Why Michael Kitces is speaking out against the CFP Board

Continuing education providers — including the largest professional organization for planners and one of the field’s most influential entrepreneurs — are crying foul over the CFP Board’s fees.

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Michael Kitces of Kitces.com and the Financial Planning Association are leading a new coalition of continuing education companies and nonprofit organizations critical of the tiered fee system that they say is too costly and complicated to administer, Kitces said in an interview. He has also raised concerns that the CFP Board is trying to compete with external continuing education providers despite its conflicts of interest for doing so. 

The CFP Board, which oversees the record ranks of more than 107,000 certified financial planners, began charging the planning trainers a fee in 2023 of $0.50 to $1.25 for each hour of continuing education. Kitces, along with other coalition members, has proposed an alternative: Add $18 to the $575 a year CFPs now pay the CFP Board for certification fees, and do away entirely with the indirect costs imposed by the attendance fees. 

“The unfortunate reality is, and part of the conflict is, CFP Board effectively regulates CE providers,” Kitces said. “They could come out tomorrow and say, ‘Since you’re objecting to what we do, we’re just going to pull your CE sponsor license and now you can’t offer CE anymore,’ and shut the business down. So, to their credit, I think CFP Board is not an organization that would do that. I think they’re willing to take feedback and engage the coalition.” 

The coalition has members who have chosen to remain anonymous, fearful of backlash from the CFP Board.

“CFP Board holds so much power in this situation that they weren’t even comfortable being public,” Kitces said. “Unfortunately, part of the challenge of the whole situation is that CFP Board has dramatically raised fees on CE providers, and they have no voice to express the concerns around this.”

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The CFP Board’s response, and that of CFPs

Representatives for the CFP Board provided a statement and referred inquiries about the coalition’s concerns to its 20-page terms and conditions for continuing education providers. 

The tiered fees that it began charging three years ago were implemented at the same time it lowered some hourly costs for the CFP Board’s review and approval of each of the nearly 1,100 continuing education providers’ programs. Annual sponsor rates of $500 for for-profit companies and $250 for nonprofit organizations remained unchanged at the time. Every provider must pay the CFP Board an “attendance fee” of $1.25 per hour for the first 10,000 completed by each CFP certificant in a year, $0.75 per hour for any amount between 10,001 and 40,000 and $0.50 for anything above 40,000.

“Attendance fees are payable online via the CE Sponsor Portal, within 14 days of program completion,” the terms and conditions state. “If sponsor fails to submit attendance fees on a timely basis, then CFP Board may, in its discretion, so notify sponsor in writing, and if sponsor does not submit the attendance fees within 10 business days of receiving such notice, then CFP Board may suspend or terminate the program. If CFP Board suspends or terminates one program of a sponsor, then CFP Board shall have the right to suspend or terminate all programs of that sponsor.” 

The tiered fee structure “reflects the operational costs” of running the continuing education program, according to the statement the CFP Board sent in response to the coalition’s concerns. The statement rejected the idea of “passing on additional costs to certificants” and said the CFP Board “has no plans to compete with our valued CE providers,” noting that it had only managed 0.9% of the courses offered to certificants in 2025. 

Each holder of the profession’s most popular and respected certification must complete 30 hours of continuing education every two years — an obligation that will rise to 40 hours at the beginning of next year. (Disclosure: Financial Planning provides continuing education quizzes eligible for CE credit through the CFP Board and the Investments & Wealth Institute. It is not a member of the coalition.)

Regardless, just as new CFP Board CEO K. Dane Snowden has pledged to invest in technology to help continuing education providers comply with the expanded mandate, representatives for the organization welcomed the feedback. They also pushed back on any notion that the administrative tasks have caused potential overbilling of the providers or capped certificants’ continuing education. 

“Administrative burden on providers is a real concern,” the statement said. “CFP Board is actively working to address these issues through technological upgrades and will share updates with the provider community as that work progresses. CFP Board and CE providers share the same goal: provide CFP professionals with resources and opportunities to hone their skills and stay current to better serve their clients. We are committed to working towards this goal together and look forward to working constructively with the CE provider community.”

