From November, a Bachelor's Degree Is Enough to Start the CPA Clock

On the twenty first of November a New York accountant will be able to hold a license with a bachelor's degree behind them instead of a fifth year of school. For a Long Island business that has spent two years waiting longer than it used to for an audit, a review or a set of returns, that date is the first structural relief in the pipeline that produces the people doing the work.

What changes, precisely

Chapter 530 of the Laws of 2025 was signed on the twenty first of November last year and takes effect twelve months to the day afterwards. It adds a second route to a certified public accountant license rather than replacing the existing one.

The established route stays: a curriculum of at least 150 semester hours in accountancy, the examination, and one year of acceptable full time experience. The new route is a curriculum of at least 120 semester hours, the same examination, and two years of acceptable full time experience. Six years of combined education and experience is the total either way. The trade is a year of tuition for a year of paid work.

Full time is defined rather than assumed. It means a five day working week of at least thirty five hours. Part time work counts, at a ratio of one week of credited experience for every two weeks worked, which matters for any firm that brings people in below full hours.

The experience has to be supervised, and the supervision requirement is the part that turns this from a story about students into a story about employers. Qualifying experience must be under a certified public accountant licensed anywhere in the United States, or a public accountant licensed in New York.

The bottleneck was never demand

The 150 hour requirement has functioned for years as a private tuition bill sitting between a graduate and a license. A fifth year costs money and it costs a year of earnings, and the person paying both is someone who has not yet been paid anything by the profession. The effect is not that fewer people want to be accountants. It is that the cost of the last step falls hardest on candidates who cannot absorb it, which narrows the pool at exactly the end that a smaller firm recruits from.

Removing that step does not conjure accountants. It shortens the distance between a local graduate and a licensed one, and it moves part of the cost from the candidate to the employer, in the form of a second year of supervision.

What it asks of a Long Island employer

Any Nassau or Suffolk business that employs accounting staff should read the supervision clause as an obligation rather than an opportunity. To put a bachelor's degree hire on the new track, a business needs a licensed CPA supervising them, and needs to keep them for two years rather than one. A firm that cycles junior staff annually cannot use this route at all. A firm that can hold someone for twenty four months can now offer something it could not offer before, which is a license at the end of it without a fifth year of tuition in the middle.

For members who buy accounting services rather than employ accountants, the effect arrives later and indirectly. The first candidates licensed under the new route will not be signing anything for two years. What changes sooner is recruiting: a Long Island practice competing for graduates against larger firms gains a cheaper, faster offer to put in front of them, and the practices most likely to use it are the small and mid sized ones that serve small and mid sized businesses.

The rules are not written yet

One caution before anyone builds a hiring plan on this. The State Education Department has said plainly that until the law takes effect and the regulatory changes are in place, the existing licensing pathways remain as they are, and that revised requirements will be posted closer to the effective date once the Board of Regents adopts the amended regulations. The statute is settled. The administrative detail underneath it, including exactly what the Department will accept as documentation of two years of supervised experience, is not published.

The same chapter also addresses practice privilege, setting out the conditions on which an accountant licensed elsewhere and in good standing may practice here. For a member with operations in more than one state, that is worth raising with counsel separately.

What it means for members

If your business employs accounting or finance staff and has a licensed CPA on the payroll, decide before November whether you want to be a place where someone can earn a license, because from that date it is a genuine recruiting argument and it costs you a retention commitment rather than money. If you rely on an outside firm, ask them this autumn whether they intend to hire on the new pathway, because it is a reasonable proxy for whether they expect to have capacity in 2028. And do not change a job description or an offer letter on the strength of the statute alone until the Board of Regents has adopted the regulations that say what the Department will count.