Florida

The published process

Practice while the application is pending

Florida publishes no temporary permit and no provisional license for an endorsement applicant in the sources reviewed. What it publishes instead is a compact answer that applies only to nurses arriving from another compact state, and it is narrower than it first reads: "The nurse may practice on the former home state license only UNTIL the multi-state license in the new NLC home state is issued." The board sets no cushion around it — "This should be completed upon moving and the nurse should not delay. There is no grace period." — and forecloses the common assumption that the old license can simply be run to its expiry: "The nurse may not wait until the former license expires to apply in the nurse’s new state of legal residency." For a nurse arriving from a state that is not in the compact, no equivalent bridge appears; the board's own instruction is to apply, and it states only that the applicant "may apply before or after the move." What the board does publish is speed once the file is complete: "When all requirements are met the license will be issued to qualified within 7 days pursuant to Section 456.0145(2)(e), Florida Statutes." Searched for this row: the MOBILE Endorsement requirements, process, and fees blocks, the multi-state upgrade blocks, the license deactivation section, and the processing times section.

Verification of the existing license

The board puts this first in its own ordering, ahead of the application itself: "Contact the state board(s) in which a license has been held to request License Verification be sent to Florida. If the state has an online verification including disciplinary actions, we will accept the online verification." Examination scores travel separately: "Transfer National Examination scores from NCSBN." The cost is not stated: the fee block reads "Fee varies for License Verification".

Fingerprints and the background check

Florida requires electronic fingerprints of every applicant and states a recent statutory basis for it: "Florida passed House Bill 975 following the 2024 legislative session, which requires this profession to complete electronic fingerprinting. Your application cannot be approved until this requirement, along with all other licensure criteria, has been met." The mechanics: "Applicants for initial licensure must use a Livescan service provider to submit a set of fingerprints to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) for the purpose of conducting a search for any Florida and national criminal history records that may pertain to applicant." Results are routed through a clearinghouse and retained: "The results of the search will be returned to the Care Provider Background Screening Clearinghouse and made available to the Department for consideration during the licensure process. The fingerprints submitted by the applicant will be retained by FDLE and the Clearinghouse." The board warns about the single most common way the step fails: "It is important to use the correct Originating Agency Identification (ORI) when submitting fingerprints. If you do not provide an ORI number or if you provide an incorrect ORI number to the service provider, the board office" will not "receive your fingerprint results". Responsibility and cost sit with the applicant: "The applicant is fully responsible for selecting the service provider and ensuring the results are reported to the Department." "All costs for conducting a criminal history background screening are borne by the applicant." For the multi-state upgrade, the prints carry a freshness rule: "Livescan results must be submitted no more than 90 days prior to the submission of the application and fees or anytime within a year of applying."

The three rows above answer the questions an experienced adviser raises first, from the board's own published documents, or record that a question is not answered in them.

Fees, as stated in the sources

All quoted; none totaled. From the board's own fee blocks, retrieved Aug 26, 2026.

MOBILE Endorsement. "$110.00 Application and Licensing Fee to Board of Nursing". Two further amounts are named but not stated: "Fee varies for Livescan Service Provider" and "Fee varies for License Verification".

Multi-state upgrade. "$100.00 Application and Licensing Fee to the Board of Nursing", again with "Fee varies for Livescan Service Provider".

Licensure by examination, for comparison. The same "$110.00 Application and Licensing Fee to Board of Nursing", plus an amount payable elsewhere: "$200.00 to Pearson VUE, Testing Vendor". The board publishes this route as the fallback for an applicant who cannot meet the two-year practice condition, so its cost is quoted here rather than left to be discovered.

What the compact privilege costs a nurse who does not move. Nothing to Florida, as the board states it: "If you are a nurse practicing in Florida under the privilege of a different party state license, you are not required to pay any fees or complete continuing education requirements for the State of Florida."

What any of this means for a particular application is for the board to determine.

Timelines, as stated in the sources

All quoted; none calculated. The board publishes three different review clocks across the same page, and all three are reproduced.

On the statutory review period: "Florida law provides that an initial application must be reviewed within 30 days." The multi-state upgrade process block states the same figure differently: "All applications are reviewed for completeness within 30 days of receipt of the application and fees."

On the endorsement route's own stated review time: "Please allow up to 10 business days for initial review of new applications. All applications and document submissions are reviewed in the order they are received."

On documents that arrive after that first review: "Any documents submitted after initial review will be updated within 14 business days of receipt."

On issuance: "When all requirements are met the license will be issued to qualified within 7 days pursuant to Section 456.0145(2)(e), Florida Statutes."

On the practice condition: "at least two years during the four-year period immediately preceding the date of submission of this application", and, for discipline, "the five years immediately preceding the date of submission of the application."

On fingerprint freshness, for the upgrade: "Livescan results must be submitted no more than 90 days prior to the submission of the application and fees or anytime within a year of applying."

On the life of an application: "Applications are valid for 1 year. After that time, the application will be expired if not approved."

On moving, as the board frames it: "There is no grace period."

