How to Plan a Whole Renewal Cycle in One Sitting

Most people do their CE the same way: a course here, a course there, and a scramble in the final month. It works, but it costs more and it produces the one genuinely bad outcome — discovering a missing mandatory subject with two weeks to go.

The alternative takes about half an hour at the start of a cycle. Here is the method.

Step 1: Write down four facts

Before choosing a single course, establish:

• Your renewal date.
• The total hours your license requires for the cycle.
• Your mandatory subjects — the ones nothing else substitutes for.
• Your home study limit, if your state sets one.

All four are on our state requirements pages, broken down by license type. Confirm against your board, which is always the final authority.

Step 2: Book the mandatory subjects first

This is the whole trick, and it is the step people skip. Mandatory subjects cannot be swapped for anything else. Electives can be swapped for each other endlessly. Clearing the compulsory list first means that if life intervenes, your shortfall is in the interchangeable part.

Step 3: Deal with live hours if you have them

If your state caps home study, work out how many live hours you owe and attach them to something already in your calendar — a conference, a study club, a manufacturer's session. Do not leave live hours to the end; they are the hours with fixed dates attached.

Step 4: Fill the rest in one order

Here is where the money is. Buying your remaining credits in one order rather than one at a time triggers volume pricing across the whole basket, and the per-course price falls as the basket grows. Buying the same courses across six separate transactions costs materially more for exactly the same CE. The mechanics are set out in our help article on package savings.

There is no deadline pressure in doing this. Courses sit in your account until you take them, so buying the whole cycle in September and working through it over the following year is a perfectly normal way to use them.

Step 5: Let the builder do the assembling

If steps one to four sound like work, the Personalized Course Builder does them for you. Give it your state and license type and it assembles a package that meets your requirement, including the mandatory subjects, and applies the volume pricing automatically. It takes about ten seconds.

Step 6: Keep the paperwork somewhere sensible

Certificates stay in your account permanently and can be reprinted at any time. If you are in a CE Broker state we report on your behalf — but check your license number, type and state are correct in your profile first, because that is what the reporting matches on. Ten seconds now saves a phone call later.

Common questions