Rule explainer Not legal advice

AICPA advertising rules for a CPA firm

Read this before you write the About page, the fee page or the next filing-season post. It runs the Code's advertising rule in the Code's own order, from who it binds to what you have to be ready to justify.

The ruleAICPA Code of Professional Conduct §1.600.001, the Advertising and Other Forms of Solicitation Rule, with the list that gives it teeth at §1.600.010. Contingent fees sit separately at §1.510, firm names at §1.800. The edition read here is effective December 15, 2014, updated through July 2026. Sources 1 and 2, at the foot of this page.

Why searching for this rule turns up two numbers

Before December 2014ET section 502Advertising and solicitation lived under different numbering. Older handbooks, older articles and plenty of search results still point there.
December 15, 2014§1.600, inside Part 1The codified Code takes effect and advertising lands in the part addressed to a member in public practice. Every paragraph carries its old ET reference in brackets, which is how you cross-check an old memo.
December 15, 2015The framework paragraphsThe two paragraphs covering a situation no interpretation addresses take effect a year later. They are the ones that put the burden on you.

Scope

Does it reach you?

Four situations cover almost every firm reading this. The fourth is the one people get wrong, because it is about somebody who never agreed to the Code.

ApplicabilityThe rule opens “A member in public practice shall not seek to obtain clients…”. Part 1 is the part addressed to a member in public practice, and public practice is defined as performing professional services for a client, by the member or the firm. Source 1.

An AICPA member in public practice

The rule reaches you

Anything your firm puts out to win work sits inside it, whatever it is called internally: service pages, the fee page, a filing-season explainer, a pitch letter. The rule never mentions a website and does not need to. Read on.

A licensed CPA who is not an AICPA member

A different enforcer

The bylaws are what require members to follow the Code, and membership is what the AICPA can take away, so it reaches you through joining. Your state board holds the licence, and its advertising rule is the one attached to it. The Code sends its own members there too, and warns a board may be stricter.

A member who is not in public practice

A different part of the Code

This rule sits in Part 1, which speaks to a member in public practice. A member in business is answered by Part 2. If you hold both roles, the preface tells you to read every part that applies and apply the most restrictive of them.

The agency or the marketing hire who writes it

Not bound. You still are.

They are not members and the Code does not reach them. It reaches you, and says so: asked to do work for a third party's client or customer, you are to determine that the third party's promotional efforts comply, because you receive the benefit. The sentence that settles it is that members must not do through others what they are prohibited from doing themselves.

The core of it

What it prohibits, in the rule's own order

The rule itself is two sentences long, which is why quoting it settles nothing. The list that does the work sits in the interpretation underneath and names four things. Left, the text as written. Right, what it means when the marketing is a page on your site.

Reading noteThe middle column is verbatim from §1.600.001.01 and §1.600.010.02. Paragraph letters sit in the left margin so you can find each one in the source. Source 1.

AICPA Code §1.600, as written

Point at either side to link them

Verbatim

In plain English

§1.600.001A member in public practice shall not seek to obtain clients by advertising or other forms of solicitation in a manner that is false, misleading, or deceptive. Solicitation by the use of coercion, over-reaching, or harassing conduct is prohibited.

§1.600.010.02Promotional efforts would be considered false, misleading, or deceptive if they

(a)

create false or unjustified expectations of favorable results.

In plain EnglishTwo adjectives, and the second one is why this catches firms. Unjustified does not ask whether the statement was untrue. It asks whether you had grounds for the expectation you set, which turns on what was in front of you when you wrote it rather than on how it turned out.

(b)

imply the ability to influence any court, tribunal, regulatory agency, or similar body or official.

In plain EnglishImply, not claim. Nothing here stops you saying a partner spent nine years at the Service. What is named is the suggestion that the relationship moves outcomes, usually built out of adjacency rather than a sentence, which is how it survives a read-through.

