Is the person working with my child actually certified? Here’s how to check, in about five minutes

You’re allowed to ask this. Asking isn’t rude, and it isn’t a sign you distrust the person in your living room. Every credential described on this page is publicly verifiable by anyone, deliberately, and good providers expect the question.

Who’s who, in plain words

An RBT being newly qualified isn’t a problem in itself. Everybody starts somewhere, and a well-supervised new technician can be excellent. What matters is that the supervision is real.

The check itself

The Behavior Analyst Certification Board keeps a public registry, and you can look up any certificant yourself. You need their name, spelled as they’d have registered it.

• Ask the person, or the agency, for their full name and which credential they hold — BCBA, BCaBA or RBT.
• Look them up on the BACB’s public registry.
• Check the credential is current, not simply that the name appears.
• Ask who supervises the person working with your child, and look that person up too.

If they hold a credential from a different board — QABA and IBAO are two others you may hear named — that’s a separate organisation with its own separate register, and you check it there. One board can’t confirm another board’s credential. Our guide to the three boards explains how they differ.

What supervision of an RBT actually has to look like

Parents are often told an RBT is “supervised” without ever seeing what that means. The BACB sets a floor, and it’s specific:

• Ongoing supervision covering at least 5% of the hours the RBT spends providing services each calendar month.
• At least two face-to-face, real-time contacts per month. Phone and email don’t count.
• The supervisor must observe the RBT actually delivering services in at least one of those meetings. In-person is preferred; video-conferencing is permitted.
• At least one of the two must be individual, not a group meeting.

Note what that rules out. A supervisor who has never watched your child’s sessions, or who only ever checks in by phone or email, isn’t meeting the standard. Recorded video with nobody interacting in real time may not count either.

Questions worth asking any agency, before you sign

• Who will be in the room with my child each week, and what credential do they hold?
• Who supervises them, and how often will that supervisor observe an actual session?
• May I meet the supervising analyst, and may I speak with the person delivering sessions?
• How will you tell me what my child is working on, and how will I see whether it’s working?
• What happens when I disagree with something in the programme?
• How do you handle staff changes, so my child isn’t restarting with a stranger?

The last three aren’t credential questions and they matter just as much. A fully certified team can still deliver a programme you were never really consulted about.

Certified isn’t the same as licensed

Certification comes from a certifying board. A licence comes from your state government, and in some states practising without one isn’t permitted. These are two different checks with two different authorities, and someone can hold one without the other. Our page on certification versus licensure covers what each one does.

If something feels wrong

Trust that. You know your child. Ask for the supervisor’s name and credential in writing, ask for a meeting, and ask what your child worked on this week. Those three requests are ordinary and a provider meeting the standard can answer all of them. If you can’t get answers, the credentialing board a person claims is the body that handles concerns about that person, and your state board handles licensed practitioners.

And if you’re an adult wondering about someone who worked with you as a child — a question we’ve seen asked, quietly, more than once — the registry is public for you too.

← All our credentialing guides — eight plain-English answers to the questions practitioners and families actually ask.