For Internationally Educated Accountants
Can You Sit for the U.S. CPA Exam?
U.S. requirements changed substantially in the last two years, and most of the advice online has not caught up. Find out where you stand before you spend a penny on an evaluation.
Free, about a minute, and your documents stay with you for now.
What Decides It
These four come first.
- Your degreeWhether it is treated as equivalent to a U.S. four-year degree, not the same as how long you studied.
- Your accounting studyHow much of your coursework a board counts as accounting, which is rarely what the course titles suggest.
- Your business studyCounted separately, and the bucket most people are short in without realising.
- Where you applyRequirements differ by jurisdiction. The right one for you is a question about your transcript.
Why This Is Harder Than It Looks
The Rules Moved
U.S. jurisdictions have been rewriting their education requirements. Pathways that did not exist two years ago exist now, and advice written before then is quietly wrong.
Requirements are not uniform
Each jurisdiction sets its own education rules. A transcript that satisfies one can miss another by a single course, and the gap is rarely where people expect.
Titles are not categories
What counts as accounting rather than general business is a judgement made about your specific courses. It is the most common reason a confident self-assessment turns out wrong.
The order costs money
An official evaluation is prepared against one jurisdiction. Choose after you have been evaluated and you will often pay for a second one.
How It Works
See Where You Stand, Then Decide
We would rather tell you where you stand than collect your documents first. The read is free and takes a minute; you decide from there.
01
Run the Free Check
Three questions about your degree and your study. You get an honest read on whether a U.S. route looks open to you, close, or some way off. Nothing is emailed to us unless you ask for it.
About a minute, in your browser
02
Send your transcript
Send your transcript. We read it course by course and tell you which route fits, what is missing, and in what order to do things. We cannot do this without documents, nobody can.
two business days, 249 USD
03
Get the official evaluation
Foreign education has to be evaluated by an approved service before a board will act on it. We tell you which jurisdiction to have it done against, so you spend that fee once instead of twice.
Paid to the evaluator, not to us
What a Review Changes
It Often Comes Down to One Course
The candidates we help are rarely far away. They are one or two courses from a route they did not know existed, or about to apply somewhere that was never going to work for them.
One candidate came to us having already decided where to apply. Their transcript was three accounting hours short of that route, a single subject, but already met the requirements of another. They had been about to pay for an evaluation prepared against the wrong jurisdiction.
De-identified, used with permission.
The Point
Pricing
One Fee, Refundable
One review, one price, refundable.
Transcript review
$249
Full review of your transcript, the jurisdiction that fits you, the gap list, and the order to do things in.
Existing Becker students
$129
The same review, reduced, if you are already enrolled with Becker. Proof of enrolment required.
Enrolling in Becker Premium
$0
The review is free if you enrol in Becker Premium through us, we are paid by Becker instead. Disclosed, and it does not change our recommendation.
Refundable. If we recommend a jurisdiction and you turn out not to be eligible there, you get your money back. We do not quote a success rate, because nobody can honestly promise an outcome a state board controls.
Before You Go Further
What We Can't Do
We are not a state board.
Only a board of accountancy decides whether you are eligible. Everything here is preliminary.
We are not an evaluation service.
The official assessment of your foreign transcript is made by an approved evaluator, and it is a separate fee paid to them.
We cannot make hours appear.
If you are thirty hours short, no jurisdiction shopping fixes that. We will tell you so on day one.
We do not give legal or immigration advice.
Licensure, SSNs and visas interact in ways that need a professional. We will say when you have reached that line.
Questions
The Ones We Get Asked
Can I sit for the U.S. CPA exam with a degree from my own country?
Very often, yes. U.S. jurisdictions accept foreign education provided it is assessed by an approved evaluation service and your study meets that jurisdiction's requirements. The question is almost never 'is my degree foreign', it is how much of your study is counted as accounting, how much as business, and whether your qualification is treated as degree-equivalent. Those are questions about your transcript.
Do I need 150 credit hours?
Not necessarily, and considerably less often than you would think from reading around online. Education requirements have changed substantially across the U.S. in the last two years, and several routes now exist that did not before. Whether a particular route is open to you depends on your own record, which is what a review establishes.
Do I need a Social Security Number or a U.S. visa?
Not to sit for the exam. Requirements around identity documents differ by jurisdiction and between sitting the exam and being licensed afterwards, and for candidates without U.S. documents this is one of the factors that decides which route makes sense. It is a solvable problem, and a common one, most of the people we work with are in exactly this position.
What does the free check tell me?
Whether your education looks like it already meets a U.S. route, whether you are close, or whether you would need further study first. It is a general read, computed in your browser from figures you type, and it is deliberately not a determination, it will not tell you which jurisdiction to apply to or exactly what is missing, because both turn on how your individual courses are classified. That requires reading your transcript.
Why won't you just publish the requirements?
Because published thresholds are the easiest thing in this field to read correctly and still get wrong, and because acting on a self-assessment is how candidates end up paying for the wrong evaluation. Two people with identical credit totals routinely land on opposite sides of the same requirement, depending on how their courses are classified. We would rather look at your documents than have you make an expensive decision from a table.
What is a credential evaluation and do I have to pay for it?
An approved service converts your foreign transcript into U.S. terms and sorts your courses into the categories a board acts on. Foreign education has to be assessed this way before a board will consider it, and it typically costs a few hundred dollars paid to the evaluator, not to us, we earn nothing from it. Our review comes first so that you buy the right one, once. Ordering an evaluation before deciding where to apply is the most common expensive mistake we see.
What if your review is wrong?
Then you get your money back. If we recommend a jurisdiction and you turn out not to be eligible there, we refund the fee. We do not publish a success rate, because no one can honestly promise you an outcome a state board controls, but we can stand behind our own reading of your transcript, and the refund is how we do that.
I hold ACCA. Does that count?
Ask us before assuming it does. ACCA is the qualification most often misunderstood in this process, and candidates regularly arrive having planned years around an assumption that does not hold. The circumstances in which it helps are narrow and depend on your particular route through it. This one is genuinely worth an email before you commit to anything further.