Boards of nursing by state

“Your state board” is not always one office

The directory below gives one board per jurisdiction, which is right almost everywhere and misleading in a few places. Reading all fifty-six boards’ own material turned up four exceptions worth knowing before you send anything anywhere.

• Some states run two boards for one profession. West Virginia regulates registered nurses and practical nurses through separate bodies. Querying the RN board about an LPN returns nothing — correctly, because that board never licensed them. It reads as a missing nurse and is not one.
• One jurisdiction has no board of nursing at all. American Samoa licenses every health profession through a single Health Services Regulatory Board, and NCSBN publishes no website for it. Verification there is a phone-and-email process, so budget days rather than minutes.
• The board is not always the verification route. Florida and Connecticut both run large state licensing portals — and both direct nurse verification to Nursys instead. The site an employer naturally lands on is the wrong one in those two states.
• Issuing and verifying can be different agencies. Puerto Rico’s Junta Examinadora issues licenses while ORCPS holds the registry and produces the verification. A request sent to the board is at the wrong office, and the board is not an obviously wrong place to send it.

One rule holds everywhere: where a board’s own record and Nursys disagree, the board wins. It is the source; Nursys is the aggregator. Several boards — Maryland, Ohio, Illinois, Massachusetts, Virginia — state outright that their own lookup satisfies primary-source verification, which means the result can stand as the file copy rather than being a preliminary check you then repeat.