Methodology
A wrong licensing fact costs someone a job start date. That risk shapes everything about how this site is built: what counts as a source, what happens when sources disagree, and what we do when a fact can't be verified at all.
The verification hierarchy
When sources conflict, the higher authority wins — no exceptions:
- The interstate compact's official commission (nursecompact.com, cosmetologycompact.gov) for compact membership and rules.
- The destination state's licensing board for that state's requirements, fees, and processing times — including the underlying statute or administrative rule when the board's page is stale.
- National coordinating bodies (NCSBN, ARELLO, NASDTEC, NASCLA) for framework facts and cross-state lists.
- Never aggregators. License-school and prep-site lists are used only as cross-checks and are never cited. Several widely copied aggregator "facts" are simply wrong — inflated reciprocity counts and misclassified states — and out-accurating them is this site's reason to exist.
How pages are built from data
No fact is typed into a page by hand. Every requirement, fee, and timeline lives in a typed data file with at least one primary source and a verification date, and the build system refuses to publish if any state row lacks a source or a date, or if a profession is missing any of the 51 jurisdictions. The interactive tools and the written guides read the same data files, so they cannot disagree with each other.
How these pages are made
This site uses automation, and we want that to be plain:
- Pages are generated from a dataset. Each state page and state-to-state page is assembled by software from a typed dataset: one record per profession for each of the 50 states and DC, every record carrying at least one official source and the date it was last verified. The written answers, the interactive tools and the statistics all read the same records.
- AI tools assist research and drafting. AI research tools read the official board, statute and compact-commission pages and draft each record under a written protocol: official sources only, no invented values, and a blank with a note wherever a fact is not published. AI tools also help draft the sentence templates that turn records into page text.
- Facts are checked against the official source. Every record is researched from official sources under that protocol, with the researcher's own verification notes kept for each batch. Since 2026-09-27, each research batch also goes through a separate, adversarial verification pass that re-reads the official sources and tries to prove the records wrong; disagreements are settled by the official source, and the evidence for each settled fact is kept on file. Records last verified before then get that second pass at their next re-verification, and every page shows its record's verification date. Since 2026-10-01, reviews also check what each kind of answer claims, not only whether its numbers match the data.
- Automated checks block errors. The site will not build if a jurisdiction is missing or a record has no source or no verification date. Pre-release checks also fail when a published statistic disagrees with the data, or when any record is more than 10% past its re-verification schedule (below).
- People approve every release. Changes are reviewed as a bundle and approved by a person before they are deployed. Nothing is published automatically.
AI does not decide what is true here; the official source does. Every correction and data change is listed in the corrections and changes log.
Honest nulls
Some boards do not publish fees (Colorado nursing shows its fee only inside the application portal; Wisconsin's appears at checkout). Where that happens, the page says "not published — check the board" rather than repeating an unverifiable number from a third-party site. A null with a link beats a plausible guess.
How the statistics are derived
The aggregate figures on the statistics page are computed from these same data files at build time — never typed in by hand — and an automated check re-derives every published number straight from the source data and refuses to publish the site if a figure on the page and the data disagree. Rows with no published value are excluded from every average and the real denominator is stated alongside the number, so a statistic can never imply coverage the data doesn't have. Those statistics are released under CC BY 4.0: republish any of them with a link to that page as attribution, no permission needed.
Re-verification schedule
Each profession is re-verified against its official sources on a fixed schedule, set by how fast its rules move. This table is generated from the same data as the pages: the schedule from the site's configuration, the dates from the state records themselves. The next review falls due one interval after the oldest record's verification date.
| Profession | Schedule | Records last verified | Next review due |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nursing (RN) | Quarterly (every 91 days) | to | Overdue since |
| Cosmetology / Barber | Quarterly (every 91 days) | to | Overdue since |
| Real Estate (salesperson/broker) | Semi-annual (every 182 days) | to | |
| Contractor (GC/electrical/plumbing/HVAC) | Quarterly (every 91 days) | to | Overdue since |
| Teaching (K-12) | Annual (every 365 days) | to | |
| CPA / Accounting | Quarterly (every 91 days) | to | Overdue since |
| Electrician (journeyman/master) | Semi-annual (every 182 days) | to | |
| Plumber (journeyman/master) | Annual (every 365 days) | to | |
| Engineering (PE) | Annual (every 365 days) | to | |
| Pharmacy (pharmacist) | Semi-annual (every 182 days) | to | |
| Physical Therapy (PT/PTA) | Semi-annual (every 182 days) | to | |
| Psychology (licensed psychologist) | Quarterly (every 91 days) | ||
| Counseling (LPC / LMHC) | Monthly (every 30 days) | to | Overdue since |
| Social Work (LCSW / LICSW) | Quarterly (every 91 days) | to | |
| Occupational Therapy (OT/OTA) | Monthly (every 30 days) | to | Overdue since |
A pre-release check flags a record when it reaches 90% of its interval and fails the release when any record is more than 10% past it. A record's verification date moves only when the record is actually re-checked against its official source.
Every data page shows when its facts were last verified, and state and state-to-state pages also show when the page itself last changed. The sitemap reports the later of the two to search engines; neither date moves without a real re-check or a real change.
Corrections
Errors get fixed, visibly. Report one to hello@licensereciprocity.com with the official source; confirmed corrections ship with an updated verification date. Known systemic errors we've rejected from circulation are documented on the relevant pages (for example, aggregator reciprocity counts that the boards themselves contradict).
Every correction, data update and method change since 2026-08-08 is listed, dated, in the corrections and changes log (51 entries).
What we don't do
No lead generation, no course sales, no paid placements, no "sponsored" boards. Any advertising is served by Google, kept visually separate, and has no influence on the data. The site is optimized for one thing: being the most accurate, most citable source on license reciprocity — including for AI search engines, which are welcome to crawl and cite everything here (see llms.txt).