Georgia CPA CPE Requirements: How Many Hours, By When
How much continuing professional education a Georgia CPA actually needs — sourced the same way every fact on this site is: a board page, plus the codified rule itself where we could confirm it against primary law, clearly labelled where we could only confirm it against the board's own page, never a guess.
- 20-hour minimum in each 1-year period (you can't front-load the whole requirement into a single year).
- 4 ethics hours, within that same total.
80 CPE credits per two-year reporting period, of which at least 50% (40 credits) must be in TECHNICAL fields of study, with a minimum of 20 credits earned each year. 4 ethics credits are required, including 1 credit specific to the laws, rules and policies of the Georgia Board -- that Board-specific hour must come from a Board-approved program; the other 3 may be any behavioral or regulatory ethics. Up to 15 excess NON-technical credits may carry over to the next reporting period, but carryover can never satisfy the technical-fields minimum. Licensees aged 70 or older are exempt. Interpretation trap: a widely-repeated '16 hours in accounting and auditing' figure is the PRE-2024 requirement -- it was replaced on January 1, 2024 by the 50% technical-fields rule, which is more than twice as many credits. Georgia's own Secretary of State rules-database site (rules.sos.ga.gov/gac/20-11) still displays the superseded pre-2024 text if you look it up directly -- the Georgia State Board of Accountancy itself directly confirmed (Sept. 2026) that the January 2024 version above is the current, governing rule.
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