South Carolina CPA CPE Requirements: How Many Hours, By When
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 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.
- 2 ethics hours, within that same total.
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.
What does it cost to reinstate a lapsed South Carolina license? →