in year one and skips years two and three has met the 120-hour total and still failed the rule.
- No more than 60 credit hours in nontechnical subject areas — the 2018 guide says 72. The actual cap is 60. Twelve hours of the wrong kind of credit is enough to fall short at renewal.
Two real numbers, wrong or missing, sitting on a page that still ranks for the exact question a CPA would ask.
Why a number like this goes stale
Rules get renumbered. A citation that was correct when a page was written can point to a section that no longer exists, or that no longer says what it used to say, without the page itself ever changing. Washington's own current rule carries a trace of this: it superseded an older section, WAC 4-25, that still circulates on third-party CPE-vendor sites years after the renumbering. A page that cited WAC 4-25 accurately in the year it was written can be citing dead law today, with no visible sign that anything changed — no broken link, no error message, nothing to flag it to a reader who isn't checking.
That's the actual failure mode, and it has nothing to do with anyone acting in bad faith. A guide gets written once, against the rule as it existed that day. Rules don't stay still. The guide does.
How to check a number yourself, in under a minute
You don't need to trust us, and you shouldn't trust any single source blindly, including this one. Three things to look for on any page citing a state CPE or licensing rule:
- Does it cite the actual rule section, not just "the state board's website"? A real citation (like "WAC 4-30-134") is something you can look up directly and confirm word for word. "Check with your state board" is not a citation.
- Does the page say when it was last checked? A rule requirement with no visible verification date is a number frozen at some unknown point in the past.
- Does the cited section still exist, and still say what the page claims? Rule sites publish the current text for free. It takes one search to confirm a citation is live, current, and says what's claimed.
Bottom line: every figure on this site carries a citation to the primary rule and a "Last verified" date for exactly this reason — see our verification method for the full standard. For Washington specifically, the current, cited figures are on our Washington CPE requirements page.
General orientation, not a citation. This guide draws on board rules and, where available, this site's own verified dataset — it isn't a primary source in itself. Last checked against those sources: August 28, 2026.
For the current renewal date or CPE figures your state actually enforces, use the state page linked above — it carries a direct link to the board page and codified rule, per our verification standard.