CPARE 2026 Dates for South African Accountants: Enrolment, Module and Results Windows
Miss one window in this sequence and the whole year’s plan for entering Canadian public practice slides by twelve months, not a few weeks. The cpare 2026 dates for south african accountants run on a fixed annual cycle, and each stage only opens once.
Why CPARE exists in the first place
Since 1 January 2018, a Reciprocal Membership Agreement has run between all the Canadian CPA bodies and SAICA, letting a member in good standing who came through the SAICA education and training route become a Canadian CPA without starting over. One important exclusion: if your route to CA(SA) exempted you from the final qualifying exam, the RMA doesn’t cover you, and CPARPD — a shorter bridging course on Canadian tax and law — is usually the standard next step for RMA entrants generally. CPARE itself is the extra layer specifically for anyone who wants to practise public accounting in Canada, combining a mandatory preparation module with an exam covering tax, assurance, financial reporting and business law. Pass it, and both the education and examination components for public practice are satisfied.
The 2026 cycle, stage by stage
Eligibility assessment requests: 20 April – 18 May 2026. The CPARE eligibility assessment window opens first and is genuinely narrow — about four weeks. This is where your SAICA standing and route into CA(SA) get confirmed against RMA criteria before anything else can proceed.
Enrolment: 16 May – 17 July 2026. Once eligibility is confirmed, enrolment opens for roughly two months, overlapping the tail end of the eligibility window by a couple of days.
Module: 16 May – 24 September 2026. The preparation module itself runs across a much longer stretch, from mid-May through late September, giving candidates time to work through the material around a full-time job.
Results release: 11 December 2026. The cpare results release date 2026 sits nearly three months after the module closes, which is worth building into any plan that depends on knowing your outcome before year-end.
What this means for sequencing your year
Lay the four dates alongside each other and the practical takeaway is that this is a spring-to-winter commitment, not a quick add-on. Missing the mid-May to mid-July enrolment window because you were still waiting on eligibility confirmation, for instance, would push the entire cycle into 2027 rather than simply delaying it by a month.
The one number this timeline doesn’t include
Notably absent from any published national schedule is a single CPARE fee — cost is set individually by each provincial or regional CPA body that runs the cpa reciprocity education and examination program dates locally, covering both the preparation module and the exam. Anyone budgeting for 2026 needs to ask CPA Ontario, CPABC, CPA Alberta, or the relevant body in their target province directly, since no national figure was confirmed here.
Where your own SAICA route or the RMA’s exclusions apply to your specific case, that’s worth confirming directly with the CPA body in your target province, and with a licensed RCIC if the timing needs to line up with an immigration application already in motion.