The three-year renewal cycle
Two dates matter, and the one people remember is the later of the two.
The date that gets filed, and the date that gets missed
30 April is the filing deadline: renewals go in between 1 January and 30 April of the licence's expiry year, and a late fee follows. That date is well known.
31 December of the year before is the one that decides whether you can file at all. By then the 120 hours of continuing education must be complete — with at least 20 hours in each calendar year of the three-year cycle, and a Board-approved ethics course among them. The rule is at WAC 4-30-134.
The consequence is arithmetic rather than advice: someone who opens the renewal form in February and starts looking for hours has already missed the deadline that mattered, and is asking for an extension instead.
The three cohorts
They are close in size, which is what a three-year cycle looks like once it has settled. It also means about a third of Washington’s 25,984 practising CPAs are in a renewal year at any time, and their hours were due the December before.
What a cohort is not
It is not a year group. Two people who qualified decades apart can sit in the same cohort, because the cycle follows the licence rather than the career: the oldest licence still in practice was first issued in 1959, and it renews alongside licences issued last year.
It is not a queue either. Nothing moves between cohorts by waiting; a licence stays in its three-year rhythm unless it lapses and is reinstated.
Where each cohort is
Every cohort is spread across the whole state rather than concentrated anywhere: 91 Washington towns have enough licence holders to get a page of their own, and 3,874 licences in practice sit at an address outside Washington altogether. A cohort page shows both splits.
And 9,578 licences in practice — 36.9% — carry no state at all on the record, so they appear in a cohort without appearing anywhere on the map.
If you are the one renewing
Your cohort is on your own record: look up your licence number, or your surname, in the search above and the year is shown against it. The two dates follow from that year — hours by 31 December of the year before, filing by 30 April.
This site is not the Board and nothing here moves a date or files anything. What it gives you is the year, the arithmetic, and who else is in the same position.
A reminder before the December that counts
Leave your details and we will tell you when your cohort is coming up — in time for the hours, not just the filing — and pass your request for continuing-education hours to providers who teach for Washington.
We take no commission and we recommend no course provider. We have no arrangement with any provider today — we are collecting these requests in order to go and find them. What we do with this.