15 credit hours per year, reported every year (birth-month). Verified against the TX bar or court authority.
| Total CLE required | 15 credit hours per year |
|---|---|
| Ethics requirement | 3 hrs |
| Reporting cycle | Every year (birth-month) |
| Wellness / mental health credit | 1 hr may be earned in a legal-wellness category (verify) |
| Online CLE accepted | Yes |
| Accreditation route | Approved (State Bar of Texas MCLE) |
Note: Mandatory legal-technology component. Confirm the current wellness-credit rule.
Texas requires 15 hours every year. That matches thirteen of the 46 jurisdictions that mandate CLE, the most common requirement in the country.
Texas recognizes wellness or mental health credit. 1 hr may be earned in a legal-wellness category (verify) This is the most direct route to satisfying part of your requirement with substantive training rather than a box-ticking exercise. AWP programs are built for exactly this category: live, taught by physicians, judges, and practising attorneys, and grounded in the neurobiology of cumulative stress rather than general wellness advice.
Texas requires 15 hours each year, of which 3 are earmarked for ethics. That leaves roughly 12 hours each year that you choose the content for. Those are the hours in question.
The 2026 national study of 39,036 lawyers found that 47.5 percent reported high or very high work-related burnout, and that moderate or higher symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress ran at 21.6, 20.4 and 18.9 percent. The earlier 2016 study had found something that surprised the profession: the risk concentrated among younger attorneys and those in their first ten years. The prior assumption ran the other way. It is shaping the careers of the people a firm has most recently invested in.
Exposure follows the material rather than the job title, and it is not only the attorneys and advocates who carry it. Immigration practitioners and the paralegals working alongside them take asylum narratives in detail and repeatedly, frequently with a client's safety turning on how completely the trauma is recounted. Firms, offices, and courts in Texas whose work runs through material like this carry more of it than a general commercial practice does, and their training needs differ accordingly.
These are competence issues, not comfort issues. They surface as missed deadlines, degraded judgment on live matters, ethics complaints, and the departure of lawyers a firm has already paid to train. If Texas is going to require the time anyway, it can be spent on the thing that is measurably breaking.
Texas requires 15 credit hours per year. Of that, the ethics requirement is 3 hrs. The reporting cycle runs every year (birth-month).
Yes. Rules on self-study versus live or interactive formats vary, and newly admitted attorneys are often held to stricter requirements than experienced ones. Confirm with the accrediting authority before enrolling.
Yes. Texas recognizes wellness or mental health credit: 1 hr may be earned in a legal-wellness category (verify) Attorney Wellness Project delivers live, accredited programming in this category, taught by attorneys, judges, physicians, psychologists, and coaches.
Approved (State Bar of Texas MCLE). Requirements change, so verify directly with the issuing authority before relying on any summary, including this one.
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