Can Psychologists Prescribe? The RxP States

In seven states, yes: specially trained doctoral psychologists hold prescriptive authority — the laws practitioners abbreviate to RxP.

In every other state, no. The authority is not part of the psychology licence itself; each one is created by a state statute layered on top of it.

A legislature passes a prescriptive-authority act, the state board builds a certification onto the licence, and the statute then bolts on physician involvement — a supervision or collaboration agreement — as a condition of prescribing.

The distinction that trips most readers is doctoral versus master's.

The RxP statutes are written for psychologists who already hold a doctorate and an independent licence, and none of them extends to master's-level practitioners of any kind.

If your credential is an LCSW, LPC, or LMFT — or a master's-level psychology licence — the answer stays no in all 50 states and DC; that answer, and why it never moves, is covered in can a therapist prescribe medication?.

What follows here is the doctoral exception: which states run it, what the training requires, and what a prescribing psychologist may actually put on a prescription pad.

Nine states had enacted prescriptive authority for psychologists as of 2026, in this order: New Mexico (2002), Louisiana (2004), Illinois (2014), Iowa (2016), Idaho (2017), Colorado (2023), Utah (2024), and, in 2026, Vermont and Hawaii — the count APA affirmed when Hawaii became the ninth state.

Guam, a territory, enacted its own version as far back as 1999.

Enacted and operative are different sets.

Vermont's Act 84 was signed on April 27, 2026, and the statute's prescribing sections take effect on July 1, 2029 — until then, a Vermont psychologist's lawful maximum is a medication recommendation to the patient's prescribing provider.

Hawaii's Act 266 became law without the governor's signature on July 16, 2026, and it is a three-year pilot, not a licence tier: participating psychologists prescribe only at federally qualified health centers in the counties of Kauai and Hawaii, only to adults aged 18 to 65, and only under the supervision of a physician or psychiatrist.

That leaves seven working pathways as of September 2026: Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, New Mexico, and Utah.

Two earlier attempts died at governors' desks — Hawaii's 2007 bill and Oregon's 2010 bill were both vetoed, per APA's chronology.

And the state count misses federal practice entirely: the Department of Defense, the US Public Health Service, and the Indian Health Service have trained and credentialed prescribing psychologists of their own for decades, which is where much of the model was proven before any state adopted it.

Every pathway stacks the same layers, and the base layer is the licence itself: an independent psychologist licence built on a doctoral degree.

On top of it come three additions.

• A post-doctoral master's in clinical psychopharmacology. The programs must be APA-designated or meet APA's designation criteria, and the statutes size them differently: Colorado's law requires at least 450 classroom hours, New Mexico's rules count the same 450, Illinois requires a minimum of 60 credit hours of didactic coursework, and Utah requires at least 30 credit hours over no fewer than four semesters. Idaho phrases its standard by analogy — a master's substantially equivalent to the education required of an advanced practice psychiatric nurse practitioner.
• Physician-supervised clinical training. Colorado requires twelve to twenty-four months of supervised clinical experience including at least 750 hours treating at least 150 clients; Utah requires at least 4,000 hours of supervised clinical training across at least two years under a physician's direction; Vermont's statute sets rotations totalling at least 14 months across at least five practice settings — psychiatry, geriatrics, family or internal medicine, emergency medicine, and neurology; New Mexico's practicum means 400 hours treating a minimum of 100 patients.
• The PEP. The Psychopharmacology Examination for Psychologists, written and administered by ASPPB — the same organization behind the EPPP. ASPPB's eligibility rules require a passed EPPP, an independent licence from a jurisdiction that requires a doctoral degree for licensure, at least two years of independent practice as a health-service provider, and transcripts from the post-doctoral psychopharmacology program.

The seven statutes agree on the architecture and disagree on nearly everything else.

One state routes its prescribers through the medical board; another caps how many psychologists a physician may partner with; several stage the authority from conditional to full.

The detail below is each state's own statute or rule, verified September 2026.

