How many CEUs does a BCBA need?

32 continuing education units in each two-year recertification cycle, of which 4 must be in ethics and 3 in supervision if you supervise. That is the BACB's own requirement, stated in the BCBA Handbook: all CEUs must be earned within the cycle they are applied to, so credits cannot be carried forward from a previous cycle.

Can you get all 32 BCBA CEUs for free?

In principle yes, and the constraint is not the total — it is the ethics and supervision credits. General learning CEUs are widely available free. Free credits specifically labeled ethics or supervision are rarer, and the sources offering them cap seats or gate access by employer membership. Plan those seven credits first and fill the remaining 25 around them.

What is the cheapest way to get BCBA CEUs if not free?

Published prices we verified run from about $9 per credit for podcast-based CEUs up to roughly $16 to $19 per credit, with bundle discounts bringing the effective rate lower. A flat monthly subscription at $21 covers unlimited credits at one provider. Conference CEU packages can be cheaper per credit than any of these if you attend the sessions anyway.

Free BCBA CEUs: What's Actually Free, and What Costs the Least (2026)

Q: How do I know a free CEU actually counts?

The provider must be a BACB-authorized ACE provider. In practice this is harder to check than it should be: of roughly fifteen providers we examined, exactly one published its ACE provider number on its own site. The reliable check is the BACB's own authorized continuing education provider listing rather than the provider's marketing pages.

Every free and low-cost BACB continuing education source we could verify against the provider's own site, with the catch on each one — including where to get free ethics and supervision CEUs, which are the hardest to find.

Every BCBA needs 32 CEUs per two-year recertification cycle — 4 in ethics, and 3 in supervision if you supervise anyone. That breakdown comes from the BACB’s own BCBA Handbook, which also notes that credits must be earned inside the cycle they apply to. Nothing carries forward.

At typical prices a full cycle runs into the hundreds of dollars. It does not have to. But most “free CEU” lists overstate what is actually free, so this one is built differently: we checked every entry against the provider’s own website, we say what the catch is, and we separate genuinely free from free-to-attend-pay-for-credit.

Last checked 6 August 2026.

Start with ethics and supervision

This is the part every other list buries. General learning CEUs are easy to find free. The seven credits you need in ethics and supervision are the scarce ones, so schedule them first.

Source	What’s free	Ethics	Supervision	The catch
Behavior University	Live webinars, 2 CEUs each, listed at Price: Free	Yes	Yes	Seats are capped and do sell out. Past free webinars are converted into paid on-demand products, so check the live catalog rather than an old bookmark.
Full Spectrum ABA	App library, ~28 courses, each labeled G / S / E with its credit value	Yes	Yes	Requires a free signup. Credits are small — some courses are 0.5.
CASP CEU Center	70+ courses, 100+ CEUs, including a full 8-hour supervision training	Not stated	Yes	Free only to employees of CASP member organizations; you enter your employer’s member ID at checkout.

At the time we checked, Behavior University’s published schedule included free ethics webinars on 10 and 23 September 2026 and a free supervision webinar on 7 October 2026, at 2 CEUs each. If your employer is a CASP member, their 8-hour supervision training covers your supervision requirement more than twice over at no cost — worth asking your director about before paying for anything.

Genuinely free, general credits

Source	What’s free	Format	Notes
Behaviorist Bookclub	States “60+ free CEU sessions” on one page and “476 free BCBA CEUs” on another	Live webinar + catalog	The two figures describe different things. It hosts its own weekly free sessions, and separately catalogs courses from other ACE providers — for those, it links out and the certificate comes from the originating provider.
Blossom Children’s Center	13 podcast episodes, one CEU each on quiz completion	Podcast	You enter code words spoken in the episode to claim the credit. Two episodes cover supervision topics but are not labeled as supervision-type CEUs.
Behavior Analyst CE	2 free CEU-bearing courses, one of them 3 supervision credits	Self-paced	Read the list carefully — four other free courses on the same page are marked “NO CEUs”.
Autism Partnership Foundation	4 free courses, learning-type only	Self-paced	Their ethics and supervision courses sit behind a $13 paywall — still among the cheapest anywhere.
ABA Technologies	One free CE course on behavior analysis basics for OBM	Self-paced	The page confirms no charge but does not state a credit value, so we do not assign one.

Cheap, not free

Several widely-recommended “free” sources are actually free to consume and paid to certify. That is a legitimate model and often the cheapest route to interesting content — it is just not free.

Source	Published price	Ethics	Supervision
ABA Inside Track	$9 per episode credit; bundles $45–$220	Yes	Yes
Behavioral Observations	$16–$19 per 1.0 credit; published codes give 50% off orders over $200 and 30% off five or more	Yes	Yes
How to ABA	$21 a month for unlimited access; individual courses $15–$70	Yes	Yes
Autism Partnership Foundation	$13 per course	Yes	Yes
BHCOE Virtual Academy	Free to attend live; $20 for the credit, free for members and accredited organizations	Yes	Not stated

Behavioral Observations has the widest cheap selection of ethics and supervision credits we found — a dozen episodes tagged for each — and its published bundle discount brings the effective cost per credit into single digits.

Don’t forget conferences

If you are attending a conference anyway, the CEU package is often the cheapest credit you will buy all cycle. From our conference directory, where organizers publish figures:

RIABA — a one-day chapter conference that states plainly that free CEUs are provided.
UC Davis MIND Institute Summer Institute — $30 with 3 CEs included, or $10 a credit, for a half-day online event.
TxABA — publishes an exact count of 62 CEUs available across its program, with the CEU package at $75 on top of registration.
FABA — CEU package at $100, sold separately from the conference ticket.

Two things being widely miscited

CentralReach’s “entire CEU library for free” is not a current offer. The blog post announcing it is dated 20 March 2020 and states the access lasted 60 days. It still surfaces in search results and still reads as live. It is not.

BHCOE’s “upcoming events” page lists events from January and February 2022. Attendance is free and the credit is $20 for non-members, but treat the schedule itself as stale.

One more counting problem to watch for generally: several providers list free courses that carry no CEUs alongside free courses that do. Counting the former inflates the total. Study Notes ABA’s only free item is literally titled “(FREE VERSION NO CEUS)”.

How to check a provider is legitimate

The credit only counts if the provider is a BACB-authorized ACE provider. This is harder to verify than it should be. Across roughly fifteen providers we examined, exactly one published its ACE provider number on its own website — Study Notes ABA, at #OP-20-3183. Several state their ACE status in prose without a number; most say nothing at all.

So do not rely on provider marketing. Check the BACB’s own authorized continuing education provider listing, and keep your completion certificates for the full cycle in case you are audited.

Correcting one thing we had wrong

A previous version of this page listed the Autism Partnership Foundation’s free 40-hour RBT training under CEUs. It is not continuing education — it is initial certification training for people becoming RBTs, and the provider describes it in training hours, never in CEUs. It is still genuinely free and still worth knowing about if you run a practice and need to train new technicians without a per-seat budget. It just will not count toward your recertification.

If an offer here has changed, tell us and we will check it against the provider’s site and fix it. Corrections we make are recorded on our corrections page.