The Seventeen States That Have Adopted Access MFTs

The count is easy to find and the roster is not, which is a strange situation for something a working therapist might reasonably want to plan around.

Naming the seventeen

Seven states formed the initial cohort in 2024: Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Tennessee and Virginia. Six more were standing by the summer of 2025: Arkansas, Connecticut, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina and West Virginia. Four adopted during the 2026 legislative sessions: Kentucky, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Oklahoma.

That totals seventeen, and it reconciles exactly to the figure AAMFT reports. The reconciliation is the point. Any roster that lands on a different number is either counting announcements as adoptions or has missed one of the states that got there quietly.

Two entries that break the pattern

Oklahoma changed its regulations rather than its statutes. No bill was introduced and none was signed, which means a legislative search would never surface it. The change is real and the board administers it, but the paper trail looks nothing like the others.

Arizona arrived through a general universal recognition law covering every licensed profession in the state, not through anything specific to marriage and family therapy. For an applicant the practical effect is the same, and Arizona is properly counted, but a therapist looking for an MFT bill in the Arizona session records will come away thinking the state did nothing.

Both cases illustrate the same trap: adoption is a change in law or rule, not a press release, and it does not always arrive in the form you expect.

Reading the absences correctly

AAMFT reports twenty-four states with streamlined endorsement and attributes seven of them to independent action outside the initiative. Those seven are not named in any source we have located.

So a state's absence from the list of seventeen is not evidence that endorsement is difficult there. It means only that we have not confirmed it adopted this particular model. Roughly one in five of the remaining states has the same streamlined route under another name, and nobody outside those boards appears to know which ones.

The honest next step for a state not on the list is a call to its board asking specifically whether it has an endorsement or reciprocity pathway that waives review of education and supervised experience for an applicant licensed elsewhere. That is a question board staff can answer in a minute.

Announced is not adopted

Oregon and Wisconsin have announced for their 2027 sessions. An announcement is a statement of intent by advocates, not a change in law, and bills fail routinely for reasons having nothing to do with their merits.

Kentucky is the instructive case. Its bill failed in 2025 and passed in 2026 as House Bill 459. Texas considered one that did not pass. A therapist who moved to Kentucky in 2025 on the strength of the announcement would have arrived to find the old requirements fully in force.

Treating an announcement as settled is the single most common error in published portability writing. It is what made most of the material about the physical therapy compact wrong for years, and it is worth more skepticism than anything else on this subject.