(c)

contain a representation that the member will perform specific professional services in current or future periods for a stated fee, estimated fee, or fee range when it was likely at the time of the representation that such fees would be substantially increased and the member failed to advise the prospective client of that likelihood.

In plain EnglishRead it twice, because the fee is not the problem. Publishing a number, an estimate or a range is untouched. The failure has two halves and needs both: it was already likely the fee would rise substantially, and you did not say so. A pricing page becomes a conduct question only where what you knew and what you printed came apart.

(d)

contain any other representations that would be likely to cause a reasonable person to misunderstand or be deceived.

In plain EnglishThe widest line here, and measured on the reader rather than the writer. Nothing in it is limited to sentences, so emphasis, placement and what you left off the page are all part of the representation.

Quoted text is the Code's own. The right-hand column is our plain-English rendering, no part of the Code. Source 1.

Vocabulary

Four terms that decide the arguments

Most disagreements about a draft turn out to be about one of these, and three are easy to read straight past.

Public practice

Performing professional services for a client, by you or your firm. It is what puts you inside the part of the Code this rule lives in, and it turns on what you do rather than what the door says.

Safeguards

Where no interpretation covers your situation you work the Code's framework, and you are in breach if you cannot demonstrate that safeguards brought a significant threat down to an acceptable level. The proving is yours by design.

Substantially increased

The two words that keep a published fee out of trouble or put it in. A fee that later rose is nothing. A fee you already knew would rise substantially, published without saying so, is the named failure.

Through others

The Code's answer to an agency or a lead vendor writing under your name. You check their promotional efforts because you take the benefit, and you may not do through them what you may not do yourself.

On the page

Six lines off a CPA firm's website

Everything above is easy to agree with in the abstract. It gets hard one sentence at a time, on the page you are writing.

Three of these resolve cleanly and three do not, which is the honest ratio rather than a hedge. Where a line turns on facts only your firm holds, a clean-sounding answer is worse than one that says where the judgement sits.

Worked from§1.600.010.02(a) to (d), the contingent fee rule at §1.510.001, and the membership designation at §1.800.001.04. Source 1.

Six lines, six verdicts

Worked examples

Worked from the Code's own words. Where a real sentence lands is a judgement about your facts.

Price

What you may say about what you charge

The fee rules are not in the advertising rule at all, which is why firms meet them late and usually through a line already published. Contingent fees have their own rule, narrower and stranger than its reputation: a short list of work it shuts down, and a longer list of situations where one is fine.

The rule§1.510.001, the Contingent Fees Rule, with the tax interpretation at §1.510.010. A contingent fee is defined at §1.510.001.03. Source 1.

What it shuts down

One line is the one your marketing will run into: preparing an original or amended return, or a refund claim, for a contingent fee, for any client. Not most clients, and not unless the client is happy with it.

The definitionAn arrangement where no fee is charged unless a specified finding or result is attained, or where the amount depends on the finding or result. Wider than the word “contingent” appearing anywhere, narrower than any fee that moves.

Prohibited

.01a(i)An audit or review of a financial statement
.01a(ii)A compilation a third party is expected to use, where the report does not disclose a lack of independence
.01a(iii)An examination of prospective financial information
.01bPreparing an original or amended return, or a refund claim

What it permits, which is the surprise

The Code's own interpretation prints a list of circumstances where a contingent fee is allowed, and the pattern is representation rather than preparation. Where an authority will genuinely weigh the matter, the fee does not ride on your say-so.

The line people missThe interpretation also prints a failure: no contingent fee where the firm prepared an amended return claiming a refund because a valid deduction was left off the original by mistake. Close to the list, and outside it.

