CPD Hours for Canadian CPAs: What Counts as Verifiable

A CPD hour is verifiable when a third party can confirm you did it. That is the entire test. It is not about difficulty, cost, or whether the learning was formal — it is about whether evidence exists that does not depend on your word.

Canadian CPAs need 20 hours a year with at least 10 verifiable, and 120 over three years with at least 60 verifiable. Getting the categories wrong is the most common way a member arrives at a deadline believing they are compliant when they are not.

Verifiable or Unverifiable? A Decision Table

The Difference That Costs People Hours

“Unverifiable” and “doesn't count” are not the same thing, and treating them as the same is the most expensive misunderstanding in CPD.

Unverifiable hours are real hours. They count toward your 20 and your 120. If you read standards updates for fifteen hours across a year, those fifteen hours are yours — you simply cannot use them to satisfy the 10-hour or 60-hour verifiable minimum.

Non-qualifying activity is worth nothing at all. Doing your job is not CPD, no matter how much you learn from a difficult file. The distinction the profession draws is between doing the work and developing the capability to do it.

The practical consequence is a ceiling. You can satisfy up to half your annual requirement through reading and listening, and not a minute more. A member who reaches December with twenty hours of reading and nothing else has met zero percent of the requirement that actually binds.

Is There a Limit on Unverifiable Hours?

Yes, and it is implied rather than stated. Because at least 10 of your 20 annual hours must be verifiable, no more than 10 can be unverifiable. Over the three-year cycle, at least 60 of 120 must be verifiable, so the unverifiable ceiling is 60.

Quebec is the exception and it works differently: there, 15 hours is an explicit cap on unverifiable self-study, not a floor on verifiable hours — a distinction widely reported backwards. Holders of a public accountancy permit in Quebec face a 15-hour self-study cap across the whole three-year cycle.

Deadlines and local variations are set jurisdiction by jurisdiction. Those are covered in our guide to CPA CPD requirements across Canada, and the Ontario specifics in our CPA Ontario guide.

What Evidence Do You Actually Need?

You do not submit evidence when you declare. You produce it if you are audited, and audits look back across the full three-year period — so the evidence has to survive job changes, provider portals being retired, and your own memory.

A certificate of completion should show: your name, the activity title, the provider, the date completed, and the number of hours. A certificate missing the hours is the most common gap; keep the course description alongside it if so.

When the provider issues nothing — common with in-house sessions and some conferences — build the record yourself at the time: the agenda or session description, the date, the duration, the presenter, and confirmation of your attendance from whoever ran it. An email from the organiser saying you were there is third-party evidence.

For unverifiable hours, keep a contemporaneous log: date, what you read or listened to, time spent, and one line on relevance to your role. Nobody reconstructs a year of reading accurately in retrospect, and a number you cannot explain is worse than a smaller number you can.

Record relevance for everything. One sentence on why the activity applies to your professional role. It is the field everyone skips and the one auditors ask about, because relevance is the test that decides whether an hour qualifies at all.

Ways to Earn Verifiable Hours

Verifiable hours are the constraint, because unverifiable ones accumulate on their own through work you were doing anyway. Four sources cover most members:

• Employer-sponsored training. The most overlooked source in the profession. If your firm runs technical sessions with an agenda and an attendance record, those are verifiable hours you may already have earned without claiming.
• Conferences. Concentrated and efficient — a two-day event can carry more verifiable hours than a year of ad-hoc learning, provided attendance is recorded per session.
• Certificate programs. The certificate is the evidence, which removes the documentation problem entirely. Examples on CPDFormula include ChatGPT for CPAs and Truth and Reconciliation for CPAs — the second being a useful reminder that CPD relevance is not confined to tax and audit.
• Live webinars. One hour, one certificate, bookable this week. The simplest verifiable hour there is, and the standard answer when a deadline is close. The live webinar calendar lists what is currently scheduled.

On subject matter, the latitude is wider than most members use. Beyond the four ethics hours, no Canadian body prescribes what you study — only that it is relevant to your role. Skills development counts as readily as technical updating, which is why something like data analytics and AI qualifies as squarely as a tax update.

Tracking Hours Without Dreading It

Three habits, none of which take more than a minute:

1. File the certificate the day you earn it, in a folder named by year. Certificates are what disappears.
2. Log unverifiable hours the same week, not the same year.
3. Check your ethics count every January. Four verifiable hours per three-year cycle is a small number that is easy to miss and impossible to backfill.

Courses completed on CPDFormula issue a certificate automatically and remain in your account, so the verifiable side of your record maintains itself. The unverifiable side is yours — and a spreadsheet is genuinely enough.

Frequently Asked Questions

What makes a CPD hour verifiable?
Independent, third-party evidence that the activity took place — a certificate of completion, a registration or attendance record, or a documented agenda with confirmation you attended. Not difficulty, cost, or formality.

Do unverifiable hours count?
Yes. They count toward your annual 20 and triennial 120 totals. They cannot count toward the 10-hour annual or 60-hour triennial verifiable minimums.

How many unverifiable hours am I allowed?
Up to 10 of your 20 annual hours and up to 60 of your 120 triennial hours, outside Quebec. Quebec caps unverifiable self-study at 15 hours, and at 15 across the full cycle for public accountancy permit holders.

Does reading standards updates count as CPD?
Yes, as unverifiable hours, provided it is relevant to your professional role and you log it contemporaneously.

Does my day job count as CPD?
No. Routine work does not qualify however technical it is. The distinction is between doing the work and developing the capability to do it.

What if a provider does not issue a certificate?
Build the record yourself at the time — agenda, date, duration, presenter, and written confirmation of attendance from the organiser. That confirmation is third-party evidence.

How long do I need to keep evidence?
Across the full rolling three-year period, since that is the window a CPD audit can examine.