AAMFT evaluated the interstate compact model and decided against it in 2025, building the Access MFTs model law instead. No MFT compact is in development, and the association that would have to sponsor one has publicly committed to a different route.
This question arrives in one of two moods. Hopeful, from someone planning a move and wondering whether to wait. Resigned, from someone who has already assembled three separate applications and suspects there should have been a better way.
The answer is the same in both cases, and it is more settled than most people expect.
What was actually decided
In 2025 AAMFT worked through the compact question and came down against it. The reasoning is visible in what the association built instead.
A compact requires a critical mass of states to enact identical text. It requires a commission to govern the agreement, a shared data system to track licenses and discipline across the membership, and a period of negotiation long enough to produce eligibility standards that every participating state will accept. Only after all of that does the first privilege issue to a single therapist.
Access MFTs asks each state for a much smaller change to its own endorsement statute. Seventeen states have made that change, four of them during the 2026 legislative sessions alone. A compact effort begun in 2025 would, on any realistic schedule, still be assembling its commission and drafting its rules.
Why the model law is not a stepping stone
It is tempting to read the model law as groundwork, as though enough adoptions would eventually convert into a formal compact. That is not how the two instruments relate.
A compact is a binding agreement among states, and joining one means accepting a shared standard and ceding some authority to the governing commission. A model law does the opposite: each state keeps full control, writes the text into its own code, and administers it through its own board. States frequently amend the model as they adopt it, which is precisely the flexibility that makes adoption fast and precisely what a compact cannot tolerate.
Seventeen states with seventeen slightly different versions of a statute is a reasonable outcome for a model law. It is a failure condition for a compact.
What waiting actually costs
Suppose the association reversed course tomorrow. Drafting a compact takes a year or two. Reaching the threshold number of enacting states takes several more. Standing up the commission, the rules and the data system takes longer still. The professions with working compacts spent the better part of a decade getting there, and one of them had to relaunch its agreement partway through.
None of that helps a therapist who needs to see clients in a second state next spring. The cost of waiting is not abstract: it is the referrals not taken, the relocating clients handed off, and the job in the next state not applied for.
The route that exists now
Licensure by endorsement is the mechanism, and it is genuinely lighter in the seventeen adopting states, where a board will issue a license to an experienced therapist without re-auditing a graduate transcript from a decade ago.
In the remaining states it is heavier but still entirely workable, and AAMFT reports seven further states that reached streamlined endorsement on their own without joining the initiative. It does not name them, which is a reason to call a board rather than a reason to assume the worst.
That is the landscape to plan around. It rewards a therapist who picks target states deliberately and starts the paperwork early, and it does nothing at all for one who waits.
Common questions
- Could a compact still happen someday?
- Nothing prevents it in principle, but it would require the association to reverse a considered decision and then spend years on drafting and state-by-state adoption. No such effort is underway.
- Is the model law a first step toward a compact?
- No. They are alternative designs, not stages. The model law amends each state's own endorsement statute rather than creating a shared privilege governed jointly.
- Should I delay a move until portability improves?
- Generally no. The states that have adopted the model law have already improved, and the ones that have not are unlikely to change on a schedule that fits your plans.
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