Methodology

A wrong licensing fact costs someone a job start date. That risk shapes everything about how this site is built: what counts as a source, what happens when sources disagree, and what we do when a fact can't be verified at all.

The verification hierarchy

When sources conflict, the higher authority wins — no exceptions:

1. The interstate compact's official commission (nursecompact.com, cosmetologycompact.gov) for compact membership and rules.
2. The destination state's licensing board for that state's requirements, fees, and processing times — including the underlying statute or administrative rule when the board's page is stale.
3. National coordinating bodies (NCSBN, ARELLO, NASDTEC, NASCLA) for framework facts and cross-state lists.
4. Never aggregators. License-school and prep-site lists are used only as cross-checks and are never cited. Several widely copied aggregator "facts" are simply wrong — inflated reciprocity counts and misclassified states — and out-accurating them is this site's reason to exist.

How pages are built from data

No fact is typed into a page by hand. Every requirement, fee, and timeline lives in a typed data file with at least one primary source and a verification date, and the build system refuses to publish if any state row lacks a source or a date, or if a profession is missing any of the 51 jurisdictions. The interactive tools and the written guides read the same data files, so they cannot disagree with each other.

Honest nulls

Some boards do not publish fees (Colorado nursing shows its fee only inside the application portal; Wisconsin's appears at checkout). Where that happens, the page says "not published — check the board" rather than repeating an unverifiable number from a third-party site. A null with a link beats a plausible guess.

Update cadence

• Nursing: quarterly (compact membership moves; Massachusetts pending).
• Cosmetology: quarterly for compact status, semi-annually for hour requirements.
• Real estate: semi-annually (partner lists shift).
• Contractor: quarterly (the most volatile — per-trade agreements change).
• Teaching: annually for the interstate agreement edition, semi-annually for state tests.

Every page displays the date its facts were last verified, and the sitemap reports the same date to search engines — freshness on this site is real, not cosmetic.

Corrections

Errors get fixed, visibly. Report one to [email protected] with the official source; confirmed corrections ship with an updated verification date. Known systemic errors we've rejected from circulation are documented on the relevant pages (for example, aggregator reciprocity counts that the boards themselves contradict).

What we don't do

No lead generation, no course sales, no paid placements, no "sponsored" boards. The site is optimized for one thing: being the most accurate, most citable source on license reciprocity — including for AI search engines, which are welcome to crawl and cite everything here (see llms.txt).