How to Become a CPA: Every Step, and Why Your State Board Decides

Understanding how to become a CPA starts with four gates, and you pass them roughly in this order. Education comes first: a bachelor's degree with an accounting concentration at minimum, and in any jurisdiction that has not adopted the pathway added in 2025, a total of 150 college credit hours, which is 30 more than a standard bachelor's delivers. The exam is second: the Uniform CPA Examination, four sections, 16 hours of testing, and a minimum score of 75 on each one. Experience is third: supervised accounting work, one year or two depending on which education pathway you used. Licensure closes it out, and in some states an ethics course or ethics exam sits just before it.

That is the honest skeleton, and it is worth noticing what is missing from it: numbers you can rely on. Every quantity in the list above except the exam itself is set by a board of accountancy, not by a national body. The credit hours, the definition of an accounting concentration, how many months of supervision count, whether an ethics exam is required at all, the fees: all of it is jurisdictional. A guide that gives you one figure for each is quietly describing one state and hoping it is yours.

Most answers to how to become a CPA are a checklist of numbers. The useful way to read this one is as a map of where the decisions sit instead. If you want the day-to-day picture of the job at the end of it, our guide on how to become an accountant covers the work itself, which is a different question from the license.

Every serious answer to how to become a CPA has to start here, because this is the part that reframes everything else. NASBA's own directory lists the contact details and governing statutes for a State Board of Accountancy in each of 55 jurisdictions, and that count is not 50 because it includes the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. Fifty-five boards, fifty-five rulebooks. AICPA's own ThisWayToCPA site puts it without hedging: education, work experience, ethics and other requirements vary from state to state.

The practical consequence is an ordering problem, and it is where people lose a year. The instinct is to finish the degree and then pick a jurisdiction to be licensed in. Do it that way and you can graduate with a transcript that satisfies the state you studied in and falls short in the state you want to work in, because the two boards count upper-level accounting hours differently. Choose the jurisdiction first, pull that board's rules, and build the degree plan against them. It costs an afternoon at the start and it can save a semester at the end.

It also explains the search results. When four of the top pages answering how to become a CPA come from the Texas, Florida, California and Ohio CPA organizations, that is not a gap in national coverage. That is the topic accurately reflecting its own structure. Treat any page that hands you a single national credit-hour figure with suspicion, and treat your board's website as the only source that settles anything.

One more distinction worth fixing early, because it drives the whole process: the CPA is a license issued by a government body, not a certification issued by a membership organization. That is why a board can tell you what to study and a professional association cannot. We break that difference down properly in our guide to accounting certifications, which covers how the CPA sits against the CMA, the CIA and the enrolled agent credential.

For years the education half of how to become a CPA was one sentence: 150 credit hours. That is no longer true, and the change is recent. In May 2025 AICPA and NASBA approved model legislation for an additional licensure pathway, and it was folded into the amended Uniform Accountancy Act released that summer. There are now three published routes to the license, and they trade education against experience:

Read the third row carefully, because it is the one that changes the math. It removes 30 credit hours of tuition and adds a second year of supervised work. Whether that is a saving depends entirely on what a fifth year would have cost you and what you would earn during the extra year of work instead. For a student at a public university with low in-state tuition, the difference is smaller than it looks. For someone facing private-school tuition, skipping 30 credits is a large amount of money not spent.

Now the caveat that makes this useful rather than misleading: each state must enact the new pathway separately. It is already live in some jurisdictions and takes effect in 2026 or 2027 in others, and it is not available everywhere. Do not design a degree plan around it until you have confirmed your own board has adopted it. If your board has not, the 30-credit route is still the working answer.

An accounting concentration itself is usually somewhere around 24 to 30 accounting hours plus roughly 24 business hours, though the exact split is a board decision. Across our ranked sets there are 1,132 bachelor's in accounting programs and 513 master's in accounting programs, with published in-state tuition running from $4,477 to $69,400 a year at both levels. The master's is worth understanding as two things at once: a degree, and the cleanest way to close the 30-credit gap while cutting the experience requirement to a single year.

The exam is the one part of how to become a CPA that does not change when you cross a state line, which is exactly why it is called the Uniform CPA Examination. Unlike everything else on this page, the CPA exam requirements are set nationally rather than by your board. It is four sections and 16 hours of testing, built as three Core sections that everybody takes and one Discipline section that you choose.

The four CPA exam sections break into three Core and one Discipline. The three Core sections are Auditing and Attestation (AUD), Financial Accounting and Reporting (FAR) and Taxation and Regulation (REG). The Discipline section is one of Business Analysis and Reporting (BAR), Information Systems and Control (ISC) or Tax Compliance and Planning (TCP). Every section runs four hours, and AICPA states the standard plainly: you must score a minimum of 75 on each CPA Exam section. Not an average of 75 across four sections. Seventy-five on each.

