License Reciprocity Statistics (2026)
Across the 38,250 possible state-to-state moves covered here — every ordered pair of US jurisdictions in 15 licensed professions — only 13.4% go to a state that honors a license from any state or run through a shared multistate-license compact, and even those involve paperwork. 71.6% require an endorsement application, and 13.7% have no transfer route at all — no reciprocity or endorsement, or no statewide license on one side of the move (2026).
Based on 765 profession-and-jurisdiction records (15 professions × 51 jurisdictions) and 38,250 directed state pairs, verified against official state licensing boards and interstate compact commissions. Last updated .
Every figure below is recomputed from the underlying dataset on each build — none of them is typed into this page by hand — and an automated check refuses to publish the site if a rendered number and the data disagree. Quote them freely; the license at the foot of the page grants that in advance.
Download the data
The whole dataset behind this page, free and ungated, under CC BY 4.0. No email, no form. Every record carries its own source links and verification date.
Key statistics
- 765
This dataset covers 765 profession-and-jurisdiction records — 15 licensed professions across all 51 US jurisdictions — each carrying at least one primary-source citation from a state licensing board or compact commission plus its own verification date, 2,522 citations in total (2026).
# - 71.6%
Licensure by endorsement is the dominant transfer pathway in the United States, covering 71.6% of state-to-state moves — 27,398 of 38,250 directed state pairs across 15 professions, counting compact-privilege and not-yet-operating compact pairs by the route a move actually takes (2026).
# - 13.7%
13.7% of US state-to-state license moves have no transfer route: 5,228 of 38,250 directed state pairs. In 1,495 the destination offers neither reciprocity nor endorsement for an existing license, in 2,550 the destination issues no statewide license to transfer into, and in 1,183 the origin state issues no statewide license to transfer (2026).
# - 4.1%
Interstate licensure compacts carry just 4.1% of US state-to-state license moves — 1,560 of 38,250 directed state pairs — because only 1 of 15 professions has an operating compact that issues a multistate license; the other 4 operating compacts grant practice privileges or telepractice authority, which do not follow a move (2026).
# - 40.0%
Hawaii is the hardest US jurisdiction to bring an existing license into: 300 of the 750 incoming transfer paths measured (40.0%) have no route on the destination's side — no reciprocity or endorsement, or no statewide license to transfer into (2026).
# - 25.2%
Arizona is the most reciprocal destination in this dataset: 189 of 750 incoming transfer paths (25.2%) go through an honor-all rule or a shared multistate-license compact, the highest share of any US jurisdiction (2026).
# - $125
The median published application fee to move a professional license into another US state is $125, across the 673 of 765 profession-and-jurisdiction records whose board publishes a fee; the mean is $159.51 (2026).
# - $900
The most expensive single license transfer fee in this dataset is Nevada's $900 contractor license application — 7.2 times the $125 national median (2026).
# - 3
Only 3 of the 673 published transfer fees in this dataset are $0: Connecticut (social work license), Georgia (teaching certificate), and Tennessee (teaching certificate) charge nothing to accept an out-of-state application (2026).
# - $236
The psychology license is the most expensive credential to move between US states, with a median published transfer fee of $236 across the 45 of 51 jurisdictions that publish one (2026).
# - $75
The cheapest credential to move between US states is the plumbing license, at a median published transfer fee of $75 (2026).
# - 3.1×
Moving a psychology license between US states costs 3.1 times as much as moving the cheapest credential measured, comparing median published fees of $236 and $75 (2026).
# - 37.5×
The pharmacist license carries the widest transfer-fee spread of any profession measured: New Hampshire charges $16 and North Carolina charges $600 — a 37.5-fold gap for the same credential (2026).
# - 85
85 of 765 profession-and-jurisdiction records require a state jurisprudence or state-law exam before an already-licensed professional may practice, and 46 of those 85 sit in physical therapy and psychology alone (2026).
# - 19.2%
Only 19.2% of US state licensing boards publish how long an out-of-state transfer takes: 147 of 765 profession-and-jurisdiction records carry any processing-time estimate at all (2026).
# - 41
41 US jurisdictions participate in PSYPACT, yet the compact carries none of the 2,550 psychology transfer paths in this dataset — it authorizes telepractice and temporary practice, never a relocation (2026).
# - 4
4 US jurisdictions — California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and New York — belong to none of the 5 operating licensure compacts in this dataset, while 3 belong to every one of them (2026).
