The Experience Requirement

Report Your Experience

Get ahead of the game. You can report your experience at any time through the online experience reporting profile available in your CFP Board Account Dashboard. You will be able to review previously submitted entries, update hours for your current position and enter new experience.

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Account Dashboard

How to Report Your Experience

Your experience can be reported to CFP Board at any time through the experience reporting feature in your CFP Board Account Dashboard. We encourage you to report early and update often to keep your profile current. If you have already reported experience, you can also use your Account Dashboard to review past entries and confirm or update your remaining hours balance.

There are 2 main pathways to completing the experience requirement. Review them today.

Completing Your Experience Profile

We will accept experience completed within 10 years before and 5 years after successful completion of the CFP® exam. Once your experience requirement is completed, your account will show a “Provisionally Accepted” status until final CFP® exam results are released verifying you successfully passed the exam. At that time, the “Provisionally Accepted” status will change to “Accepted.” Some helpful tips are below.

Refresh Hours

Current experience (with no end date) entered in your Experience Profile can be refreshed at any time. The Refresh Hours function recalculates hours from the date entered to the current date.

Experience Entered

You will enter experience or refresh hours for your position until you meet the required number of hours. You should assume that the experience you entered is provisionally accepted, unless otherwise noted. Some experience types will be automatically reviewed and/or verification requested.

Experience Submitted

Once you meet the required number of hours, you will need to submit your entered experience by clicking the “Submit” button that will appear. Once submitted, each experience entry will have an updated status of Accepted, Pending Verification, or Provisionally Accepted.

Experience Statuses Terminology

Below is some helpful terminology related to the status of experience that has been entered and submitted.

Under Internal Review

Certain experience entries will trigger an automatic internal review. These reviews are typically completed within 7-10 business days, and once the review is complete, the candidate will be notified whether the experience has been accepted, if more information is required, or if the experience entry has been denied.

Pending Verification

A status of "Pending Verification" indicates that CFP Board has sent a verification request to the Supervisor or Qualified Attester identified with that job experience, asking them to complete an attestation. This attestation includes verification of the position, start date, end date (if applicable), hours worked per week, and selected relevant primary elements if applicable to the job type.

Provisionally Accepted

Applies only to Experience submitted BEFORE successful completion of the CFP® exam.

After an entry has been reviewed and approved by CFP Board and verified by your supervisor/attester (if applicable), the experience entry will be placed in a “Provisionally Accepted” status. These hours have been confirmed as qualifying towards the CFP® Experience requirement and are only pending the completion of the CFP® Exam.

Accepted

Once the CFP® exam has been successfully completed and the official exam results have been released, experience entries approved by CFP Board will have a status of “Accepted”. Additionally, previously submitted experience will automatically change from Provisionally Accepted to Accepted, allowing the candidate to proceed to the next steps in the certification process.