Out-of-state licensure · Paths A and B · checked August 2026
Your license travels. Your transcript does not.
In short
Can I bring my license and my supervised hours from another state?
Which of the Board’s two routes you are on, the coursework each one costs, and how much of your licensed time converts into hours
100 hrs/month, capped at 1,200California has two routes in, and they are not close. One asks for four courses. The other reopens your graduate degree — and continuing education cannot close that gap, whatever the deficiency letter looks like.
Which pathCheck yoursPath APath BYour hoursSupervisionWhat it costsSources
From the associate group, and thirteen comments of guesses
I applied for APCC and was denied based on “missing 4 credits that did not meet CA requirements”. I am curious if anyone has had this issue when applying from out of state. I came from a CACREP school.
And, separately: if I have 2,000 hours in another state, can I transfer them when trying to get my California license?
The short version
Two routes, and the letter you got does not say which one you are on.
The Board publishes this answer three times — once for marriage and family therapists, once for clinical social workers, once for professional clinical counselors — in three documents that never reference each other. Read side by side they describe the same machine, and seeing the shape of it is most of the work.
Four conditions, all of which are about the license you already hold rather than the degree behind it. Meet them and California asks for four courses, one exam, and nothing else. Your clinical exam is waived.
Everyone who does not qualify for A. Your graduate transcript is reopened and measured against California's content requirements, you owe up to nine California-specific courses on top, and you sit both exams.
Which is why it is worth knowing which one you are on before you pay an application fee to find out.
The four conditions
Path A is not about your degree. It is about your license.
All four have to be true at once. Any one of them failing puts you on Path B, and there is no partial credit.
| The condition | What it actually means |
|---|---|
| You hold the license in another U.S. jurisdiction | Another country does not qualify you for Path A, however senior the license. Out-of-country applicants are on Path B and also need a NACES-member credential evaluation. |
| At the highest level for independent practice there | An associate, provisional, conditional or supervised-practice credential is not it. This is the condition that surprises people who have been practicing for years under a two-tier scheme. |
| Current, active and unrestricted | Not lapsed, not inactive, not on probation. Past discipline does not automatically disqualify you but must be disclosed for the Board to review. |
| For at least two years before you apply | Two continuous years immediately before the application. Time before a lapse does not bridge the gap. |
Identical for LMFT, LCSW and LPCC. The LCSW route adds that the master’s must be from a CSWE-accredited school; the other two accept a regionally or nationally accredited or BPPE-approved institution.
The sentence that decides it
California’s statute for marriage and family therapists puts the boundary in one line. Section 4980.74 — the Path B section — opens by saying it applies to people with out-of-state education or experience “who do not qualify for a license under Section 4980.72”, which is the Path A section.
So Path B is not a second option you might prefer. It is the residual. You are on it by default and leave it only by satisfying all four conditions above.
The checker
Which path, and what you would owe.
Answer the four conditions and, if you have them, your hours. Everything is computed in this browser: no account, no storage, nothing sent anywhere, and nothing kept when you close the tab.
The four conditions
And your hours
Answer the four conditions on the left. This runs entirely in your browser, nothing is stored, and nothing is sent anywhere. It reads the Board’s published requirements — it is not the Board’s evaluation of your file, which only the Board can make.
Path A
Four courses, one exam, and the clinical exam is waived.
This is the whole of it. The four courses below are the only coursework Path A asks for, they are the same four for all three licenses, and an acceptable continuing education provider can supply every one of them.
| Course | Length | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| California law and professional ethics | 12 hours | Scope of practice, confidentiality and its limits, child abuse reporting, advertising, disciplinary action and the licensing law itself — all California-specific. |
| Child abuse assessment and reporting | 7 hours | CANRA, the indicators, the assessment methods and the reporting procedure. The out-of-state version of this course does not count; it has to be the California one. |
| California cultures and the social and psychological implications of socioeconomic position | 15 hours or 1 semester unit | Named in the statute in those words. There is no national equivalent, so essentially nobody arrives holding it. |
| Suicide risk assessment and intervention | 6 hours | Required of applicants since 1 January 2021. |
Then the California Law and Ethics Exam, and that is the end of the examination requirement. For marriage and family therapists the statute says so directly: an applicant qualifying under section 4980.72 passes the California law and ethics examination with the clinical examination waived. The clinical social work and professional clinical counselor guides run the same way — a Path A applicant is never sent to the national clinical examination.