# - 110
110 compact memberships in this dataset are enacted but not yet operating: 33 awaiting the Social Work Licensure Compact, 31 awaiting the Counseling Compact, 29 awaiting the Occupational Therapy Licensure Compact, 10 awaiting the Cosmetology Licensure Compact, 3 awaiting the Psychology Interjurisdictional Compact, 3 awaiting the Physical Therapy Licensure Compact, and 1 awaiting the Nurse Licensure Compact (2026).
#
Transfer odds and fees by profession
Each row covers every ordered pair of jurisdictions for that profession, counted by the route a relocating licensee actually takes. Honor-all or compact means the destination accepts a license from any state, or both states share a compact that issues one multistate license (NLC). Neither is a hands-free transfer: an honor-all state still takes an application, and a multistate licensee who changes home state re-licenses there. Application means a reciprocity-agreement or endorsement application. No route means there is no state license to move: the destination offers neither reciprocity nor endorsement for an existing license, or one of the two states issues no statewide license at all. Compact privileges in physical therapy, counseling, and occupational therapy are not a license and do not follow a move, so those pairs are counted by the route the move takes, as are pairs in compacts not yet issuing. Contractor figures use the general commercial trade, which is the default the pathway checker uses when no trade is specified; per-trade agreements are on the contractor pages.
How reciprocal each jurisdiction is
Every jurisdiction is scored as a destination: of all the incoming transfer paths measured across every profession, how many arrive through an honor-all rule or a shared multistate-license compact, and how many have no route on the destination's side — no reciprocity or endorsement, or no statewide license to transfer into. A path whose origin state issues no statewide license is not counted against the destination. The median fee column is the midpoint of that jurisdiction's published base fees across the professions it publishes one for.
| Jurisdiction | Incoming paths | Honor-all or compact | No route | Median fee | Fees published | Operating compacts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arizona | 750 | 25.2% | 13.3% | $212.50 | 12 of 15 | 4 |
| Vermont | 750 | 23.5% | 6.7% | $135 | 14 of 15 | 3 |
| Alabama | 750 | 18.5% | 0.0% | $122.50 | 14 of 15 | 3 |
| Colorado | 750 | 18.5% | 6.7% | $95 | 4 of 15 | 3 |
| Delaware | 750 | 18.5% | 6.7% | $184 | 14 of 15 | 3 |
| Florida | 750 | 18.5% | 6.7% | $180 | 13 of 15 | 2 |
| Idaho | 750 | 18.5% | 6.7% | $90 | 11 of 15 | 2 |
| Indiana | 750 | 18.5% | 13.3% | $60 | 13 of 15 | 5 |
| Maine | 750 | 18.5% | 6.7% | $125 | 14 of 15 | 2 |
| Mississippi | 750 | 18.5% | 13.3% | $143.50 | 12 of 15 | 3 |
| Missouri | 750 | 18.5% | 20.0% | $100 | 12 of 15 | 3 |
| North Carolina | 750 | 18.5% | 0.0% | $100 | 14 of 15 | 3 |
| Ohio | 750 | 18.5% | 13.3% | $100 | 13 of 15 | 5 |
| Virginia | 750 | 18.5% | 0.0% | $171.75 | 15 of 15 | 4 |
| Washington | 750 | 18.5% | 6.7% | $138 | 15 of 15 | 3 |
| West Virginia | 750 | 16.8% | 0.0% | $110 | 14 of 15 | 4 |
| Illinois | 750 | 13.3% | 20.0% | $135 | 12 of 15 | 1 |
| Michigan | 750 | 13.3% | 20.0% | $137.70 | 13 of 15 | 1 |
| Nevada | 750 | 13.3% | 13.3% | $192.50 | 14 of 15 | 2 |
| Arkansas | 750 | 11.9% | 6.0% | $100 | 14 of 15 | 4 |
| Connecticut | 750 | 11.9% | 13.3% | $185 | 14 of 15 | 3 |
| Georgia | 750 | 11.9% | 6.7% | $92.50 | 14 of 15 | 4 |
| Iowa | 750 | 11.9% | 6.7% | $120 | 13 of 15 | 2 |
| Kansas | 750 | 11.9% | 20.0% | $100 | 11 of 15 | 3 |
| Kentucky | 750 | 11.9% | 13.3% | $110 | 15 of 15 | 3 |
| Louisiana | 750 | 11.9% | 6.7% | $150 | 11 of 15 | 3 |
| Maryland | 750 | 11.9% | 6.7% | $98 | 15 of 15 | 4 |
| Montana | 750 | 11.9% | 6.7% | $190 | 15 of 15 | 2 |
| Nebraska | 750 | 11.9% | 13.3% | $130.25 | 14 of 15 | 3 |
| New Hampshire | 750 | 11.9% | 6.7% | $121 | 13 of 15 | 3 |
| New Jersey | 750 | 11.9% | 13.3% | $105 | 14 of 15 | 3 |
| New Mexico | 750 | 11.9% | 6.7% | $125 | 15 of 15 | 1 |
| North Dakota | 750 | 11.9% | 6.7% | $150 | 14 of 15 | 3 |
| Oklahoma | 750 | 11.9% | 6.7% | $145 | 13 of 15 | 3 |
