Illinois CPA CPE Requirements

Illinois CPAs need 120 CPE hours every three years. No more than 24 of them may be in personal development.

Your license expires on September 30 every three years; the next is September 30, 2027. Illinois counts CPE over the three years before it expires, and hours beyond the requirement can’t be applied to a later renewal period. Keep your certificates; the board may ask you for them.

Illinois CPAs need 4 hours of professional ethics during each three-year license period. Ethics hours also count toward the 120-hour total for the period. They also need a 1-hour sexual harassment prevention course during each three-year license period, which counts toward the 120 hours.

Illinois’s rules don’t say whether behavioral ethics courses meet the ethics requirement, so a regulatory ethics course is the safe choice. Sequoia CPE’s Illinois ethics courses are regulatory ethics courses and meet the 4-hour requirement.

Yes. Illinois accepts self-study programs. Credit is based on program length, with 50 minutes equal to one CPE hour. Noninteractive self-study is credited at one-half of the average completion time the sponsor determines, and no more than 60 hours of it may count in a renewal period. Up to 80 hours may be self-study. At least 50% of your hours must come from Illinois-registered sponsors, NASBA-registered sponsors, sponsors approved by another state’s board of accountancy, national and state accounting organizations (such as the AICPA and state CPA societies), or accredited colleges and universities. The accounting organizations are the AICPA, NASBA, the Illinois CPA Society and other states' CPA societies. The colleges and universities are those approved by their governing board in Illinois, or by the equivalent public authority governing board in another jurisdiction, to award accounting degrees. A self-study course counts only if one of the sponsors named above gives or approves it. Attending a program that none of them gives or approves (an unregistered sponsor’s program) can count only as nonverifiable CPE. All nonverifiable CPE together may make up no more than 60 of the 120 hours in a renewal period. That 60 also covers three activities, each limited to 10 hours: professional reading of published materials with no certificate or assessment; work on technical committees of an international, national or state professional association or member organization; and consultation with outside experts or research in a subject new to you or where regulations or standards have changed (repeat consultation or research on the same subject does not count unless the regulations or standards have changed significantly).

No. Hours beyond the requirement cannot be applied to a later renewal period (68 Ill. Adm. Code 1420.70(a)(5)).

Illinois exempts a licensed CPA from CPE for the first renewal after the license was originally issued. From the next renewal on, the full requirement applies: 120 hours in each three-year renewal period, at least 4 of them in professional ethics.

Illinois’s rules cover four situations: registered CPAs; address of record outside Illinois; waiver for extreme hardship; and inactive status and restoring a license. The details and their conditions are under Exemptions and special circumstances, below.