Excerpt:
Texas, Tennessee, and Oregon are the states where licensing requirements for people looking to get into a new line of work are the most demanding, a new study has found.
The study from the Washington, D.C.,-based Archbridge Institute looked at the number of tasks and tests that people seeking professional qualifications need to pass before they’re allowed to practice their trade in each state.
Texas came in with a barrier score of 9.33 out of 10 and a perfect 10 out of 10 for the total number of licensing requirements. Tennessee had a barrier score of 9.5 and a license score of 7.66.
Oregon came in with a perfect 10 in both categories.
Kansas, Missouri, Wyoming, Indiana, and New York were the states with the lowest occupational regulatory burdens.
Broken down by occupation, the jobs with the most number of tests and licenses included addictions counselor, lawyer, architect, audiologist and barber.
Some of the easiest lines of work to get into from a licensing perspective were car sales, dental radiography, geophysics, public accounting, and lead removal.
The Archbridge study contains a number of surprising findings.
Requirements for dentists and dental hygienists are the same. Cosmetologists have more barriers to entry for their field than engineers do. And the number of barriers for registered nurses is the same as the number for surgeons.
There’s a large amount of variance from state to state in the difficulty and intensity of different certifications that it’s difficult for any comprehensive study to capture and normalize for the purpose of rankings.
Read the full article at The Hill.
Read the 2025 State Occupational Licensing Index here.
The Hill
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