Florida Cosmetology Continuing Education Requirements

Florida requires ten hours of continuing education each biennium as a condition of renewal and its deadline for a cosmetology license, and nine of the ten are directed at named subjects with minimum hours each. The requirement comes from the Board’s rule. The statute only sets a ceiling.

The statute sets a maximum, not the requirement

Section 477.019(7)(a) authorizes the Board to prescribe continuing education “not to exceed 10 hours biennially”. That is a ceiling. The actual requirement — and the allocation — is in Rule 61G5-32.001.

This distinction is easy to lose because the two numbers happen to match. A citation to the statute for the ten hours would look right and be wrong.

The ten hours

Every licensed cosmetologist and registered specialist “shall complete a minimum of ten (10) hours of continuing education which shall include, at a minimum, all of the following subjects as they relate to the practice of cosmetology”:

subject	minimum
HIV/AIDS and other communicable diseases	1 hour
Sanitation and sterilization	3 hours
OSHA regulations	0.5 hour
Workers’ compensation as it pertains to Florida law	0.5 hour
State and federal laws and rules	2 hours
Chemical makeup as it pertains to hair, skin and nails	1 hour
Environmental issues	1 hour
Elective	1 hour

Each is a minimum, and they total ten. Only the final hour is free choice.

What the mandated hours must cover

The rule specifies content, not just headings. The HIV/AIDS hour must cover “the modes of transmission, infection control procedures, clinical management, and prevention”, and discussion of “attitudes towards HIV and AIDS as well as appropriate behavior in dealing with persons who may have the virus or syndrome”.

The three sanitation hours are the salon sanitation rules taught as CE. They must cover standard cleaning and disinfecting precautions, “how to distinguish between disinfectants and antiseptics”, how to sanitize hands and disinfect tools, and “bacterial, viral, and fungal, bloodborne pathogens and parasites, and infection and infestation control”.

This page is the most likely on the site to go out of date

A rule development notice proposing to amend 61G5-32.001 was published in March 2026. No proposed text had been issued when this page was last checked, so the version quoted here remains operative — but of every fact on this site, this table is the one to re-check first. The date it was last checked is at the foot of this page.