The Nurse Licensure Compact

The published process

Practice while the application is pending

For a nurse moving between two party states, the rules state that practice continues on the old license: a nurse who changes primary state of residence from one party state to another "may continue to practice under the existing multistate license while the nurse’s application is processed and a multistate license is issued in the new primary state of residence." Then: "Upon issuance of a new multistate license, the former primary state of residence shall deactivate its multistate license held by the nurse and provide notice to the nurse." The provision that most often surprises: a state-issued temporary permit is not a compact privilege. "A temporary permit, license, or similar temporary authorization to practice issued by a party state to an applicant for licensure shall not grant multistate licensure privileges." A move to a non-party state is treated differently again: "If a party state verifies that a licensee who holds a multistate license changes primary state of residence to a non-party state, the party state shall convert the multistate license to a single state license within fifteen (15) calendar days". — Final Rules 403 and 404, effective January 2, 2024, retrieved Sep 3, 2026

Verification of the existing license

The commission does not publish a verification form. It requires party states to participate in a shared system: all party states shall participate in a coordinated licensure information system, and that participation includes "Participation in the license verification service for endorsement." On application, "with the exception of renewal by a nurse, a party state shall query the Coordinated Licensure Information System to ascertain the applicant’s current licensure status, previous disciplinary action(s), and member board notifications related to current participation in an alternative program or current significant investigative information." The uniform data set the states furnish includes "the nurse’s name", "jurisdiction of licensure", "license expiration date", and "status of multistate licensure privileges", and states must report it "within fifteen (15) calendar days of the date on which the action is taken." What form a particular board requires of an individual nurse is stated by that board, not here.

Fingerprints and the background check

The sixth uniform licensure requirement is that the applicant "Has submitted to state and federal fingerprint-based criminal background checks". Two further requirements bear on the same record: "Has not been convicted or found guilty, or has entered into an agreed disposition, of a felony offense under applicable state or federal criminal law" and "Has no misdemeanor convictions related to the practice of nursing (determined on a case-by-case basis)". The rules limit what may then be shared: communication between party states about a nurse's eligibility "shall not include any Criminal History Record Information (CHRI) received from the Federal Bureau of Investigation relating to a federal criminal records check performed by a member board under Public Law 92-544." The commission directs questions about an individual record to the board: "Criminal background check (CBC), including past criminal history or disciplinary action".

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

Fees, as stated in the sources

All quoted; none totaled. No fee payable by a nurse — for a multistate license, for an upgrade from a single state license, or for anything else — is stated anywhere in the commission sources reviewed. That absence is a finding, not an omission: the commission publishes fees only as an assessment on the states themselves. "The Commission shall determine the annual assessment to be paid by party states. The assessment formula is a flat fee per party state." Notice of a change to it runs "at least ninety (90) calendar days prior to the Commission meeting to consider the proposed revision."

Fees a nurse pays are set and published by the board of nursing, and the commission says so, listing "Application fees" among the questions that "must be directed to your BON." 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. From the Final Rules effective January 2, 2024 except where noted.

On moving between party states: "A multistate licensee who changes primary state of residence to another party state shall apply for a multistate license in the new party state within 60 days." The commission states the same rule on its home page: "Nurses moving from one compact state to another must apply for licensure in their new primary state of residence within 60 days."

On moving to a non-party state: the party state "shall convert the multistate license to a single state license within fifteen (15) calendar days, and report this conversion to the Coordinated Licensure Information System."

On disclosure of an alternative program: an applicant "shall disclose current participation in an alternative program to any party state, whether upon initial application or within ten (10) calendar days of enrollment in the program."

On reporting to the shared system: "A party state shall report the items in the uniform data set to the Coordinated Licensure Information System within fifteen (15) calendar days of the date on which the action is taken."

On a new state joining: "The Executive Director shall notify party states within fifteen (15) calendar days after a new party state enacts the Compact." "The new party state shall establish an implementation date within twelve (12) months from enactment, or as specified in the enabling language". Before that date: "At least ninety (90) calendar days prior to the new party state implementation date, party states shall notify any active single state licensee with an address in the new party state that the licensee may only hold one multistate license in the primary state of residence."

On the compact's own dates: "The Compact was implemented on January 19, 2018."

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

Change log

Sep 3, 2026 · Sources re-checked; this layer's packet is now reproducible by the repository's own tooling. All ten sources re-captured. The substantive finding is about how this packet was made rather than about the commission: the packet published until today was built by converting the seven HTML pages with pandoc, while tools/recipes/compact.json specified a different extraction entirely. Running the recipe therefore did not reproduce the packet, and never had. That is the one property this project asks of every packet — that re-running a recipe against an unchanged source reproduces the text — and this layer, alone among the fifty-one, did not have it.