What Path A does not ask you for
- A unit count on your degree.
- Any of the thirteen core content areas.
- The advanced-coursework block.
- Practicum hours, or evidence of them.
- Verification of 3,000 supervised hours — the license you already hold stands in for all of it.
- The clinical examination.
Path B
The part where continuing education stops working.
Path B has two halves that look alike in the letter and behave nothing alike in practice. The Board calls one remediation and the other additional coursework, and the difference is who is allowed to teach it.
The distinction the deficiency notice buries
“Missing 4 credits” is a graduate-credit problem.Remediation — the overall unit floor, any missing core content area, the advanced-coursework block, and the three-semester-unit law and ethics course — must be graduate level, from a regionally or nationally accredited or BPPE-approved school. Continuing education courses are not accepted for any of it.
Additional coursework — the 12-hour California law and ethics course and the other California topics — may come from an acceptable continuing education provider.
Same word on the same page of the same notice. One of them is a few hundred dollars. The other is a semester of graduate tuition, per course, and it is the one the letter was almost certainly talking about.
What only a graduate school can fix
| Requirement | What it takes | The detail people miss |
|---|---|---|
| The overall unit floor | 48 semester units, or 60 if your program began after 1 August 2012 or you graduated after 31 December 2018 | Up to 12 semester units of remediation are accepted toward the floor. |
| Any missing core content area | 3 semester units each, at graduate level | The LPCC scheme names 13 of them. The ones out-of-state applicants most often lack are psychopharmacology, addictions counseling, crisis or trauma counseling, and advanced theories and techniques. |
| The advanced-coursework block | 15 semester units on specific treatment issues or populations | Core content area courses cannot be double-counted into this. |
| The 3-semester-unit law and ethics course | 3 semester units, if your degree's version was shorter | Distinct from the 12-hour California law and ethics course, which CE does satisfy. Two different requirements, similar names. |
Remediation coursework may count toward more than one of these at once, but a core content area course cannot be counted into the advanced-coursework block.
What a continuing education provider can fix
Nine courses, and Path A applicants owe only the first four. Everything here is available from acceptable continuing education providers, which is why this half is the cheap half.
| Course | Length | Who owes it |
|---|---|---|
| California law and professional ethics | 12 hours | Both paths |
| Child abuse assessment and reporting | 7 hours | Both paths |
| California cultures and the social and psychological implications of socioeconomic position | 15 hours or 1 semester unit | Both paths |
| Suicide risk assessment and intervention | 6 hours | Both paths |
| Human sexuality | 10 hours | Path B only |
| Spousal or partner abuse assessment, detection and intervention | 15 hours | Path B only |
| Aging and long-term care, including elder and dependent adult abuse | 10 hours | Path B only |
| Substance use disorders and co-occurring conditions | 15 hours | Path B only |
| Mental health recovery-oriented care | 45 hours or 3 semester units | Path B only |
Transcribed from the Board’s LMFT out-of-state requirements chart, whose filename carries the stamp 01012016, and from the LPCC and LCSW out-of-state guides. Where the chart and the statute could be read differently, the statute above is what is quoted. Check your own license’s current guide before spending money on any of it.
The 3,000 hours
Time spent licensed converts into hours. Time spent unlicensed does not.
This is the second question the group asks, and the answer is better than most people expect — with one condition that does most of the work.
An applicant currently licensed at the highest independent level in a U.S. jurisdiction whose own scheme required at least 3,000 supervised hours does not submit experience verification at all.
The statute directs the Board to accept, as qualifying supervised experience, the time you held an active license in good standing in another state or country at the highest level for independent practice — at 100 hours per month, up to a maximum of 1,200 hours. No verification of the underlying work is required for the converted portion.
