How much continuing professional education a South Carolina CPA actually needs — sourced the same way every fact on this site is: a board page plus the codified rule itself, never a guess.
South Carolina is one of the few states on an annual (not multi-year rolling) CPE cycle: each licensee must document 40 hours of acceptable CPE completed during the immediately preceding calendar year, of which at least 2 hours must be ethics, every single year. Licensees may carry over up to 20 excess hours into the next year (10 for CPA-Retired status). Non-obvious trap: the number '40' does NOT appear in the Board's own CPE administrative regulation (Reg. 1-08, which covers only program mechanics, sponsor standards, and carryover rules) -- it is set by the statute, S.C. Code § 40-2-250(C), so citing Reg. 1-08 alone as the hours authority would be wrong. Since 2022 SC no longer mandates a SC-specific ethics course; any qualifying regulatory/behavioral ethics course satisfies the 2-hour requirement. Verified by reading the full statute text (scstatehouse.gov) against the Board's own FAQ (llr.sc.gov) and the full text of Reg. 1-08/1-13 (scstatehouse.gov coderegs Chapter 1 PDF), which independently corroborates the annual-ethics and 120-hour/3-year figures used for CPA-Retired reinstatement (40 x 3 = 120).
What does it cost to reinstate a lapsed South Carolina license? →