How much continuing professional education a Mississippi CPA actually needs — sourced the same way every fact on this site is: a board page plus the codified rule itself, never a guess.
Mississippi's base CPE requirement is ANNUAL, not triennial: a minimum of 40 CPE credit hours within each one-year (12-month) compliance period ending June 30 (up to 20 excess hours may carry over into the next annual period). Layered on top of that annual cycle is a separate TRIENNIAL ethics component: a minimum of 3 hours of Board-approved Ethics and Professional Conduct plus a separate minimum of 1 hour of Mississippi Public Accountancy Law and Regulations, every 3 years (current cycle July 1, 2025-June 30, 2028) -- 4 ethics-related hours total, but on a 3-year cadence layered over the annual 40-hour requirement, not 4 hours per year. Interpretation trap: multiple vendor pages (and even a preliminary MSBPA search snippet) conflate this into a flat '120 hours per rolling 3-year period,' which is mathematically consistent (40 x 3) but obscures that compliance is actually checked and reported annually, not triennially. New licensees are exempt from CPE in their initial (partial) compliance period and from the ethics/law requirement for the rest of that triennial cycle. Verified against the full text of Rule 4.1 (Cornell regulations mirror) and the Mississippi State Board of Public Accountancy's own CPE page, which independently state the same 40-hour annual / 3+1-hour triennial ethics structure.
What does it cost to reinstate a lapsed Mississippi license? →