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CFP Board

A coalition born of frustration

For his part, Kitces said the coalition came together “in the spirit of being constructive with CFP Board to come to solutions” in a way of asking, “How do we actually make CE better and bring down the costs for advisors?” To this point, he said that the CFP Board “has not been very constructive in engaging CE providers around this,” since “nothing got changed for three years of CE providers complaining individually.”

He had already been taking the CFP Board to task publicly about continuing education for several months before announcing the coalition with the FPA on April 15. Kitces’ voice carries weight in the profession. To cite a few of his credentials, he holds the CFP and seven other degrees and certifications, he’s the co-founder of the XY Planning Network and AdvicePay, the head of planning strategy with Focus Partners, the host of the “Financial Advisor Success Podcast” and the chief financial planning nerd of Kitces.com and its “Nerd’s Eye View” blog.

In a LinkedIn post to more than 115,000 followers two months ago, he called the CFP Board’s hiring of a managing director of program development “a new doozy,” suggesting that it “implemented fees on CE providers to generate revenue to hire their own people at CFP Board to compete against the CE providers.” The post drew 600 likes and nearly 200 comments.

Among them, CFP commenters replied to Kitces that the CFP Board was “showing their true colors and what they care about…and it’s not the profession,” that it “doesn’t sound very fiduciary,” and it’s a “disgusting conflict of interest.”

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The latest episode in CFP Board criticism

The CFP Board’s work may seem innocuous to those outside of a profession that has often squabbled since the formal beginning of financial planning in 1969. But its actions can raise the ire of planners who are simultaneously proud of abiding by its rigorous standards. 

In October, the CFP Board hiked its annual certification fee for holders of the mark by $120 to $575 with the stated reason of supporting advertisements and other aspects of its ongoing “public awareness campaign.” Some iterations of the CFP Board’s marketing efforts have drawn significant pushback among planners, as well. So the discussion about continuing education fees has added another dimension to these recent developments. 

But, all the while, the CFP Board has been announcing new highs in certificants and exams.

“People are pursuing CFP certification earlier in their careers, recognizing it as the essential credential for financial planning,” Snowden said in a statement earlier this month after a record 4,391 candidates took the exam in March. “That momentum reflects a stronger, more intentional pipeline into the profession. It shows the impact of our efforts, alongside educators and firms, to bring more professionals into the field to meet growing demand among Americans for competent, ethical financial planning.”             

While the tiered attendance fees may sound nominal, Kitces pointed out that they can quickly multiply across the more than 100,000 CFPs getting their mandatory professional training hours from providers who are struggling with unpredictable costs that depend on attendance in their programs and “a whole completely redundant, unnecessary layer of extra credit card fees.” (Representatives for the CFP Board noted that continuing education providers may use automated clearing house transactions instead of credit card payments, if they prefer.)

The overall costs, though, have prohibited Kitces.com from hiring two more staff members to a team of 26 employees whose work includes developing its professional development programs.

Since the billing has been done in “this most horrifically, inefficiently expensive way,” the continuing education providers are hiking the costs of their programs “to cover how much additional implementation pain has been created by CFP Board rolling it out this way,” Kitces said. That indirect cost to planners, the administrative headaches and his concerns about the CFP Board taking over continuing education led him to speak out and help start the coalition. The growing continuing education requirements and the inclusion next year of up to five hours of practice management programs into the total of 40 are making the concerns more urgent.   

“CE providers are saying, ‘Our costs are up like a thousand percent, and you’re using the dollars to compete against us and undermine us,'” Kitces said. “This is fundamentally not good for the CE ecosystem. I mean, just the natural outcome of this is, eventually CE providers get put out of business and CFP Board is the only one providing CE. And I don’t even think that’s good for the ecosystem of CFP professionals as a whole. Regulators don’t have the best history of providing quality education when they’re the only player in the marketplace.”