Search “how many hours of CNA training does [state] require” and you’ll usually get an answer within the first few results. The problem isn’t finding an answer — it’s that three different pages will give you three different answers, all stated with equal confidence, and none of them will tell you when the number was last checked. This isn’t sloppiness on any one site’s part; it’s a structural problem with how licensing information gets published and re-published online. Here’s why it happens, and a concrete way to verify any specific claim before you rely on it.

There is no single source of truth

Occupational licensing in the United States is set by 50 state legislatures plus DC, each with its own licensing board, its own regulations, and its own publishing habits. There is no federal registry that consolidates training-hour minimums, fees, or renewal cycles across states — not for CNAs, not for cosmetologists, not for electricians. A page that looks like a national database is, at best, someone’s compilation of 51 separate lookups done at 51 different times. If even one of those lookups is a year old, the page reads as current when part of it isn’t.

Requirements change on a schedule nobody publishes centrally

State boards adjust fee schedules, swap exam vendors, and revise training-hour minimums regularly — often without a public changelog. A board might update its fee page mid-year with no announcement beyond the page itself changing. Interstate compacts add new member states on their own timeline entirely; the Nurse Licensure Compact added two new states in 2025 alone, which means any compact-membership list written before then is already out of date and gives no visual sign of it. A page doesn’t turn red when the fact it states goes stale — it just sits there, still confidently worded.

Undated content is the core problem

Most of what’s published about licensing requirements online carries no visible “as of” date and no link back to the regulation or fee schedule it’s describing. That’s the single biggest reason two pages disagree: one might be summarizing a rule from three years ago, the other from three months ago, and there’s no way to tell which is which just by reading the prose. A training-hour figure that was correct in 2023 reads exactly the same as one that’s correct today — unless the date travels with the number.

A practical checklist for verifying a licensing claim

Whether you’re reading this site, a state board’s own page, or anywhere else, here’s how to check whether a specific number you’re relying on is actually current:

  1. Find the primary source. Every real requirement traces back to a specific government body — the licensing board, the health department’s registry, the professional-licensing division. If a page doesn’t name and link that source, treat the number as unverified.
  2. Check whether the source is the board itself, not an aggregator. A page that says “according to [state] regulations” without a link is making a claim you can’t check. A page that links directly to the regulation, fee schedule, or application form lets you confirm the number yourself in under a minute.
  3. Look for a date. Not a copyright year in the footer — a specific “verified” or “last checked” date attached to the actual fact you’re reading. If there isn’t one, you have no way to know if it’s this year’s number or three years old.
  4. Cross-check the exam vendor’s own pricing, separately. Training-hour minimums and eligibility rules usually come from the state board, but exam fees are frequently set by a third-party vendor (Prometric, Credentia, Headmaster, Pearson VUE) under contract — and vendors update their own candidate bulletins independently of the board. A number that’s correct on the board’s site can still be wrong if the vendor changed its fee since that page was last updated.
  5. When in doubt, call the board. Every state board publishes a phone number, and for a fact that’s time-sensitive to a real decision — an application deadline, an exam fee, a renewal cutoff — a two-minute call is the only way to be certain. This isn’t a knock on published sources, including this one; it’s just true of any secondhand information.

If you’d like to see this checklist applied rather than just listed, we’ve walked one real claim — Missouri’s 175-hour CNA training requirement — through every step of it, in How to Verify a License Requirement Claim, Step by Step.

What we do differently here

This isn’t a plug so much as a description of the mechanism, since it maps directly onto the checklist above: every fact on this site — a training-hour minimum, a fee, a renewal cycle — carries its own source URL and the date we checked it, at the level of the individual fact rather than the whole page. A record only becomes a live page once it has been verified end-to-end, and records get re-checked on a rolling schedule; anything older than 12 months is flagged rather than left to quietly go stale. You can read the full breakdown of how that works, including what counts as an acceptable source and how we handle a page that’s moved or gone offline, on our methodology page — and every requirement page links back to it, so the sourcing is never more than one click away from the number you’re reading.

None of this replaces confirming a time-sensitive fact with the issuing board directly before you act on it. What it does is give you the same thing the checklist above asks for: a source and a date, attached to the number, so you can decide for yourself how much to trust it.