September 30 of every even-numbered year. Write that down if you're a Georgia LPC, because that is when your license expires, and it does not move to match your birthday or your hire date. The Georgia Composite Board renews professional counselors on a fixed biennial schedule, and 2026 is one of those years.
The number you owe is 35 hours per cycle. That's a touch higher than a lot of states ask of counselors — Texas LPCs get away with 24 plus a jurisprudence exam, and Illinois LCPCs owe 30 — so don't assume your old state's total carries over.
The 5 ethics hours have a catch
Five of your 35 hours must be in professional ethics. That part is common. The catch is delivery: Georgia requires the ethics hours to be earned live or synchronously. A recorded module you watch on your own time does not count toward the ethics requirement, even if it's a great course. This is the single most common reason a Georgia counselor's CE gets kicked back.
Ethics is nearly universal across the behavioral-health professions — we walk through why in the piece on ethics hours almost everyone shares. Georgia just adds the live-delivery wrinkle on top.
The async cap
Beyond ethics, Georgia limits asynchronous online activity to a maximum of 10 hours per cycle. So at least 25 of your 35 hours have to come from something other than self-paced online study — live webinars, in-person workshops, supervised training, and so on. If you're the kind of clinician who likes to knock out CE on the couch at 11 p.m., Georgia forces you to mix it up. The distinction between live and enduring credit is exactly the thing to understand here.
What the hours should cover
Outside the ethics requirement, the remaining hours are largely your call, but they should be relevant to counseling practice. A lot of Georgia LPCs use the flexibility to pick up cultural-competency or suicide-prevention content even where it isn't strictly mandated — both show up as hard requirements in other states, which we cover in what boards mean by cultural competency and suicide-prevention CE state by state. They're good hours to bank regardless.
One board, three professions
Georgia regulates counselors, social workers, and marriage and family therapists under a single Composite Board, so if you're dual-licensed, you're dealing with one agency but separate requirements per license. That naming-and-structure stuff is messier than it should be; the post on LPC vs LPCC vs LMHC vs LCPC untangles why the same job wears different letters in different states.
The authoritative source is the Georgia Composite Board. For your exact obligations, our Georgia LPC requirements page lays out the hours and the live-ethics rule, and you can compare against counselor CE rules nationwide.
If your September renewal is approaching and you're unsure whether your ethics hours qualify as live, that's exactly the kind of thing we check. White Glove CME builds the plan for $99 per renewal — we don't access the board portal or issue credit, we just make sure your hours land in the right buckets. Send your renewal date and we'll handle the math. See what the plan covers first if you'd like.
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Stop guessing what CME you need. Tell us your license type, state, and renewal date, and we'll map exactly which continuing-education hours and mandated topics you need — and by when. Flat $99 per plan.