I live in NY and will be applying for my LBA in June. Does anyone know how this would work if I want to move to another state that requires a license? One of 164 questions we collected about state licensure — by a wide margin the largest thing practitioners ask about, and the one with the least reliable information around it.

Practising across state lines: what travels with you, what doesn’t, and who actually decides

Certification is national. A licence isn’t. Almost every cross-state problem in this field comes from that one asymmetry, and it shows up in four different disguises.

The rule underneath all four

Your BACB certification is issued by a certifying board and it goes where you go. A state licence is permission from one state government, and it stops at that state’s border. Moving, supervising remotely, or delivering telehealth doesn’t change your certification at all — it changes which state’s licensing law you’re standing under. If that distinction is new, start with our page on certification versus licensure.

1. “I’m moving states”

Your certification comes with you. Your licence doesn’t — it belongs to the state that issued it, and it doesn’t convert automatically into another state’s. Expect a fresh application under the new state’s rules, which may differ from the ones you met the first time.

Practical order, before the move rather than after:

Find the new state’s board and read its requirements yourself.
Ask whether it licenses behavior analysts at all — not every state does.
Ask what it needs beyond BACB certification: application, fees, supervised hours, a jurisprudence exam and its own renewal cycle are all common.
Ask how long processing takes. That number, not the paperwork, is what decides your start date.

2. “My supervisor is in another state”

Several people asked a version of this: my supervisor is in one state, I’m accruing fieldwork in another, and my state licenses behavior analysts — does my supervisor need a licence here?

That is a real question with a state-specific answer, and it’s the board’s answer, not your supervisor’s and not your employer’s. Ask the board in the state where the work happens, in writing, before the arrangement starts. Getting this wrong is expensive in the direction that matters: hours you have already accrued.

Ask in writing and keep the answer. A verbal “that’s fine” from anyone — employer, supervisor, or a helpful voice on a phone line — isn’t something you can produce later. You are the one who carries the consequence of a miscounted or disallowed arrangement, so you should be the one holding the evidence. That’s the same principle as keeping your own supervision records, which we cover in our page on supervision.

3. “I want to offer remote supervision to people in other states”

This came up from a practitioner who’d started taking enquiries nationwide and wanted to be careful. That instinct is right. Offering paid supervision into a state means asking whether that state regulates what you’re doing there — and each state answers for itself. There is no single national answer, and a colleague’s experience in one state doesn’t transfer to another.

4. “Can I deliver services by telehealth across a state line?”

Generally the state that matters is where the client is, not where you’re. States have taken meaningfully different approaches to out-of-state practitioners, and some have changed their rules in recent years. Treat any advice more specific than that — including this sentence — as a prompt to check with the board rather than a conclusion.

Why we’re not going to list the fifty states here

You will find pages that do. Be careful with them, because state licensure rules change, and a page that was right when it was written isn’t obviously wrong when it goes stale — it just sits there looking authoritative.

The thing at stake is whether you may lawfully practise, and a confident wrong answer about that is worse than no answer at all. So the honest position is this: the authority is the board in the state where the work happens. Not a certifying body, not an employer, not a recruiter, and not us. What we can do is tell you exactly what to ask them, which is what this page is for.

What to ask any state board, in one message

Does this state license behavior analysts, and is a licence required to do the work I’m describing?
I hold BACB certification — what else does the licence require?
My supervisor / my client is in another state. Whose licence rules apply?
How long does processing take, and can I work in any capacity while it’s pending?
What is the renewal cycle, and does it require continuing education separate from my certification?

That last one catches people. A state renewal and a BACB recertification are two different clocks with two different requirements, and the continuing education one accepts isn’t automatically the other’s. Our guide to how CEUs work covers the BACB side.

More on credentials

Written by Special Learning’s clinical team from questions practitioners actually asked in public forums. This page deliberately states no individual state’s requirements: those change, and the authority is the licensing board in the state where the work happens. General information, not legal advice about your situation.

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