Permitted, per §1.510.010.04

aRepresenting a client in a revenue agent's examination
bAn amended return on an issue that is the subject of a test case involving a different taxpayer, or on which the authority is developing a position
cA refund claim above the threshold for review by the Joint Committee on Taxation or a state authority
dReclaiming interest or penalties charged in error, or deposits an authority misposted, where it reviews such requests
eProtesting a property's assessed value through an authority's established review process
fObtaining a private letter ruling, or influencing the drafting of a regulation or statute

One sentence in the same interpretation reaches outside the Code: practising before the Service or another taxing authority, members are told to comply with other applicable and more restrictive requirements too. That is the door into Treasury's rulebook, which has its own enforcer. Circular 230 and how you market tax work →

Your firm's name and letters

What your firm is allowed to call itself

The corner of the rulebook that is arithmetic rather than judgement, which makes it the easiest to get right and the easiest to get wrong without noticing. Three claims that look alike on an About page, gated by three different sets of people.

The rulesFirm names at §1.800.001.02 with the interpretation at §1.820.030; the membership designation at §1.800.001.04; AICPA-awarded designations at §1.600.030; the CPA credential at §1.600.100. Source 1.

Three lines on an About page

Two switches

“Members of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants”, as a firm §1.800.001.04 Not permitted
An AICPA-awarded designation on firm letterhead and in marketing §1.600.030.02 Not permitted
A member who holds it using the designation after their own name §1.600.030.01 Permitted

Neither switch is on, so two of the three lines are unavailable to the firm and the third is unaffected. The individual permission never depends on anybody else.

Two different sets of people. The membership line counts the firm's CPA owners. The designation line counts its partners. Not the same list, and a firm can clear one and fail the other. Source 1.

Underneath all three sits the sentence that catches the rest: a firm name is misleading where it contains any representation likely to cause a reasonable person to misunderstand, or be confused about, what the legal form of the firm is or who its owners are. The example given is naming a type of organisation the firm is not organised under.

On the credential itself the Code hands the question over: a member who fails to follow their state's accountancy laws on using the CPA credential is treated as having used it in a false, misleading or deceptive way, and is in breach of the advertising rule as well.

The part almost nobody explains

Who has to prove what

Most firm marketing rests on an unexamined assumption about where the burden sits. The Code is unusually direct, and it runs the other way.

The lines“Members must be prepared to justify departures from these rules.” And a member who departs from an interpretation “shall have the burden of justifying such departure in any disciplinary hearing”. Source 1.

What people assume

If anyone ever complains, they have to show the page was misleading.

Reasonable, and the wrong way round once a departure is in view. The framework paragraphs go further: where no interpretation covers your situation, you are in breach if you cannot demonstrate that safeguards reduced a significant threat to an acceptable level. Not that a threat was absent: what you did about it.

What the Code says

Be ready to justify it.

Nothing is filed and nothing is approved. Nobody reads a CPA firm's website before it goes up. The obligation is that a year later the firm can say why a sentence was written and what it rested on. A filing problem rather than a legal one, and either solved before it is asked or not at all.

The Code sets no retention period for marketing. This is what a firm keeps anyway, and why

The sentence itselfAs published, not as drafted. What went out is what you are asked about

Who approved itA name. The rule binds a member, not a website

When it went liveAnd the tax year its figures belong to

What it rested onThe authority, the release, the page. A saved copy

The version it replacedA site edited in place keeps nothing

When it gets read againWhat stops a true figure quietly going out of date

None of that is a compliance decision at the moment it is made. It is a decision about where the website lives and what it saves, taken years earlier by whoever set it up.

One section about our software, then back to the rule

What Verand checks of this rulebook, and what it does not

Everything above stands whether or not you buy anything. This is how much of it software can see in a draft, printed because the right-hand column is longer.

What it checks

Blocks a refund-contingent fee offer. “Pay only if we get you a bigger refund”, and its usual variants, cannot publish.
Blocks a claim of pull inside the Service. Insider framing and talk of connections cannot publish. Naming a genuine former role there is not caught: the check carries an exception for that wording.
Flags self-awarded superlatives. “#1 CPA”, “best tax firm” and the rest are raised for a person, not stopped. A ranking you attribute to somebody else reads differently from one you award yourself.
Runs a CPA conduct check on every draft, for a guaranteed audit or tax outcome, for absolute independence wording, and for lines aimed at another firm's clients.
Blocks six more claim types underneath: guaranteed results, guaranteed returns, cannot-lose, get-rich-quick, risk-free and zero-risk. Those last two clear only on a written reason, logged against the article.
Holds the disclaimer block and the sourcing floor: four cited sources, two of them primary.

