Certified, not licensed — and why the word matters
The distinction sounds pedantic until a search comes back empty. “CNA license” is what everyone types, including employers, but it describes a thing that does not exist in most states:
- RN and LPN/LVN hold a license issued by a board of nursing, verified on Nursys QuickConfirm or with the board directly.
- CNA / nurse aide holds a certification, and their entry lives on a state nurse aide registry. Federal rules require states to maintain these registries for nurse aides working in Medicare- and Medicaid-certified facilities, which is why every state has one and why they are structured similarly.
So a CNA searched in Nursys returns nothing — not because anything is wrong with the certification, but because it was never the right system. That is the single commonest reason a valid CNA appears “unverifiable” to an employer.
What a nurse aide registry shows that a license lookup does not
This is the part employers most often miss, and it is the reason registries exist at all. A nurse aide registry is not simply a list of who is certified. It also records substantiated findings of abuse, neglect, or misappropriation of a resident’s property.
A finding of that kind generally bars the person from working in a certified nursing facility, and it is published on the registry rather than handled as a license disciplinary action, because there is no license to act against. There is no equivalent field in an RN or LPN lookup, where discipline is a board action against a license.
The practical consequence: checking a CNA’s status means reading both the certification status and any findings section. A certification can read active while a finding is recorded, and the finding is the part that governs whether the person may be employed in a certified facility. What each registry publishes, and for how long, is set by the state.
Finding your certificate or registry number
Most registry lookups accept a name, but a certificate number returns an unambiguous result — useful when the name is common, or has changed. If you do not have it:
- Check the certificate or wallet card issued when you completed your competency evaluation.
- Search the registry by name and date of birth where the registry supports it; most return the number alongside the record.
- Ask a previous employer in a certified facility — they were required to verify your registry status before you started, so they held the number.
- Contact the registry directly. The board of nursing is the right first call in states where the board runs the registry, and can usually redirect you where it does not.
How to find your state’s nurse aide registry
Registries are state-run and organized differently from state to state, but the path is consistent:
- Search for your state’s nurse aide registry — typically hosted by the state health department, and in some states by the board of nursing.
- Use the registry’s lookup, searching by name or certificate number.
- Confirm the certification is active, note the expiry, and read any findings section.
Each state page links to that state’s board of nursing, which is the right starting point where the board runs the registry. We deliberately do not publish per-state registry fees, renewal periods, or requirements: those are set by each state and change, and a figure repeated here would be quoted as authoritative long after it stopped being true.
Verifying a CNA as an employer
Employers hiring into Medicare- or Medicaid-certified facilities are generally required to check the registry before the person starts, and to check the registry of any state where the applicant has worked as an aide — not only the state doing the hiring. A certification is a state credential and does not travel, so a clean record in one state says nothing about another.
If you are verifying nurses as well as aides, the systems differ and so do the traps — see the employer verification workflow for RN, LPN and APRN, where the pitfall is the opposite one: the record exists, and the question is what type of license it is.
Does the nursing compact cover CNAs?
No. The Nurse Licensure Compact covers RN and LPN/LVN licenses only. There is no multistate CNA certification, and a certification from one state does not carry to another through the compact — see is there a compact license for CNAs? Moving states generally means applying to the new state’s registry, often by reciprocity, which is a registry process and has nothing to do with the compact.