We’ve written before about why licensing requirements are so hard to look up — the structural reasons confident-sounding pages disagree with each other and go stale without warning. And our methodology page explains our general approach to sourcing: every fact on this site is traced to the authority that governs it and dated the day we checked. Both are useful as background, but neither is a how-to. This post is the worked example — one real claim, verified end to end, so the process is visible rather than just described.

The claim we’re verifying

Our Missouri CNA page states that Missouri requires 175 total hours of training to become a Certified Nurse Assistant: 75 hours of classroom instruction plus 100 hours of on-the-job clinical training. That’s a specific, checkable number — not a range, not an estimate. Here’s how you’d confirm it yourself, using nothing but a search engine and the state’s own website.

Step 1: identify who actually governs this claim

Every licensing requirement has a specific issuing authority — never assume it’s a generic “state government” page. For Missouri CNA certification, that authority is the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS), specifically the CNA, CMT and Insulin Registry unit. This matters because a lot of aggregator content links to third-party summaries, trade-school marketing pages, or general “health department” landing pages that aren’t the actual rule-making body. The first question to ask of any claim isn’t “is this true” — it’s “who would actually know.”

Step 2: find the authority’s own published page

Searching “Missouri CNA requirements” surfaces DHSS’s own page at health.mo.gov/safety/cnaregistry/cna.php within the first few results — that’s the primary source, not a summary of it. This is the page our record cites directly. If your search instead turns up a school’s admissions page or a generic “CNA classes near me” directory first, keep scrolling or refine the search until you find the .gov (or equivalent state) domain — that’s the source worth trusting for the actual requirement number, even if a secondary source happens to state the same figure correctly.

Step 3: check what the primary source actually says — and how specifically

DHSS’s own page states that Missouri requires a state-approved course totaling 175 hours: 75 hours of classroom training plus 100 hours of on-the-job (clinical) training. Notice that this is more specific than “175 hours” alone — it breaks the figure into its two components, which is itself a signal of a well-sourced page versus a copied one. A page that states “Missouri requires 175 hours” with no breakdown may simply be repeating a number it found elsewhere without checking the underlying rule.

Step 4: check whether the source itself shows internal inconsistency

This step is where a lot of aggregator research stops short, and it’s worth doing anyway. Missouri’s own CNA FAQ page states the combined nurse-aide exam cost is $135 total ($32 knowledge + $103 skills) — but an earlier version of the exam vendor’s candidate handbook listed a different combined total ($30 knowledge + $95 skills, $125 total). Both figures technically originated from an official source at different points in time; the more recent, currently-published DHSS FAQ is the one that should be treated as authoritative. This is a useful pattern to watch for generally: even a government source can have an outdated figure lingering on an older PDF or handbook that search engines still index. When you find two numbers from what looks like the same authority, check which one is on the currently active page, not just which one ranks higher in search results.

Step 5: note the access date, and treat it as an expiration warning, not a formality

Our record for this claim lists an accessedDate of the day we checked it. That’s not a bureaucratic footnote — it’s the honest boundary of the claim’s shelf life. A training-hour requirement set in state regulation doesn’t change often, but it does change occasionally (Missouri’s own 175-hour figure is itself well above the federal 75-hour floor, meaning the state chose to exceed the minimum at some point and could choose to revise it again). Any page — including ours — that doesn’t tell you when a number was last checked is asking you to trust it indefinitely, which isn’t a reasonable ask for a fact that a state agency controls and can update on its own schedule.

Step 6: when in doubt, call

For a decision as consequential as enrolling in a training program or budgeting for licensing fees, the state authority’s own contact information is worth using directly. DHSS’s CNA Registry publishes a phone number (573-526-5686) alongside its published requirements — if a number on any site, including this one, doesn’t match what a live person at the issuing authority confirms, the phone call wins.

The general pattern

Missouri’s 175-hour figure happens to check out cleanly, but the process is the same regardless of the answer: find the actual issuing authority, go to its own published page rather than a summary of it, look for internal detail (a breakdown, not just a headline number) as a trust signal, check for version conflicts within the source itself, note how recently it was checked, and use direct contact information when the stakes justify it. Our CNA requirements hub and its comparison table apply exactly this process across all 51 jurisdictions — every figure traces back to a primary source with a date attached, which is the whole point of the exercise. For the broader reasoning behind why this matters for licensing information specifically, see our methodology.