On the department's own processing queue: the Department of Health's licensing dashboard, reached from the Processing Times section of the board's page, reports a "Days to Process" figure by profession. It is a report of where the department stood on the day it was read rather than a timeframe the board undertakes, so it is recorded here as an observation and not as a quotation this page maintains; a reader arriving later should expect it to have moved and should read the dashboard for where it stands today. Observed Aug 29, 2026: 25 days for Registered Nurse and 24 days for Licensed Practical Nurse.

What any of this means for a particular application is for the board to determine.

Change log

Aug 26, 2026 · Page created. Captured first-party and appended mechanically: the board's combined RN and LPN licensing page, including the MOBILE Endorsement requirements, process, and fee blocks, the multi-state upgrade blocks, the license deactivation section, and the processing times section, retrieved Aug 26, 2026. Findings recorded rather than smoothed: (1) Florida does not publish "licensure by endorsement" as a heading — its route is the "MOBILE Endorsement pathway" under section 456.0145, Florida Statutes, and a reader searching the board's site for the ordinary phrase will not meet it; (2) the route carries a practice-recency condition that closes it to nurses returning from a break, "at least two years during the four-year period immediately preceding the date of submission of this application", with examination named as the alternative; (3) it also closes on history in ways most states' endorsement routes do not, requiring that the applicant "Must not have ever been reported to the National Practitioner Data Bank" subject to stated exceptions, and have had no disciplinary action in five years; (4) no temporary permit or provisional license for an endorsement applicant appears anywhere in the sources reviewed, and the only bridge published is the compact one, which reaches only nurses arriving from another compact state and expires the moment the new license issues; (5) the board states plainly that "There is no grace period." for a nurse who has moved, which contradicts the widespread assumption that the old license runs to its expiry date; (6) three different review clocks appear on the same page — a statutory 30 days, an endorsement-specific 10 business days, and 14 business days for later documents — alongside a 7-day issuance requirement, and all are reproduced rather than reconciled; (7) the endorsement and upgrade fees differ by ten dollars, $110.00 and $100.00, and three cost lines are published as varying rather than stated, so no total is possible and none is offered; (8) no telephone number for the board appears in the sources reviewed, and the only number on the page belongs to the examination vendor; (9) the page's tabbed sections return their full content on the plain text transport and only their labels when rendered in a browser, and a guessed endorsement URL returned 404 on both — facts about the transport and the address, recorded so a later reviewer does not read either as a missing source. Capture pending: the MOBILE and endorsement application PDFs, the multi-state upgrade application, the background screening form and MQA screening page, the final nurse compact rules page, the live processing-times dashboard, and the statutes and rules chapters. Internet Archive captures: to be added. Reviewer: Carrie Schluter, reviewed Aug 30, 2026. Corrections on the record in this log: hello@fieldassembly.net.

Aug 29, 2026 · Source map corrected; the processing-times dashboard is now captured. The dashboard was never unreachable, only unaddressed. The bare host qlik.floridahealth.gov redirects to floridahealth.gov and does not reach the document; the address of record is the Qlik single-object embed the board itself carries in the Processing Times section of its RN and LPN page, and that full address now stands in the source map in place of the bare host. The source was captured Aug 29, 2026 through a browser transport — no scripted transport renders it — and retained as a supplemental packet; the source-map row no longer describes it as pending, because it is not. Findings: (1) the figures the dashboard reports are a queue observation under the charter's volatile-figures rule, a report of where the department stood on the day it was read rather than a timeframe the board undertakes, and they are carried in the timelines section as a dated observation and nowhere as a maintained quotation; (2) only the two professions this page covers are carried, Registered Nurse and Licensed Practical Nurse, and the dashboard's other categories are left where the department publishes them; (3) the board's mandatory timeframes — the 30-day statutory review, the 10 business days for initial endorsement review, the 14 business days for later documents, and the 7-day issuance requirement — are unchanged and untouched, and the observed queue sits alongside them rather than replacing them; (4) the capture-pending list stated in the Aug 26, 2026 entry above is superseded from this date to the extent of this source, which that entry listed as pending and which is now captured. Capture pending, otherwise unchanged from Aug 26: the MOBILE and endorsement application PDFs, the multi-state upgrade application, the background screening form and MQA screening page, the final nurse compact rules page, and the statutes and rules chapters. Internet Archive captures: to be added. Reviewer: Carrie Schluter, reviewed Aug 30, 2026. Corrections on the record in this log: hello@fieldassembly.net.

Aug 30, 2026 · A quotation corrected on the working page; capture recipe adopted. The fingerprint passage quoted in section 02 of the markdown working page carried the characters ** around "will not" inside the quotation marks. Those asterisks were not the board's: the Aug 29 capture converted the page HTML to markdown, and the converter wrote the board's bold emphasis as markdown asterisks, which the working page then reproduced as though they were the board's own text. The error was ours; the asterisks are removed and the quotation now carries the board's words alone. This page rendered the same passage with the emphasis outside the quotation marks and is unchanged. On the same date the source was re-captured by the new capture recipe tools/recipes/florida.json (transport curl with the pinned browser user-agent; the board's host refuses a bare fetch), which supersedes the hand methods of the earlier captures; the fresh capture confirms every other quotation on this page unchanged. Reviewer: Carrie Schluter, reviewed Aug 30, 2026. Corrections on the record in this log: hello@fieldassembly.net.