• New Mexico (2002). The first state. A conditional prescription certificate — 450 classroom hours, the 400-hour/100-patient practicum, the PEP — converts to a full prescription certificate after two years of prescribing psychotropic medication under a supervising clinician.
• Louisiana (2004). The administrative outlier: the medical psychologist licence is issued and regulated by the Louisiana State Board of Medical Examiners, not the psychology board, and since a 2024 act the holder no longer needs to keep a psychology-board licence at all. Eligibility includes a post-doctoral master's in clinical psychopharmacology, a national psychopharmacology exam, and at least three years of clinical experience. Narcotics are excluded.
• Illinois (2014). The prescribing psychologist licence requires a written collaborative agreement with a physician — and the statute caps any one physician at three such agreements, which limits how many prescribing psychologists a single physician can partner with.
• Iowa (2016). Two stages: a conditional prescription certificate, valid four years, with prescribing under a licensed physician's supervision; the full prescription certificate follows two years of prescribing psychotropic medication.
• Idaho (2017). Provisional certification first; full certification after two years including at least 2,000 hours of prescribing under a physician supervision agreement, with supervision of at least four hours a month and 48 hours a year. Adding pediatric or geriatric patients takes another year and 1,000 supervised hours.
• Colorado (2023). HB23-1071, effective August 2023, created the Prescribing Psychologist Authority: beyond the training pipeline above it requires independent peer review and liability insurance of $1 million per claim and $3 million aggregate, and 40 hours of continuing education every two years in pharmacology and psychopharmacology to keep it.
• Utah (2024). S.B. 26 made Utah the seventh state and the narrowest formulary of the seven — see the next section.

Prescriptive authority here means psychotropic medication, but the breadth varies more than any other feature of the nine laws.

• Utah is the narrowest. A certified prescribing psychologist may prescribe, administer, and discontinue selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and other medications the state approves by rule — and may not prescribe narcotics or controlled substances of any schedule. A collaborative relationship with a physician or psychiatric nurse practitioner is required.
• Louisiana and the Hawaii pilot bar narcotics. Louisiana's statute states that a medical psychologist may not prescribe them; Hawaii's pilot defines its formulary as psychotropic agents including controlled substances but excluding narcotics.
• Vermont pairs authority with a psychiatrist. From July 2029 a prescribing psychologist-doctorate must work under a written collaborative agreement with a psychiatrist, may not prescribe injected controlled substances, and may not prescribe at all for patients under 18, over 80, or pregnant.
• Illinois writes its limits into the delegation. The collaborative agreement may only cover mental-health medications the physician generally prescribes, excluding patients under 17 or over 65, pregnant patients, and patients with serious medical conditions such as heart disease, cancer, stroke, or seizures and with developmental or intellectual disabilities. The drug rules are explicit too: no Schedule II controlled substance may be delegated, none delivered by injection, and no narcotics; benzodiazepine Schedule III substances are excluded, and any other Schedule III–V delegation must name the specific drug in the agreement.
• The rest constrain by structure, not drug list. New Mexico, Iowa, Idaho, and Colorado build their rules around supervision agreements, collaborative arrangements, and staged certification rather than a named formulary. Each state's full act controls — do not treat a statute's silence as permission to prescribe a specific agent.

The exception is real, and it is not a door.

Prescriptive authority attaches to the doctoral psychologist licence plus the psychopharmacology layer — never to a master's-level practitioner, in any of the nine states, in any year the laws have been on the books.

The gate is hard-coded into PEP eligibility, which requires an independent licence from a jurisdiction that licenses psychologists at the doctoral level.

Vermont's act grants future prescribing to the psychologist-doctorate and pointedly not to the psychologist-master its own board also licenses.

PSYPACT, the interstate compact for psychological practice, is doctoral-only by rule for the same underlying reason.

So the map above is not a mobility route for therapists, counselors, social workers, or master's-level psychology practitioners — the standing answer for those licences is no state, no pathway, laid out in can a therapist prescribe medication? and in therapist vs. psychologist vs. psychiatrist.

For a doctoral psychologist, the practical sequence is the reverse of the mythology: licence first, practice years next, the psychopharmacology master's and supervised prescribing after that — each state's own board defines the order its certification accepts.

The full role behind the licence — testing scope, settings, and pay — is covered in what does a clinical psychologist do?.

This article is general career information, not legal, clinical, or medical advice, and it is not guidance for anyone seeking treatment. Prescriptive authority is created by state legislatures, administered by state boards — the medical board, in Louisiana — and it changes; confirm the current law with the state board before relying on any entry here.