Annual Licensing Database Snapshot: 2025

KRRC Database 2025 Release:

Our mission at the Knee Regulatory Research Center is to provide a resource for professionals, policymakers, and researchers about the scale, scope, and specific requirements of occupational licenses in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. As a part of that mission, we maintain a database of licensing requirements freely available on our website. The database grew out of a Department of Labor grant-funded project for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Over time, it grew to be a resource to track the requirements for any profession licensed in the US. We update the database on a regular basis to ensure the data reflects the current regulatory landscape.

In 2023, we began providing an annual snapshot of licensing requirements as a resource for researchers who want to use our data to estimate the effect of specific licensing requirements and for policymakers to follow changes in requirements over time. We strive to make the specific requirements as comparable between states and across occupations as possible. We provide a full explanation of the data and walk through the Audiologist profession as an example in Norris, Timmons, Kelley, and Carneal  (2024).

For 2025, we updated all 77 professions in the 2024 database release and added 19 new professions.

The 2025 data is available at the bottom of the page downloadable in Excel .xlsx and Stata .dat.

Data Gathering Process:

For the 2025 update, the team began gathering data in January 2025 and finished in December 2025. Researchers relied only on information directly from state government sources, as data from others like industry groups is frequently out of date. Requirements are found in a variety of locations, including state laws, administrative codes, agency communications, and licensing board websites. The authority for licensing boards is created in statute, yet requirements can be found in statute, administrative code, or delegated to licensing boards directly. When information was not publicly available, researchers communicated with licensing boards directly via email or phone. For example, Colorado and Delaware do not announce licensing renewal fees publicly before the renewal date, so our researchers would email or call licensing authorities directly to get the renewal fees. In cases where representatives from those states would not respond, we left the fee blank.

In an attempt to improve the usability of the data for researchers, this release removes the Notes tab for each requirement. This information can still be found and updated in our database for those who want more information about specific requirements. We also standardized the licensing requirements between professions. For education and training requirements, we list the requirement in hours. We relied on the common full-time working hours to make the requirements comparable across professions, unless full-time was explicitly defined as fewer hours in legislation. We also prorate each renewal fee and continuing education hour requirement to a biennial renewal period, because that is the most common length of time.

We added a variable for multiple pathways. Some professions allow applicants to become eligible through multiple combinations of education and experience. For instance, you may need 8 total years of education and experience, which can be through an Associate’s degree and 6 years of experience, a Bachelor’s Degree and 4 years of experience, or a Master’s degree and 3 years of experience. We listed the most common or reasonable education requirement and the corresponding experience requirement. Multiple pathways also signify the ability to use an apprenticeship in lieu of an education program.

We changed the names of some of the variables for ease to work with, including Renewal_Fee, Continuing_Education, English_Language, Exams, Experience, Initial_Fee, and Regulation.