The recipe now scopes each commission page to the blocks that hold its prose rather than to the whole document body. Scoping to the body had been a reasonable choice — nursecompact.com serves no main or #content landmark, which is still true and was verified again today — but it also captured the site header, the dropdown navigation and the content-management system's own template markers, forty-five of them across the ten sources, none of which the commission publishes as text. The re-scoped capture carries none, and holds between 1.06 and 3.78 times as much of each page's actual prose as the packet it replaces.

Two limits of the new capture, recorded rather than smoothed. The NCSBN uniform-licensure-requirements page is scoped to its main landmark, which that host does serve, and this captures about nine tenths of what the pandoc conversion held; what falls outside are two links to Journal of Nursing Regulation articles whose addresses are written relative to the page, and the extractor emits a link target only when the page states it absolutely. Neither is quoted here. The three commission PDFs are unaffected by any of this: they are character-for-character identical to the promoted packet once whitespace is collapsed, the signature of the page-break correction described below and of nothing else.

Also corrected in this pass: the capture tool was passing -nopgbrk to pdftotext, which suppressed the character marking a page break instead of rendering it, welding each running head onto the sentence the break interrupted. The flag has been removed and all three PDFs re-extracted. Every discrepancy this packet exists to hold survives the rebuild intact: the roster PDF still prints "Revised: Sept. 6, 2023" while listing later implementation dates, still says "43 states have enacted the NLC" in one line and "43 jurisdictions have enacted the NLC" in another, and NCSBN's page still states the list "was updated in 2011" while the file it links is named 2023_NLC_ULRs.pdf. Every quotation on this page verifies against the rebuilt packet. Reviewer: Carrie Schluter, reviewed Aug 29, 2026; this pass re-checked sources and rebuilt the packet, and did not change a statement on the page. Corrections on the record in this log: hello@fieldassembly.net.

Aug 26, 2026 · Page created. Captured first-party and appended mechanically: the full text layer of the commission's Final Rules effective January 2, 2024; the roster PDF NLC_Map.pdf; the uniform licensure requirements PDF; and the main content of the commission's How it Works, Applying for Licensure, About, Commission, and Contact pages, plus NCSBN's Uniform Licensure Requirements page — all retrieved Sep 3, 2026. Findings recorded rather than smoothed: (1) the roster PDF carries the revision line "Revised: Sept. 6, 2023" while listing implementation dates of Oct. 1, 2025 for Connecticut, July 7, 2025 for Pennsylvania, Jan. 8, 2024 for Rhode Island, and Jan. 31, 2024 for Washington, so the document's own revision line is older than its own contents; (2) the same document states "43 states have enacted the NLC" in one line and "43 jurisdictions have enacted the NLC" in another, and its list includes Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands, which are territories rather than states; (3) the uniform licensure requirements PDF opens with the abbreviation "eNLC" where the commission's own web version of the same list reads "NLC"; (4) NCSBN's Uniform Licensure Requirements page states the list "was updated in 2011" while linking a file named 2023_NLC_ULRs.pdf, and the file itself publishes no date; (5) Rule 404 states that a state-issued temporary permit "shall not grant multistate licensure privileges", which is the least-known and most consequential provision in these sources for a nurse practicing on a permit while an application is pending; (6) no fee payable by a nurse appears anywhere in the commission sources reviewed, and the commission routes fee questions to the boards; (7) the interactive map page renders its roster in JavaScript and returned no roster text on the transport used, so the roster here is taken from the commission's own NLC_Map.pdf rather than from the map page, and the map page remains capture-pending; (8) the ULR PDF's text layer drops a space in "independentcredentials", and that artifact is preserved verbatim inside the quotation; (9) two NCSBN addresses formerly used for compact material, ncsbn.org/nurse-licensure-compact.page and ncsbn.org/nlc/nlc-member-states.page, returned empty bodies on the transport used and are not cited as sources; the live commission site is nursecompact.com. Capture pending: the commission bylaws, Key Provisions, Model Legislation, the 60-day rule FAQs, the NLC definitions sheet, the commissioners directory, the FAQs page, and the interactive map page. Internet Archive captures: to be added. Reviewer: Carrie Schluter, reviewed Aug 31, 2026. Corrections on the record in this log: hello@fieldassembly.net.