Move Your Professional License to Another State

Licensing Rules for All 50 States and DC

Three professions so far, each covering every state and the District of Columbia. Built from statutes, board rules and fee schedules rather than from anyone else's summary.

Every fact carries the month we last verified it. Anything we could not confirm is marked as unconfirmed rather than filled in with a guess.

License Transfer, Profession by Profession

Every profession here is finished end to end. No partial states, no placeholder pages, and a standing page for each jurisdiction.

• Veterinarians

  Endorsement paths, exam and score transfers, board rules, fee schedules and the deadlines that catch people out. Checked against each board's own statutes.

  Only Kansas still makes you appear in person. The other 50 jurisdictions are fully remote.

• Real Estate Agents

  Reciprocity and license recognition, portable exam scores, errors and omissions requirements, and the states that make you start over.

  New Hampshire's five-state reciprocity list was repealed in 2022. It now takes any state, so anyone working from the old list is wrong.

• Insurance Adjusters

  Which states license adjusters and which do not, how to choose a designated home state, what each state costs to keep, and who files for catastrophe work.

  Iowa began licensing independent adjusters in July 2025. Every comparison table we checked still says it does not.

Licensed in something else? Tell us what you hold and where you want to work. It shapes what we build next.

How to Move a License, Step by Step

You tell us three things and we do the reading. Your profession, the license you already hold, and where you live. That last one catches people out, because in several states residence decides more than the license does. Rhode Island opens its easy real estate door only to residents of Connecticut and Massachusetts. An adjuster living in Ohio has a completely different problem from one living in Texas, and it has nothing to do with what either of them has already passed.

Then you pick your states. One, or fifteen. We order them by how hard they actually are rather than alphabetically, so the cheap wins are visible before you commit to anything expensive. What comes back is a plan for exactly the states you chose, and it covers four things:

• What carries over from the license you already hold, and what quietly does not.
• The real first-year cost, itemized rather than averaged, because the averages hide a tenfold spread.
• How long each state takes, or a plain "not published" where the state sets no standard. We would rather say that than estimate.
• The specific things that go wrong there, each with the official source behind it.

It takes about a minute and there is nothing to sign up for. Nothing you type leaves your browser.

Why Most State Reciprocity Charts Are Wrong

Every one of these professions has a circulating fifty-state comparison table, usually published free by somebody selling courses. They are largely copied from one another, and when we check them against the statutes they tend to break in the same places.

We have now measured that twice. In real estate, industry reciprocity labels were wrong in 7 of the 27 states we re-derived from statute, and a third of the states we checked carried no industry label at all. In insurance adjusting we audited the leading free resources across eight states and found five of the eight demonstrably wrong, which is roughly two and a half times worse. One of them scored zero out of eight and carries no date anywhere on the page.

What makes those numbers matter is that the errors are almost never a stale fee. They are wrong verdicts that cost money or create real exposure.

• New York splits one adjuster license into eleven. The class called "general" quietly omits fidelity and surety, accident and health, and crop. The state's own adjuster page never mentions the split, so you can pay, study, pass, hold a license that says independent adjuster on it, and still be unlicensed for the work you came to do.
• Sixteen states issue no independent adjuster license, and fifteen of those still license public adjusters. Reading the first half of that sentence without the second is how people commit unlicensed practice while believing they are exempt.
• Connecticut's published real estate reciprocity list carries two dead entries. Ohio retired its program in 2023 and Illinois abolished reciprocity in 2026. The list still names both.

Some of this is not really the tables' fault. Regulators document what they license and stay quiet about what they do not, so proving an absence usually means going outside the state's own materials entirely. Colorado does not license independent adjusters, and its own website never says so anywhere. No adjuster page, no nav item, and a site search that returns nothing. The clearest statement of Colorado's own position sits on a third-party site.

So we do the boring version. Primary sources, a date on every fact, and a flag rather than a guess when something will not confirm. When a state's paperwork contradicts its own law, we tell you which one wins and show you both.