Renewals by state › How CE reporting works
Contractors ask us this constantly: "I finished my continuing education — am I done, or do I have to send it somewhere?" The honest answer is that it depends entirely on your state, and getting it wrong is one of the quietest ways to show up to renewal thinking you're covered when the board's record says you're short. There are really only three ways a completed CE credit reaches a licensing board, and once you know which one your state uses, the anxiety goes away. This page walks all three, how to tell which applies to you, and how long to keep proof once the credit is logged.
The one-line version: either your course provider reports the credit to the state for you, or you log it into a board system such as CE Broker, or nobody reports it and you simply attest "yes, I did my CE" at renewal and keep the certificates in case you're audited. Most states are a mix, and the model can differ by trade within one state.
| Model | Who sends it to the board | What you have to do |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Provider-reported | Your approved course provider transmits your completion electronically to the state, usually within a business day or two of you finishing. | Take the course from a state-approved provider. Confirm the completion posted. Keep your certificate anyway. |
| 2. Board-tracked system (e.g., CE Broker) | The state runs (or contracts) a central CE-tracking platform. Providers and/or licensees post credits into it and the board reads it directly. | Create your account in the system, make sure every credit is recorded there, and check your compliance status before you renew. |
| 3. Self-attest & retain | No one auto-reports. You certify on the renewal form that you met the CE requirement. | Answer the renewal attestation truthfully and keep your certificates — the board only sees them if it audits you. |
In Florida, most CILB-regulated contractors need 14 hours of continuing education every two years, and the reporting is built into the provider. When you complete a course through a DBPR-approved provider, the provider is responsible for transmitting your completion electronically to the Department of Business and Professional Regulation — credits are typically reported individually as each course finishes, not in one lump at renewal. Practically, that means your job is to (a) make sure the provider is actually DBPR-approved for the CILB, and (b) log in and confirm the hours posted. The failure mode here isn't forgetting to report — it's taking a course from an unapproved provider, or assuming a completion posted when it didn't.
Some states route everything through a central platform. Georgia is a clean, current example: effective January 1, 2026, licensees who are required to complete continuing education for renewal in Georgia must register and report their CE into CE Broker and record all CE taken for licensure and renewal in their CE Broker account, which the Board and its designees can access. The Georgia Secretary of State's office has specifically applied this to electrical contractors, among other licensees. You need at minimum a free, basic (limited-access) CE Broker account and you should begin recording completed activities in it now if you renew in Georgia.
Why this matters even if your state doesn't use CE Broker yet: board-tracked systems shift the compliance burden onto the licensee. The provider posting a credit and the board seeing it as complete are two different events, and in a self-service system a credit that never got recorded simply doesn't exist at renewal. If your state adopts one of these platforms, "I took the class" stops being enough — "it's recorded in my account" is the new bar.
In many states there is no central system at all. You take approved CE, and at renewal you check a box certifying you completed it. Answering "yes" is a certification to the board that you already hold proof — so the certificate is the whole game. Oregon's Construction Contractors Board, for instance, expects contractors to keep records of their key employees' continuing education for at least 24 months after renewal. If you're audited, you produce those records; if you can't, the attestation you signed becomes a problem. Under a self-attest model the single most valuable habit is boring: save every certificate the moment you finish, in one place, with the date and hours on it.
Regardless of model, keep your certificates after the credit is reported. Retention periods are set by each board and commonly run a couple of years past the renewal — Oregon's contractor board uses 24 months after renewal as its benchmark; other boards set their own window, so confirm yours. The reason is the audit: boards verify CE by pulling a sample of licensees after renewal, and a typical audit notice gives you a short, fixed window — often 30 days — to produce documentation of every required hour. If your provider was supposed to report and didn't, most board-tracked systems also let you self-report the hours yourself before a deadline, which is exactly why keeping your own certificate matters even when someone else is nominally responsible for reporting.
Renew in more than one state, or hold more than one classification? Each one can use a different reporting model on a different clock — provider-reported here, CE Broker there, self-attest somewhere else. LicenseLedger keeps every license's renewal date, CE hours, and where the credit has to land in one place, so nothing slips because you assumed the provider handled it.
See how LicenseLedger tracks it →