LMFT Licensure in Missouri: Requirements, Hours and Exams

Missouri has one license and two ways to work under supervision before it.

The provisional licensed marital and family therapist (PLMFT) is an actual provisional license: on a qualifying master's degree it runs at least three years from issuance, and the committee may extend it for good cause on written request.

The supervised marital and family therapist (S-MFT) is the status for someone under supervision who does not hold a provisional license — the rule builds it around a registration of supervision, whose effective date the committee sets once the application, fee, transcripts, any setting-affiliation agreement, and the fingerprint background check are on file.

Whichever you hold, notify the committee within fifteen days of changing supervisors or settings, on a change-of-supervision form with its fee.

The abbreviations are the law: while providing therapy or representing yourself as a provisional licensee, use exactly the terms the rule allows.

The degree is a master's, specialist, or doctoral degree with a major in marriage and family therapy, or an equivalent graduate course of study in a mental health discipline, from a regionally accredited institution.

The statute names COAMFTE accreditation or its committee-defined equivalent, and the rule fills that in: a COAMFTE-accredited degree, a CACREP-accredited marriage, couple, and family counseling degree, or a non-accredited MFT program of at least 45 semester hours or 60 quarter hours (with the same floor for an equivalent mental health course of study).

A degree awarded within two years before its program earned COAMFTE or CACREP accreditation also counts.

Coursework must cover seven core areas, from three semester hours each in theoretical foundations, ethics and professional studies, research methodology, and diagnostic systems, to twelve in the practice of MFT, six in human development and family studies, and a six-hour practicum with client-contact minimums set by COAMFTE standards.

A deficient core area does not disqualify you: under rule 2.020(5)(A) the committee may still approve supervision while you finish the missing coursework.

The statute requires twenty-four months of postgraduate supervised clinical experience, and the rule turns that into a window: no less than twenty-four and no more than sixty calendar months.

Inside it you need at least 1,500 hours of supervised experience in marital and family therapy direct client contact — face-to-face interaction between you and the client — and at least 15 hours in a calendar month for that month to count at all, so a thin month is simply lost.

Supervision itself totals a minimum of 200 hours, at least 100 of them individual face-to-face, with individual sessions capped at two supervisees and group sessions at three to six.

The doctoral, specialist, or 30-post-master's-hour route is shorter: at least 750 direct client contact hours across no less than 12 and no more than 24 months, and a provisional license on that basis runs at least two years.

There is no total-hours figure in the rule — a circulating 3,000-hour claim is not in 20 CSR 2233-2.020 or RSMo 337.715 as read.

Missouri adopts the Examination in Marital and Family Therapy developed by the Association of Marital and Family Therapy Regulatory Boards, and uses the AMFTRB criterion-referenced passing point as the minimum passing score.

Sequencing matters: you may not apply to take the exam until an application for supervision or licensure is on file with the state committee, so the exam usually sits alongside your supervised months rather than before them.

Official scores come from the examination service to the committee, and rule 2.030 lists them among the documents that make the licensure application complete; exam fees and any challenge to a question run through the examination provider.

The statute frames what the test certifies: that the applicant possesses the requisite professional knowledge, including techniques and applications research and its interpretation and professional affairs and ethics.

Your supervisor must be licensed in Missouri as a marital and family therapist, professional counselor, psychologist, clinical social worker, or psychiatrist — an inactive, provisional, expired, temporary, or retired license does not qualify — and may not be your relative.

You and the supervisor must be employed by or affiliated by contract with the same setting, and it may not be a private practice in which you operate, manage, or hold an ownership interest.

To be registered, the supervisor documents a graduate degree in marital and family therapy or a mental health discipline, five years of clinical experience providing MFT beyond graduate practicum and internship, a license held at least two years, and either the AAMFT Approved Supervisor designation or 200 hours of prior clinical supervision experience with its own supervision coursework and supervision-of-supervision components.

One registered supervisor carries no more than ten supervisees combined.

