AAMFT reports twenty-four states with streamlined licensure by endorsement, of which seventeen adopted its model law. The remaining seven got there on their own and are not named anywhere published, so a state's absence from the confirmed list proves nothing.
This is the most consequential gap in the published information about this profession, and almost nothing acknowledges it exists.
The arithmetic
AAMFT reports that twenty-four states have enacted streamlined licensure by endorsement for marriage and family therapists. Seventeen of those adopted its Access MFTs model law, and those seventeen can be identified by name from the association's own dated announcements reconciled against the underlying bills and regulations.
The other seven are described only as having reached the same destination independently. They are not listed, not mapped, and not named in any source we have been able to find.
That leaves thirty-six jurisdictions in an unresolved category, seven of which are as good as the confirmed seventeen and twenty-nine of which are not. Nobody outside those boards appears to know which is which.
Why this matters more than it sounds
Every published guide to this subject, including the honest ones, works from the list of seventeen. A therapist researching a move to a state not on that list reads that its status is unconfirmed, reasonably interprets that as bad news, and plans around a full application.
For roughly one in five of them, that is wrong. The state has a streamlined route, the board would have said so, and the therapist spent weeks assembling transcripts and supervision logs nobody was going to ask for.
The error runs the other way too. Somebody may choose a confirmed adopting state over a closer or more suitable one, on the belief that the alternative is harder, when both are equally light.
How a state gets there without the model law
The most common route is a universal recognition statute. A number of states have passed laws directing every licensing board to issue a license to an applicant already licensed and in good standing elsewhere, without profession-specific analysis. Arizona is the documented example: it counts among the seventeen but arrived through exactly this kind of general law rather than anything about marriage and family therapy.
If Arizona reached the confirmed list this way, other states with similar general statutes may have reached the same place without anyone attributing it to this profession's reform effort. That is a plausible account of where several of the seven come from.
The second route is a board amending its own endorsement rules. Oklahoma did this and is confirmed, but only because the association announced it. A board elsewhere making the same change without an announcement would produce exactly the invisible outcome described here.
Finding out about your state in one call
Do not ask whether the state participates in Access MFTs. That is a brand name, not a statute, and board staff may not recognize it even where the state adopted the model.
Ask instead whether there is a pathway for an applicant who already holds an unrestricted independent license in another state, and whether that pathway waives review of graduate coursework and supervised clinical hours.
That question describes the substance without depending on vocabulary, and it is answerable in a minute by anyone who processes applications. The answer determines the entire shape of your application, because the education and experience review is the part that takes months.
What we do with this
This site marks the seventeen as confirmed and everything else as unverified, and we mean unverified in the narrow sense: we have not established what that state does. It is not a claim that endorsement is difficult there.
Where a state is unverified and you are seriously considering it, the honest answer is that we will ask the board rather than guess. That is slower than a map with every state colored in, and it is the only version of this that does not mislead someone into the wrong plan.
Common questions
- Why does AAMFT not name the other seven?
- It reports the total in advocacy material without maintaining a public roster. The seven are outside its initiative, so it has less reason to track them by name.
- Does that mean my state might already be easy?
- Possibly. Roughly one in five states not on the confirmed list has a comparable route under another name. The only way to know is to ask the board.
- How could a state do this without the model law?
- Most often through a universal recognition statute covering every licensed profession, or by amending its own endorsement rules directly.
- Is a state on neither list definitely hard?
- No. It means unconfirmed. Absence from a list is a prompt to ask, never a finding.
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