Where the Nurse Licensure Compact sits in each state’s law

Why the citation matters

Mostly it does not — until it does. If you are checking whether privilege reaches a state, our checker answers that without any of this. The citation matters when someone is going to rely on it in writing: a journalist naming the provision, a compliance file recording the authority, an employer’s counsel confirming that a nurse may practice without a state-issued license.

And it matters because the obvious citation is often the wrong one. Several jurisdictions replaced an earlier compact with the enhanced version, repealing the original sections — which continue to surface in search results and on legal mirrors long after they stopped being law. Our notes record that pattern for Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina and Utah. Arizona is the clearest case: §§ 32-1668 and 32-1669 are repealed, and the live text is at article 2.1.

What the statutes have in common, and where they diverge

Reading 41 of them together surfaces things no single state page shows. Six worth knowing:

• The compact sits at wildly different levels of the code. North Dakota gives it a whole chapter (43-12.4), South Carolina an article of fifteen sections inside the practice act, Maine a subchapter wedged between two others — which is why its sections break a straight numeric run — and Florida a single section.
• One state carries both compacts in one chapter. Iowa titles ch. 152E “Nurse Licensure Compacts”, plural, because the APRN compact lives there too. Finding APRN compact language in Iowa law does not mean APRN privilege exists — see the APRN compact.
• Most statutes describe joining. One describes leaving. Nebraska requires notice of withdrawal to every other party state within thirty days of a repeal — the exit written into the same act as the entry.
• Three jurisdictions legislated the compact’s COST. Almost every statute is silent on money. South Dakota is not: § 36-9-98 enacts the compact and the very next section, § 36-9-99, is headed “General funds not to be used to support compact” — the state legislated how it may not be paid for in the same breath as joining. Guam went the other way and legislated measurement, requiring its board to report quarterly how many nurses hold a Guam multistate license and how many compact nurses from elsewhere are working there, plus an annual fiscal impact report on fee revenue and operating cost to the Speaker. If you want to know what joining actually costs a jurisdiction, those are the only two places the law itself asks.
• A wrong citation is not always a repealed one — sometimes it just moved. Mississippi renumbered: its compact is at § 73-15-201, and the board’s own copy of the section is headed “Formerly cited as MS ST 73-15-22”. An older Mississippi citation is not repealed law, it is live law at a dead address, which fails in a different and more confusing way than Arizona’s repealed sections — the text is still there, the number is not.
• Enactment dates are in the statute; usability is not. Vermont’s Act 64 was signed in June 2021 and membership took effect in February 2022. The statute tells you the first date and nothing about the second, which is why we track three separate dates per jurisdiction.

Every citation we have read

Each links to the jurisdiction’s own code or legislature. Where a citation needs a caveat — a superseded predecessor, an article-level rather than section-level reading — it is on that jurisdiction’s page rather than flattened away here.

What we could not confirm

2 jurisdictions have adopted the compact and are missing from the table above. Both are blocked for the same reason, and it is the only kind that is genuinely hard: the jurisdiction does not publish its own code. We would rather name them than publish a section number we have not read, because a plausible wrong citation is worse than an admitted gap.

• Tennessee — Tennessee does not publish T.C.A. itself. Its code is licensed to a commercial platform, and the Board of Nursing’s own statutes-and-rules page has been retired — the board site now links only to the Secretary of State’s RULES at chapter 1000, which are a different instrument from the statute.
• U.S. Virgin Islands — The Virgin Islands Code is hosted on the same commercial platform as Tennessee’s, reachable only through a session-bound viewer with no citable URL. The Board of Nurse Licensure publishes nothing about the compact on its site, and the territory’s bill tracker exposes no searchable text for it.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Three jurisdictions sat in this list until the obstacle was named rather than assumed: one publishes its statutes through a single-page app whose own API answers a direct request, and two publish theirs as PDFs that defeat text extraction but read perfectly well on screen. None of the three was a question about the law. They were questions about tooling, and they were answered the day someone looked at what was actually in the way.

A further 13 jurisdictions have no compact statute at all, which is a finding rather than a gap: they have not adopted it. Those are the non-compact jurisdictions, and the absence of a citation for them is the substantive answer.

The whole table is downloadable as CSV or JSON, covering all 56 jurisdictions rather than only the cited ones. A blank citation there is never ambiguous: every row says whether it is blank because the jurisdiction has no compact law or because we have not confirmed the section.

Statutory citations are unusually stable — they change on the order of years — which is why we publish them and do not publish fees, continuing-education hours or processing times. Last reviewed 2026-07-31. Confirm anything you are relying on against the linked source; we are an independent reference, not a legal adviser.