The clock around those four sections is the piece most guides still get wrong. From 2004, when the computer-based exam launched, candidates had 18 months from passing their first section to pass the remaining three or start losing credit. On April 21, 2023 the NASBA Board of Directors voted to amend Model Rule 5-7 of the Uniform Accountancy Act, extending that conditional credit window from 18 months to 30 months and basing the calculation on the date scores are released rather than the test date. That is a full year of additional room on a clock that had not moved since 2004.

The catch is the same one that runs through this entire topic. Model Rules have no automatic force: they have no immediate effect on state board rules, and each board decides for itself whether to adopt the change. Confirm the window your own board actually applies before you plan a section order around it, because planning against 30 months when your board still runs 18 is an expensive mistake.

Supervised experience is the requirement people underestimate when they map out how to become a CPA, partly because it is the only one you cannot finish by studying harder. The amount is set by your pathway: one year on the master's route and on the 150-hour route, two years on the bachelor's route added in 2025. The work has to be supervised, and the definition of qualifying work, along with who is allowed to sign off on it, is a board decision rather than a national standard.

The ethics requirement is where a lot of published guides overstate the case. AICPA's ThisWayToCPA states it carefully: some states require a CPA applicant to complete an ethics course or ethics exam before licensure. Some, not all. It is a real requirement in a meaningful number of jurisdictions and a non-event in others, so it belongs on your checklist as a question rather than as a task. Ask your board, and only then budget the time and the fee.

Once education, exam and experience are documented, licensure itself is an application to the board: transcripts, verified experience, fees, and whatever ethics evidence that jurisdiction wants. And because fees are set per board, there is no honest national figure to quote for what the process costs. Anyone who gives you one is describing a single state. That is also why continuing education after licensure varies: your board sets the hours, and it sets the reporting cycle.

Nobody publishes a national average for how long this takes, so the only defensible answer is to add the published requirements together and show the arithmetic.

• The master's route: four years of undergraduate study, then a master's with an accounting concentration, then one year of supervised experience. Call it six to seven years from starting college, with the exam taken alongside the tail end of it.
• The 150-hour route: four years of undergraduate study plus 30 additional credits, however you accumulate them, then one year of supervised experience. Similar total, more flexible in how the extra credits are earned.
• The bachelor's route added in 2025: four years of undergraduate study, then two years of supervised experience. Roughly six years, with a year of tuition replaced by a year of salary.

The exam runs in parallel rather than in sequence, which is why it rarely sets the total. Many candidates sit for sections while finishing coursework or during their first supervised year. What it does set is a deadline inside the process: pass your first section and the 30-month conditional credit window starts, so the exam is best treated as a project you start deliberately rather than something you drift into.

The honest summary, and the part of how to become a CPA that never makes a headline, is that six years past high school is a realistic floor for most people, and that the 2025 pathway does not shorten the timeline so much as change what you are doing during it. You spend the fifth and sixth years earning instead of the fifth year paying tuition. For a lot of candidates that is the entire argument.

Most guides on how to become a CPA close with a salary figure. Here is the number nobody handles honestly: BLS does not publish a wage for licensed CPAs. The occupation is accountants and auditors, SOC 13-2011, and it counts the licensed and the unlicensed together. So every page quoting you a precise CPA salary is quoting something the federal wage survey does not measure. What we can say from BLS OEWS, May 2025, is what the occupation pays: a median of $83,680 a year, about $40.23 an hour, with the lowest 10 percent under $56,020 and the highest 10 percent above $144,090.

Sit with that spread for a second, because it is the most useful figure on this page. The distance from the tenth percentile to the ninetieth inside accountants and auditors is $88,070, about 2.57 times. The step from the accountant median to financial examiners, at $94,160, is $10,480. Which is to say the variation inside the occupation dwarfs the gap to the neighboring one. Where you work, what you specialize in and how long you have been doing it move your pay far more than crossing a single occupational boundary does.

The genuinely large step is a change of occupation, not a change of credential. Financial managers carry a median of $166,570, which is $82,890 above the accountant median, and their top 10 percent clear $323,270. The license is frequently part of the path there, and it is not the thing that pays. The accountant salary and financial manager salary pages break both distributions down properly.

On demand, the outlook is solid without being dramatic. BLS projects accountants and auditors to grow 5 percent from 2025 to 2035, against a 3.5 percent average across all occupations, with about 115,300 openings a year over the decade as workers retire or move on. Employment goes from roughly 1,595,200 in 2025 to a projected 1,674,600 in 2035. Steady, large, and not going anywhere.

So is the license worth it? For public accounting and audit work it is not a question, because signing an audit opinion requires it and nothing substitutes. For corporate accounting the case is real but weaker, and the honest comparison is against other credentials rather than against nothing. If you are still deciding between the two big undergraduate paths into this world, start with accounting vs finance. If you are weighing the accounting license against the finance world's flagship credential, CFA vs CPA covers that trade directly.