Face-to-face supervision means two hours every two weeks or one hour weekly, and electronic supervision is available only on request, on a secure, real-time system with visual and audio interaction.

The rule ties supervised practice to the supervisor in enforceable ways.

Services are performed under the registered supervisor's full order, control, oversight, and guidance, and you stay under supervision until licensed.

You may not engage in independent, private practice or offer therapy unaffiliated with the committee-approved supervisor; marketing and advertising must carry the supervisor's name and license number; and billing runs through the supervisor, who facilitates payment for the therapy you provide.

The supervisor reads and cosigns your written reports, including treatment plans and progress notes, or — where the setting prohibits cosigning — you document that the supervisor reviewed them.

Before serving a client, tell them you are under supervision for licensure and give the supervisor's name, address, and license number.

These are the mechanics a first employer has to accommodate, so ask in interviews how billing, note review, and client disclosure are handled before you sign.

An applicant holding a current license from another state or territory, or the District of Columbia, may be granted a Missouri license without examination once three things happen: the committee determines the other jurisdiction's requirements are substantially the same as Missouri's; the applicant's licensing entity verifies the current license; and the applicant consents to examination of any disciplinary history in any state.

The application rule adds what acceptable evidence looks like: licensure documentation showing the requirements, the method of licensing including examination results, the date of original licensure, and current status.

If you are licensed in a state with no MFT law, or one whose law is not substantially equivalent, rule 2.030(6) routes you to the standard qualifications under 337.715.1 instead.

No minimum time licensed appears in the statute — a circulating one-year reciprocity condition is not in RSMo 337.715 as read.

The license term is twenty-four months, though the director may set a shorter term for first licenses.

Before each expiration you document forty contact hours of continuing education, at least twenty of them formal; the balance may be self-study, capped at twenty hours, and a contact hour is fifty minutes.

At least two hours must be in suicide assessment, referral, treatment, and management training — the one topic the statute names.

Formal hours come from the activities the rule lists: postgraduate coursework (one semester hour of graduate credit counts as fifteen CE hours), presenting research, attending verified professional meetings, workshops and seminars, publishing, and teaching, with faculty teaching capped at twenty hours per year.

Keep complete CE records for four years, because the committee audits.

If personal illness, military service, or circumstances beyond your control keep you from finishing the hours, apply to the committee in writing at least thirty days before the license expires, and any extension or waiver is granted solely in the committee's discretion.

No 2023–2026 statutory change was found in the sources read, and the newest amendment credit in 337.715's history note is A.L.

2020 H.B.

2046, which the note lists without describing what it changed.

The rules are similarly settled: the supervised-experience, supervisor, application, examination, and renewal rules all carry amendments effective 2020 in their rulemaking notes, and the education rule was amended again effective December 2022.

Practically, that means a guide quoting Missouri's hour and month rules is not out of date because of a recent rewrite — where secondhand figures go wrong here, it is usually by importing a 3,000-hour total or a one-year reciprocity condition that the primary texts do not contain.

Confirm the current text with the committee before relying on any summary, including this one.

Missouri licensure is a paper file, complete only when every piece is on it: the application form and fee, official graduate transcripts sent by the institution, documentation of post-degree supervised experience under rule 2.020, official examination scores, and a fingerprint background check through the Missouri State Highway Patrol's approved vendors covering both Missouri State Highway Patrol and FBI records.

A complete application must reach the committee at least thirty days before its meeting; files received later are reviewed only at the committee's discretion, and the committee decides in writing.

The statute adds baseline eligibility: age eighteen or older, United States citizenship or status as a legal resident alien, and — in a criminal prosecution under the laws of any state, the United States, or any country — neither a final adjudication of guilt nor a guilty or nolo contendere plea, for an offense directly related to the occupation's duties and responsibilities, whether or not sentence is imposed.

Build the thirty-day buffer into your timeline rather than around the committee's meeting schedule.