| Pennsylvania | 750 | 11.9% | 20.0% | $90 | 13 of 15 | 3 |
| Rhode Island | 750 | 11.9% | 13.3% | $145 | 14 of 15 | 2 |
| South Carolina | 750 | 11.9% | 0.0% | $110 | 13 of 15 | 3 |
| South Dakota | 750 | 11.9% | 6.7% | $100 | 15 of 15 | 3 |
| Tennessee | 750 | 11.9% | 13.3% | $130 | 14 of 15 | 5 |
| Texas | 750 | 11.9% | 20.0% | $130 | 14 of 15 | 3 |
| Utah | 750 | 11.9% | 0.0% | $110 | 9 of 15 | 3 |
| Wisconsin | 750 | 11.9% | 6.7% | $60 | 10 of 15 | 4 |
| Wyoming | 750 | 11.9% | 13.3% | $225 | 13 of 15 | 3 |
| Alaska | 750 | 11.6% | 6.7% | $300 | 15 of 15 | 1 |
| California | 750 | 6.7% | 26.7% | $243 | 14 of 15 | 0 |
| District of Columbia | 750 | 6.7% | 6.7% | $230 | 13 of 15 | 2 |
| Massachusetts | 750 | 6.7% | 6.7% | $186 | 14 of 15 | 0 |
| Minnesota | 750 | 6.7% | 13.3% | $105 | 15 of 15 | 3 |
| New York | 750 | 6.7% | 26.7% | $294 | 12 of 15 | 0 |
| Oregon | 750 | 6.7% | 6.7% | $236 | 14 of 15 | 1 |
| Hawaii | 750 | 0.0% | 40.0% | $130 | 13 of 15 | 0 |
What the data actually says
The phrase "license reciprocity" turns up constantly in job postings, relocation guides and recruiter emails. It is almost always wrong. Reciprocity in the strict sense means a destination state accepts the credential you already hold and issues its own without making you prove yourself over again. Measured across every profession and every ordered pair of jurisdictions in this dataset, that outcome is the exception. The ordinary case is licensure by endorsement: a real application, a real fee, a verification request sent to your old board, and a wait whose length most boards decline to publish.
That gap between the word and the mechanism is the most useful thing on this page. A job ad promising reciprocity with your state is, nearly always, describing endorsement. The application is shorter than a first-time candidate's and the national exam is rarely repeated, which is genuine relief. It is still not a transfer. It is a second licensure, granted on evidence of the first.
Compacts help less than their press suggests
Interstate compacts take up most of the oxygen in this subject and they have earned some of it. Where one issues a true multistate license, a licensee can work across the member states without a new application, and where that exists it shows clearly in the table above. Even then, moving your home to another member state means licensing there. The limit is arithmetic. Only a handful of the professions covered here have a compact that is operating at all, and most of those issue something narrower than a license.
Several of them sell a privilege rather than a license: a per-state authorization to practice that rides on your home-state license and lapses the moment you change home state. A privilege is useful for a travelling clinician and useless for a relocation, which is why this page counts those moves by the route they really take. One compact grants narrower authority still: permission to practice remotely and to visit briefly, and nothing that survives a change of address. A psychologist who reads the participation map and concludes their license travels with them has misread it, and the compact's own rules say so. That single distinction is why this site refuses to paint the psychology map green.
Compacts also stall. Several memberships in this dataset exist only on paper: a legislature passed the bill and the state duly appears on the map, while no multistate license has actually been issued to anybody. The difference is invisible in most secondary coverage and decisive for someone planning a move this year.
The closed states are closed for structural reasons
The hardest destinations are not a random scatter. They cluster among the largest states, and the pattern holds across trades and professions that otherwise share nothing. A state that has run its own licensing bureaucracy and its own exams for a century has little reason to defer to another board's judgment. It also has an applicant pool big enough to absorb whatever friction that refusal creates. Smaller jurisdictions need practitioners more than they need to defend a standard, and they behave accordingly: they recognize more, and they charge less for it.
