Nursing Wiki

State Boards of Nursing Directory

A board of nursing is the state agency that issues nursing licences, approves nursing programmes, investigates complaints and disciplines licensees. It is the only body that can grant or take away the authority to practise, and its duty runs to the public rather than to nurses. See nurse practice acts and boards of nursing.

This directory lists the board for every state and the District of Columbia, the separate boards that regulate practical nursing in a few states, and the territorial boards. Every link was checked on 9 September 2026.

When to use the board rather than anything else

Four questions belong to a board and to nobody else: whether a specific activity is inside a nurse's scope in that state, what a licence renewal requires, how to become licensed by endorsement after moving, and what happens after a complaint.

Guidance from national organisations describes what regulators generally expect. A board position statement or rule in the state where the nurse works is the version that governs. Where the two disagree, the board wins.

Verifying a licence

Most boards feed licensure and disciplinary data to Nursys, the national verification service run by the regulators' own coordinating body, which is free to search and shows whether a licence is current and whether it is multistate. A few states run their own lookup instead, Ohio's eLicense being one example.

Employers and agencies should verify there rather than accepting a copy of a licence. See nurse staffing agencies and Nurse Licensure Compact.

The boards

Separate practical nursing boards

Most states regulate registered and practical nursing through one board. A few keep a second board for practical or vocational nursing, which is why a practical nurse in those states deals with a different agency, different rules and different renewal requirements from a registered nurse next to them.

Counting these separate boards and the territories is how the national total reaches 59 regulatory bodies rather than 51. See levels of nursing.

Territories

Territorial boards publish less and change addresses more often, so the most reliable route is the contact page each keeps with the regulators' national organisation.

A note on checking

Every address above was requested on 9 September 2026. Fifteen of them sit behind bot protection that refuses automated requests, including the Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota and Utah boards. Those pages open normally in a browser, and their addresses come from the state pages in this wiki, but they could not be machine-confirmed and are marked here rather than presented as verified.

Board web addresses move when a state reorganises its licensing agencies, which happens more often than the stability of the boards themselves suggests. If a link fails, the national organisation's member board list carries the current address for every board.

Sources

  • U.S. member boards. National Council of State Boards of Nursing. Accessed September 9, 2026.
  • Nursys licence verification. National Council of State Boards of Nursing. Accessed September 9, 2026.
  • About U.S. nursing regulatory bodies. National Council of State Boards of Nursing, for the 59 regulatory bodies. Accessed September 9, 2026.
  • Individual board addresses were taken from the state pages in this wiki and rechecked on 9 September 2026.

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