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Continuing education for mental health professionals

Acquiring CE credits helps you better serve your clients — and grow your business.

October 2, 2024 • Updated on October 1, 2026

5 min read

Your work as a therapist has the potential to drastically impact peoples’ lives. So it makes sense, after you earn your degree, to continue learning about the latest and greatest evidence-based therapy practices. Sure, acquiring these continuing education (CE) credits is a requirement for maintaining your license. But you can also better serve your clients (and grow your business) when you invest in ongoing learning. 

To be clear: continuing education is an investment of time and money. But it doesn’t have to be stressful or draining. Keep reading to learn more about continuing education for mental health professionals — and how Headway can help take the stress out of earning your CEs so you can better serve your clients as you maintain your license.

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What is a CEU?

Many fields require continuing education, a form of professional development. It’s a particularly common requirement in helping professions, such as education and healthcare. A CEU, or continuing education unit, is a form of measurement for this type of professional development.

Mental health professionals, no matter their specific degree or license, also need to achieve a certain amount of continuing education to maintain their license over time. 

For therapists and other mental health providers, continuing education may be in the form of: 

  • Conferences
  • Mentorship or supervision
  • Coursework (e.g. grad school or online)
  • Volunteer service
  • Teaching
  • Independent learning or home study
  • Presenting
  • Group studies

Why do mental healthcare providers need CEUs?

No matter what type of license you have, you need to maintain it. Licensing bodies want to ensure providers are up to date in the field so they can provide the best possible care for their clients or patients.

But keeping your job isn’t the only reason to pursue CEs — continuing education enables you to grow as a therapist. You might use CE to cultivate a specialty or niche in your field — perhaps learning about a different therapy modality or client population — so you can help a particular subset of people. Or you may want to learn more about the administrative side of therapy, like compliance and documentation, so you can continue to grow your business. 

Across the board, the idea is that if you want to empower your clients to grow, then you should be growing, too.

Either way, it’s important to know that license renewal requirements are different for every state and license type. For example, if you’re a licensed clinical social worker, you may need one number of CEs every two years where you practice. A licensed professional counselor practicing in a different state might need more or fewer CEs, either more or less frequently.

How to determine what CEU credits you need for your license

While continuing education is required for all therapists, there’s no single source of truth where you can find the specifics for your degree and practice location. Some websites attempt to list these requirements, but requirements can change quickly. If you’re not sure about the requirements you need to meet, start by searching your state board’s license requirements. For example, you could search “Colorado continuing education requirements for psychologists” or “New York continuing education requirements for mental health counselors.” 

Continuing education requirements for counselors 

Below is a list of requirements for counselors by state: 

Headway Academy

Working as a therapist is a big responsibility — and it can be hard to balance all the logistics and requirements on top of providing top-notch care to the clients you serve. That’s why we at Headway are committed to supporting therapists. We want you to feel empowered and equipped to be the best therapist you can be. 

On top of assisting therapists with insurance credentialing and billing, we’ve created opportunities for therapists to easily access continuing education courses via our clinical educational platform, Headway Academy. Currently, we have five courses that offer CEUs to help you learn and grow as a therapist: 

  • Coding Standards for CPT codes (.25 CE)
  • Compliant Clinical Documentation (.25 CE)
  • E/M Coding and Medical Decision Making for Psychiatric Prescribers (1.0 CE)
  • Prepare for Chart Reviews (.25 CE)
  • Medicare Fraud & Abuse (1.0 CE)

If you want to learn more about specific therapy practices and client populations, consider taking advantage of our partnerships with PESI and Violet. We’ve partnered with these continuing education platforms to ensure Headway therapists can stay current in the field, grow their businesses, and meet their licensing requirements — all for no cost. 

Navigating the world of CEs — and all the other logistical components of therapy work — can be confusing. By minimizing additional stressors, including these important-but-time-consuming parts of your job, you can hone in on what’s most important: the “why” that drove you into the therapy field in the first place.

While you complete your CEUs, we’ll take care of the rest

Headway makes it easier to run an insurance-based practice, from credentialing to claims, so you have more time for continuing education (and everything else).

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This content is for general informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute clinical, legal, financial, or professional advice. All decisions should be made at the discretion of the individual or organization, in consultation with qualified clinical, legal, or other appropriate professionals.

© 2026 Therapymatch, Inc. dba Headway. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission.

Life as a provider