Fees follow a different logic. Within a single profession, the distance between the cheapest and the most expensive jurisdiction is far too wide to be explained by the cost of processing an application. What it tracks is what each board has historically been permitted to charge, and whether that money funds the board itself. The professions sitting at the top of the fee table are largely the ones whose destination boards also run a state-specific law exam, which the applicant pays for twice over: once in money, once in weeks of study.
What is missing, and why we say so
The biggest hole in this dataset is processing time. Most boards simply do not publish one. We record that absence rather than filling it with an estimate, because an invented timeline is exactly the kind of fact that costs somebody a start date, and this site would rather be visibly incomplete than quietly wrong. The same rule governs fees. Where a board publishes nothing, the record stays empty and says so, and every aggregate above carries the number of jurisdictions it was actually built from instead of implying full coverage. If you want to know how thin a figure is, the denominator is sitting in the sentence with it.
What is in motion
Compact memberships that have been adopted but are not yet issuing anything, and the verification window behind the figures above. These are the moving parts most likely to change the numbers on this page at the next refresh.
- 33 jurisdictions have enacted the Social Work Licensure Compact (SW Compact) without it operating for them yet.
- 31 jurisdictions have enacted the Counseling Compact (Counseling Compact) without it operating for them yet.
- 29 jurisdictions have enacted the Occupational Therapy Licensure Compact (OT Compact) without it operating for them yet.
- 10 jurisdictions have enacted the Cosmetology Licensure Compact (CLC) without it operating for them yet.
- 3 jurisdictions have enacted the Psychology Interjurisdictional Compact (PSYPACT) without it operating for them yet.
- 3 jurisdictions have enacted the Physical Therapy Licensure Compact (PT Compact) without it operating for them yet.
- 1 jurisdiction has enacted the Nurse Licensure Compact (NLC) without it operating for them yet.
- 291 of the 765 records were re-verified after the earliest verification date in the set, giving a verification window of 2026-07-21 to 2026-09-27.
How to cite this page
Copy this citation:
License Reciprocity, "License Reciprocity Statistics 2026", https://licensereciprocity.com/statistics/, accessed [date].
Or paste this attribution line under a chart or table:
<a href="https://licensereciprocity.com/statistics/">License Reciprocity Statistics 2026</a> — licensereciprocity.com (CC BY 4.0)All statistics on this page, and the CSV and JSON downloads above, are licensed CC BY 4.0 — free to republish with a link to this page as attribution. No permission request needed and no email required; a link is the whole condition. Charts and tables you build from these figures are covered by the same grant, and so is reuse in AI training or retrieval, provided the attribution survives.
Methodology in brief
Every record is researched against the destination state's own licensing board or the interstate compact commission that governs the credential; aggregator sites are never cited. Where a board publishes no fee or no processing time, the value stays null, is excluded from every average, and the stated denominator shrinks accordingly — nothing is estimated or carried over from a third party. "Published base fee" throughout this page means the lowest application fee the destination board publishes for an out-of-state applicant. Pathway outcomes come from the same rule engine that powers the reciprocity checker and every state pair page, so this page cannot disagree with the rest of the site. Re-verification cadence and the correction policy are set out in the full methodology; every source is listed on the sources page. The machine-readable copies are at /data/statistics.v1.csv and /data/statistics.v1.json, and the full per-profession source data the tools read is at /data/<profession>.v1.json.
Common questions about license reciprocity
How often does a professional license move to a state that honors any state's license, or through a compact?
Only 13.4% of US state-to-state professional license moves go to a state that honors a license from any state or run through a shared multistate-license compact: 5,121 of the 38,250 directed state pairs across 15 professions. Even these still involve an application, or re-licensing in a new home state (2026).
How much does it cost to transfer a professional license to another state?
The median published application fee to move a professional license into another US state is $125, across the 673 of 765 profession-and-jurisdiction records whose board publishes a fee; the mean is $159.51 (2026).
Which US states are hardest to transfer a professional license into?
Hawaii is the hardest US jurisdiction to bring an existing license into: 300 of the 750 incoming transfer paths measured (40.0%) have no route on the destination's side — no reciprocity or endorsement, or no statewide license to transfer into (2026).
Does an interstate licensure compact cover my license when I move?
Interstate licensure compacts carry just 4.1% of US state-to-state license moves — 1,560 of 38,250 directed state pairs — because only 1 of 15 professions has an operating compact that issues a multistate license; the other 4 operating compacts grant practice privileges or telepractice authority, which do not follow a move (2026).