What it does not

It does not know whether you are a member, or which board licenses you. It reads the draft, not your membership record, and holds it to the stricter reading.
It does not judge your firm name, count your owners, or check that every partner holds a designation. Those are facts about the firm; the check sees text.
It cannot see what you knew. Whether a published fee range was already likely to rise substantially is the two-part question above, and only your firm holds half of it.
A flagged conduct line marks a draft, it does not stop one. Only the claim types named on the left carry a hard block. And on that last flag, said plainly: the Code does not prohibit asking for another firm's clients. It prohibits doing so falsely, misleadingly or deceptively, or by coercion, over-reaching or harassment.
It does not cover Circular 230. Two of the blocked claims rest on it as well as on the Code. The rest of that regime is its own subject. Treasury's rulebook →
It does not publish. Nothing reaches your site without a CPA approving it, and no setting changes that.

Validated against the AICPA's rules. AI-researched and operator-reviewed. Your counsel confirms applicability. Not legal advice. How we label review →

Verand for CPA firms Can CPAs use AI for marketing content? →

Questions

The ones that come up

About the rulebook, not our software. Each answer carries the paragraph it rests on.

Does the Code apply if I am not an AICPA member?

Not through the AICPA. Its bylaws are what require members to follow the Code, and membership is the thing it can take away. Your state board holds your licence, and its advertising rule is the binding one. Read that first, then read this anyway.

Can I say my firm is a member of the AICPA?

A firm may designate itself as “Members of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants” only where all of its CPA owners are members. One owner who is not, and the line comes off the site. Counting rather than judgement, so it is settled in an afternoon, provided somebody looks again when ownership changes.

Can we put the PFS letters in our firm marketing?

Two answers, which is why it gets muddled. A member who holds an AICPA-awarded designation may use it after their own name, and nothing about the rest of the firm changes that. The firm may use it on letterhead and in marketing materials only where all of its partners hold it. Same letters, two different sets of people counted.

Is “maximum refund” a problem?

It depends on what surrounds it. The named failure is creating a false or unjustified expectation of a favourable result, and the second word is the live one. The same two words inside a description of how your firm works do different work from the same two words used as the promise at the top of a landing page. The test is the expectation a reader ends up with.

Can we advertise a fixed fee for a return?

Yes. The rule does not touch publishing a fee, an estimate or a range, and the belief that it does has cost firms a useful page. What it catches is a quote made when it was already likely the fee would rise substantially, given to a prospective client who was not told. The gap between what you knew and what you printed is the exposure, not the number.

Sources

Read it in the Code, not here

Every quotation here was read off the AICPA's own text, not a summary of it, and the paragraph numbers are printed so you can land on each one yourself. The plain-English column is ours and carries no authority.

1AICPA Code of Professional Conduct, official text, updated for all official releases through July 2026. §1.600, §1.510, §1.800 and §1.820, with the preface at 0.100 and definitions at 0.400. AICPA, PDF 2The Code, browsable online, paragraph by paragraph, if you would rather not open the PDF. AICPA 3Code of Professional Conduct, the AICPA's landing page, including how revisions are exposed and adopted. AICPA 4Boards of Accountancy, the directory for the board that holds your licence and sets the rule attached to it. NASBA 515 U.S.C. §45, FTC Act section 5, on unfair or deceptive acts in commerce. It reaches a firm's advertising whether or not anyone is a member. Cornell Legal Information Institute

Paragraph references are to the AICPA Code of Professional Conduct unless another authority is named. Last checked on September 17, 2026. Not legal advice.

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