Annual hour requirement — pending publication. The number of CE hours required per cycle is being confirmed with Campbell University and the Trust Education Foundation and will be published here once settled. Nothing on this page should be read as stating that figure.
Eligibility attaches to the completion date
A program counts toward the cycle that contains the date you completed it — not the date you reported it. If you attended in January and submitted in August, it counts toward the cycle covering January.
This matters most at cycle boundaries. A program completed in late December belongs to that year even if you report it the following spring.
How programs are evaluated
Tier is a property of the provider, not of the individual program. The Committee assigns a provider a tier once, with the reasoning recorded, and programs from that provider inherit the review path. That is what makes the process faster each cycle rather than slower.
| Tier | What it means | Review path |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 | ATFA-affiliated education. Content is known to the certification directly. | Bulk ratification — one vote covers the block. |
| Tier 2 | Established industry providers the Committee has accepted as a standing matter. | Administrative. Reported to the Committee in aggregate. |
| Tier 3 | Providers approved in a prior cycle, carried forward. | Administrative, against the prior decision. |
| Tier 4 | Not yet known to the review. Requires research before any recommendation. | Researched, then put to the Committee as a new decision. |
Tier 3 is currently empty. Prior-cycle approval records have not been compiled, so providers that would qualify are routing to Tier 4 research instead. This is the single largest source of avoidable review work, and compiling those records is the fastest way to reduce it.
What gets verified
A recommendation is not a judgement about whether a program was worthwhile. It records whether ATFA could independently confirm the program occurred as described, and whether the hours claimed match what the provider published.
- The program existed as described — agenda, registration page, provider listing, or certificate.
- The hours are the published hours. Where a holder claims something different from what the provider published, that is flagged for a human, not silently corrected.
- What credit the provider itself claims to offer — recorded as stated, including when the answer is that it offers none.
“Not verifiable” is a statement about the evidence available, not about the program. If you can supply documentation, you are invited to resubmit.