Mississippi CPA CPE Requirements: How Many Hours, By When
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- 4 ethics hours, required once every 3 years (counts toward the total above, not an add-on).
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. Confirm with the Board which applies to you.
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 WITHIN 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 inside the annual 40-hour requirement, not 4 hours per year on top of it. 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. Both Rule 4.1 and the Mississippi State Board's own CPE page state the same 40-hour annual / 3-plus-1-hour triennial ethics structure.
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