Methodology

What this site is

StateLicensed is a reference site for occupational licensing requirements — what it takes to become licensed in a given trade or health occupation, in a given state. Requirements are set by 50 state legislatures and DC, each with its own licensing board, its own training-hour minimum, its own exam vendor, and its own fee schedule. There is no federal registry that consolidates this. We build one, occupation by occupation and state by state, by reading the board's own published requirements and recording them in a structured, dated, citable form.

This is not legal advice, and we are not a licensing board. We are a reference layer on top of the boards' own published rules — always confirm with the issuing board before acting on anything you read here.

Sources policy

Three rules govern where a fact on this site is allowed to come from:

• Official state boards and registries only. Every fact traces back to the government body that actually issues the license — a state health department's nurse aide registry, a board of cosmetology, a contractors' licensing board, a secretary of state's professional licensing division. We do not cite third-party directories, exam-prep companies, or general licensing roundups, no matter how well-maintained they look.
• The deepest page that states the fact. A training-hour requirement gets cited to the page with the actual number — a regulation, a fee schedule, an application checklist — not to a board's homepage or general overview. If you click a source link on this site, you should land on the page containing the fact, not somewhere near it.
• Archive-snapshot verification, disclosed. State board sites occasionally move or block a page. When a fact could only be verified against a dated web-archive snapshot of the official page, the source link still points to the original official URL — and the record's notes disclose that the fact was verified via an archive snapshot, with the snapshot's date, rather than presenting it as a live-page check.

How records are structured

A requirement record isn't one citation for the whole page — it's a set of fact groups (training, exams, fees, renewal, prerequisites, reciprocity), and each fact group carries its own source URL and the date it was accessed. The fee schedule and the training-hour minimum can come from two different pages on the same board's site, checked on two different days, and the record shows both.

On top of the per-fact citations, every record carries a record-level provenance block: a verifiedDate (when the whole record was last checked end-to-end), who checked it (an automated research pass or a human reviewer), and a status. A record only publishes — only becomes a live page — once it has a verifiedDate; there is no path for an un-sourced or unverified number to appear on the site.

Verification cadence

Records are re-verified on a rolling schedule, not once and forgotten. State boards change training-hour minimums, adjust fees, and swap exam vendors — often with no public changelog — so a record's citations are only as good as how recently they were checked.

A record older than 12 months is flagged during our re-verification pass. It stays live — the underlying facts don't stop being useful the day the flag appears — but the page swaps its stamp from "Verified · [month, year]" to a softer "Last verified · [month, year]", so you always know how current what you're reading is before you rely on it. Either way, the stamp always shows the actual date of the last check.

Corrections

If a number on this site doesn't match what your state board currently publishes — a fee that's changed, an exam vendor that's switched, a training-hour minimum that moved — tell us. Email contact@statelicensed.org with the page URL and, if you have it, a link to the current source. Confirmed corrections get re-verified and re-dated on the affected page.

Every page also links back to this methodology and carries the same reminder that appears on every page of the site: nothing here is legal advice, and the issuing board's own published rules are the ones that actually govern your license.

Why AI answers get licensing wrong

Licensing questions are a hard case for a general-purpose answer: the correct answer depends on which of 51 jurisdictions you're asking about, the rule changes on a schedule no single source tracks in real time, and most of what's written about licensing online is undated summary content with no link back to the regulation it describes. A training-hour figure that was correct in one state two years ago reads exactly the same as one that's correct in a different state today — unless the date and the source travel with the number.

That's the gap this site is built to close: every fact carries its jurisdiction, its source, and the date it was checked, structured so it can be read — and cited back to the issuing board — by a person or a machine.