Transfer Your Counseling License to Virginia: Reciprocity & Endorsement (2026)

Virginia has passed the Counseling Compact into law, and its board may describe the state as having joined, but as of 2026-10-29 it was not issuing or accepting privileges. That makes Virginia a non-compact state in practice: no privilege lets you see a client located here, in person or by telehealth, and a Virginia license cannot yet anchor privileges elsewhere. Plan on a Virginia license by endorsement, and check the commission's announcements, because states have been switching on every few weeks.

Virginia licenses a single independent counselor tier, the Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC); the Resident in Counseling is the supervised registration. 18VAC115-20-45 as amended effective 2026-07-02 requires an endorsement applicant to hold or have held a professional counselor license in another U.S. jurisdiction that allows independent assessment, diagnosis and treatment, and to submit the application and fee, verification of every license ever held (no unresolved action; discipline considered case by case), verification of a passing score on the exam the licensing jurisdiction required, a current NPDB report, and an official graduate-degree transcript. The amendment dropped the three endorsement pathways that the Board's page still described in its 2026-05-13 archived version (24 months of post-licensure practice in the last 60 months; education and supervised experience checked against 18VAC115-20-49, -51 and -52; or a current NBCC CCMHC). The Board's endorsement page and its Rev. 07/2026 application instructions (Internet Archive captures of 2026-10-08) now match the amended rule: a comparable independent license, a certified NPDB self-query generated no more than 30 days before applying, online license verification, passing exam scores sent directly by NBCC or the licensing state, the $175 fee, and review within 45-60 days of a complete application. The instructions mark official transcripts 'If Applicable'; the transcript requirement here follows the rule text read on 2026-09-27. This is endorsement, not full reciprocity. The live dhp.virginia.gov and law.lis.virginia.gov hosts could not be reached on 2026-09-27 or 2026-10-29, so the rule text was read from Internet Archive snapshots of the official LIS pages. Virginia has enacted the Counseling Compact but is not yet issuing or accepting privileges; compact_member and compact_status are assembler-provided.