1,200 hours is 12 months of the conversion and 40% of the 3,000 you need. The rest has to be real, documented, substantially equivalent supervised experience — and if you were never licensed at the highest level, the conversion is worth nothing to you.
What “substantially equivalent” means for the hours you do have to document
| Test | The requirement |
|---|---|
| When it was gained | Within the 6 years before the Board receives your California application. |
| Direct counseling | At least 1,750 hours with individuals, groups, couples or families. |
| Non-clinical | No more than 1,250 hours of supervision, testing, report writing, advocacy and training. |
| Who supervised it | A licensed mental health professional at the highest level for independent practice, licensed at least two years before supervising you, active and in good standing throughout. |
If you are still gaining hours rather than counting old ones, the separate question of whether they can be gained by telehealth from outside California is answered on its own page — and the projection of when the 3,000 actually close is on the hours page.
16 CCR §1833.2
Your out-of-state supervisor has to pass a test too.
There is a regulation devoted entirely to this, and it is where otherwise-good hours are lost. Three conditions, and the third one is the escape hatch nobody knows about.
| §1833.2 | What it requires of the person who supervised you |
|---|---|
| (a)(1) | At the time of supervision they were licensed or certified in that jurisdiction, and the license was current and active and not under suspension or probation. |
| (a)(2) | They had been licensed or certified there for at least two of the five years immediately before supervising you — as a psychologist, clinical social worker, board-certified psychiatrist, professional clinical counselor, marriage and family therapist or similarly titled practitioner, or an equivalent license permitting independent clinical practice. |
| (a)(3) | In a jurisdiction that does not license marriage and family therapists at all, supervision may instead come from someone who held clinical membership in the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy for at least two years and kept it throughout the period of supervision. |
Subdivision (a)(3) is the provision that rescues hours gained in states with no MFT license. It is rarely cited and it is the reason a flat “those hours won’t count” is often wrong.
What it costs
The Board’s own out-of-state forms print the old fees.
Board fees were cut by roughly half on 1 July 2026 and revert on 30 June 2030. The out-of-state application PDFs still show the pre-reduction figures, so a number read off one of them is not what you will be charged.
Rather than reprint figures from a document that has not caught up, the current arithmetic — application, examination and initial license, at the rates in force now — is kept on the fee page, which also carries the two things the headline reduction leaves out. One of them applies to you specifically: the $49 hard-card fingerprint fee for applicants outside California was not reduced.
Three things to settle before you send anything
- Which path you are on. Paying a Path B application fee to discover you qualified for Path A is a refundable mistake in nobody’s policy — the application fee is earned and nonrefundable.
- Whether your deficiency is remediation or additional coursework. The first cannot be bought from a continuing education provider at any price.
- Whether your supervisor met §1833.2 at the time. That is a fact about a past date and it does not improve with waiting.
Once you are through, the two waits that follow are the exams and the Board’s own processing — real pass rates and real processing times are both transcribed from board packets.
Where every figure came from
Sources.
The statute
The Board’s own documents
- Requirements for out-of-state and out-of-country applicants for LMFT licensure — the Path A and Path B chart, filename stamped 01012016
- LMFT out-of-state application flowchart
- Application for LMFT licensure, Path B, out-of-state — the eligibility wording quoted above, and pre-reduction fees
- Guide to requirements for out-of-state and out-of-country applicants for LPCC licensure — the fullest of the three, and the source for the remediation-versus-additional distinction
- LPCC degree requirements — the thirteen core content areas
- Statutes and regulations guide for clinical social workers — the LCSW Path A and Path B conditions
- Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist — the Board’s applicant page, where the current forms are listed
Where this page describes a requirement, the Board document carrying it is listed so you can read the wording yourself. The LMFT requirements chart is cited as a chart: its filename stamp is 01012016, and it is not the law. Nothing here is legal advice, and an evaluation of your own transcript is a decision only the Board makes.
