Before registering for the CPA exam, there are certain CPA exam requirements that must be met. These requirements are state-specific, and comprise of the following types in general:

1)Education Requirements

In a vast majority of cases, you’d need to have a bachelor’s degree, including a minimum of 24 semester hours of accounting courses and 24 semester hours of business courses. You are also required to have 150 college credits, which usually requires 5 years of studying full-time to obtain. The 150 college credits are required by all but two states (Virginia and Connecticut) before you are eligible to write the CPA exam. Even for these two states, though, the 150 college credit requirement needs to be met before you can get your CPA license.

2)US Citizenship

For some states, it is mandatory that cpa exam candidates be American citizens.

3)Minimum Age

Most states require candidates to be above a certain age, but most candidates will qualify by default by the time they meet the education requirements. To see the cpa exam requirements for each state please see: http://www.becker.com/accounting/cpaexamreview/state/

If you believe you meet the above eligibility requirements for the CPA exam, you can apply to sit for the exam at http://www.nasba.org. After they verify that you’re eligible to take the exam, they will send you an NTS (Notice To Schedule), at which time you can schedule your exam at the Prometric Services Website.

Qualifying to sit for the exam is just the first part of the hard work. Studying for the CPA exam will require much hard work and perseverance, and you may not pass some of the sections the first time around. To improve your odds of passing the first time, do consider getting a solid CPA review course. To see my evaluations of the most popular courses please check out http://www.CPAReviewCourse.org. To read about my experiences with the Becker and Yaeger CPA review courses, please visit my cpa exam blog at http://www.PassTheCPAExam.org.