California licenses 165,000 people and publishes a list of exactly zero supervisors.

Every list, fetched 12 August 2026

The 15 places a California supervisor list actually is.

Counts are what each source reports on its own page. Nothing from any of these directories is copied here — they are other people’s membership lists, and the useful finding is which ones are real and how big they are, not the names inside them.

Psychology Today is the largest by a wide margin and the category on it is self-declared — a paid profile with a box ticked, not a credential anybody checked. CAMFT’s own list is the opposite: the people on it hold a real certification, and the directory gives you a name and a city and nothing else.

Checked, and there is nothing there

The 9 places people are sent that do not have a list.

The 12 CAMFT chapters with no supervision directory: Inland Empire, Long Beach South Bay, Monterey County, Sacramento Valley, San Diego, San Diego North County, San Fernando Valley, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara Valley, Santa Cruz County, Ventura County. Several of them run a therapist directory or a job board, which is not the same thing and does not say who supervises.

Still ranked, no longer there

Three addresses that are gone, and are still being handed out.

The first one is the dangerous shape. A domain that fails to load sends a reader looking; a domain that was sold and now loads a working, unrelated site reads as though the chapter moved on, which it did not — it closed. CAMFT’s own chapter-links page still points at two of these.

The part that costs people months

In a private practice, you cannot simply hire your own supervisor.

This is the single most expensive misunderstanding in California supervision, and it is easy to hold, because paying somebody for their professional time is normally all it takes.

Before you sign anything

Whether this person may lawfully supervise you.

Every one of these is on the supervisor, not on you. They are worth checking anyway, because the consequence of getting it wrong lands on your hours, and a supervisor who is wrong about their own eligibility is wrong in good faith.

These are the MFT sections. The social work and counseling chapters carry the same test in the same words — BPC §4996.20(a) for an ASW, BPC §4999.12(h) for an APCC.

The shape of the week

One hour a week is the floor, and it is per setting, not per person.

The Board calls an hour of individual or triadic supervision, or two hours of group, a unit. That word is not in the statute — the statute says “one hour of direct supervisor contact” and then defines what counts as one. Both are used below because both are used in the wild.

Parallel sections govern the other two registrations: BPC §4996.23.1 for an ASW — whose six-hour weekly ceiling sits at §4996.23(d)(6) instead — and BPC §4999.46.2 for an APCC.

A trainee is on a different rule entirely. Somebody still in a degree program owes an average of one hour of supervision for every five hours of direct clinical counseling each week, in each setting — §4980.43.2(a)(2) — and may not work in a private practice at all. That is covered on the practicum page.

What it costs

Nobody publishes a rate. The Board asked 3,168 people what they paid.

There is no fee schedule for supervision in California and no survey of what supervisors charge. What does exist is one question in the Board’s own Pathway to Licensure survey, run in 2024 and published inside the 2025 Sunset Review Report. It asked supervisees what they paid, which is a different measure from what supervisors charge, and it is the only public California figure there is.

Board of Behavioral Sciences, Pathway to Licensure survey 2024, question 18, 559 respondents who said they paid. Read it carefully: respondents were self-selected rather than sampled, they span licensure years from the 1950s to 2024 with no adjustment for inflation, the top bracket is uncapped, and it records what people paid, not what anybody charges. No average is computed here, because an average over an open-ended top bracket would be an invented number.

The Board itself treats this as a problem rather than a market. Its current strategic plan carries an unmet goal to “explore ways to reduce financial burdens that arise from supervision fees,” and its own report names the cost of supervision, alongside the difficulty of finding a supervisor at all, as a barrier to entering the profession.

And no, you almost certainly cannot deduct it.

This is asked constantly and answered wrongly almost everywhere, so it is worth three careful sentences.

That is a reading of published law, not tax advice, and the pre-licensure question has never been decided for clinical supervision specifically. If you are paying for supervision, the arrangement worth asking your employer about is reimbursement under an accountable plan, which is excluded from your wages and deducted by them, and sidesteps the whole question. There is more on what is and is not deductible in a therapy practice on the deductions page.

If you are being asked to work unpaid, two agencies disagree.

The Board accepts volunteer hours and says only that employers are encouraged to pay. The Labor Commissioner has taken the position since 2000 that somebody volunteering to a for-profit business to gain experience in an occupation is an employee entitled to at least the minimum wage, and that the nature of the organization is what decides it — a public agency or a nonprofit is different. Board acceptance of your hours is not a finding that the arrangement was lawful; they are two agencies answering two questions. What unpaid associate work actually costs works the arithmetic.

Three deadlines, and they are not the same one

The paperwork, and which piece goes where.

Two of these are due within 60 days and one is due before you start, which is the part that gets missed. One is filed with the Board and two are kept.

A note on form numbers, because the wrong one circulates: 37M-300 is the Supervision Agreement. 37A-525 is the weekly log of experience hours, a different document that carries its own “do not submit” instruction, which is probably how the two got conflated.

And two things worth doing yourself: check the license on the Department of Consumer Affairs lookup before the first session — it shows status, discipline and the issue date, which is how you confirm the two-of-five years — and keep your own copy of every signed page. The hours trackers compared covers where people keep them.

Where every figure came from

Sources.

Every directory on this page was fetched by _dev/supervisor_lists.py on 12 August 2026, and the entry counts are what each source reports about itself. No listing from any of them is reproduced here. A link is an address, not a recommendation: this site has not met these supervisors, does not check them, and takes nothing from anybody for a mention. Statute and regulation text was read at the linked sections; where a rule comes from the Board’s interpretation rather than from the code, it says so on the page. None of this is legal, tax or career advice.