Counselor Licensure in Maryland: LPC Requirements, Hours and Exams

Maryland's entry credential is a licence — the licensed graduate professional counselor — not a registration or a permit.

It authorises clinical professional counseling only under the supervision of a Board-approved supervisor, and it carries its own clock: it expires 2 years after the date issued, 2-year extensions run up to a maximum of 6 years, and anything beyond 6 needs a written request the Board may grant in certain circumstances.

A first extension skips the continuing education requirement; later ones do not.

The independent tier above it is the licensed clinical professional counselor, and the gap between the two is written into the rule: an LGPC may not practise independent of supervision and may not provide supervision.

For a new graduate, that clock is the planning fact — the supervision arrangement should be in place when the LGPC issues, not after.

The degree rule fixes both the credit count and the coursework.

A master's in clinical professional counseling or a related field needs a minimum of 60 graduate semester credit hours or 90 quarter hours; a program short of 60 can be topped up with additional graduate courses as approved by the Board, and a doctoral degree needs 90 semester or 135 quarter hours.

Coursework is 3 semester credit hours in each listed area — the list runs from human growth and personality development through appraisal, marriage and family therapy, alcohol and drug counseling, psychopathology, and diagnosis and treatment of mental and emotional disorders.

The supervised field experience inside the degree must include a minimum of 125 direct clinical counseling service hours.

CACREP accreditation is not required in the text read.

The master's route requires a minimum of 3 years and 3,000 hours of experience in clinical professional counseling, and the split is fixed: at least 1,500 hours of direct clinical counseling services, a maximum of 1,500 indirect, at least 2,000 hours as an LGPC after the master's under a Board-approved supervisor, and a maximum of 1,000 hours from supervised field experience.

That last cap is the trap for a student: practicum and internship can never cover more than 1,000 of the 3,000, and at least 2,000 must be earned while holding the LGPC.

A client contact hour and a clinical supervision hour each mean at least 45 minutes.

The doctoral route is shorter — a minimum of 2,000 hours, at least 1,000 direct, with 1,000 acquired after the doctorate and 50 face-to-face supervision hours within 1 year.

Both licences require a passing score on a national certification exam approved by the Board and an examination of Health Occupations Article, Title 17 and the subtitle — Maryland's jurisprudence exam.

The rule text names no national exam, and which exam the Board currently approves was not established in the sources read, so ask the board before you register.

The Counseling Compact commission's fees table lists Maryland as requiring a jurisprudence exam and links a CCE Maryland module, which says something about the law exam's format but answers nothing about the national one.

The mechanics are set: once the Board sends the approval notice, you have 1 year to take the exams.

A failed exam may be retaken if it falls inside the testing authority's time frame, or if the Board approves a waiver extending the testing deadline upon proof of exceptional circumstances; anything else means a new application and fee.

Supervision itself totals 100 hours of face-to-face clinical supervision completed "within 2 years of the awarding of the master's degree" — at least 50 individual, at most 50 group; the doctoral figures are 50, 25 and 25 within 1 year.

The supervisor needs Board approval, not a separate licence: 2 years of active clinical practice experience plus 3 graduate semester credit hours or 18 CEUs in supervision, the NBCC Approved Clinical Supervisor credential, or board-defined supervision training.

The half rule decides whose supervision you take: at least half the requisite direct and indirect hours must fall under a supervisor who is an LCPC, so a placement supervised only by an LCMFT or LCADC covers at most half.

Video is workable — the chapter's face-to-face includes synchronous video conferencing, and excludes telephone and non-synchronous internet.

A relative may not supervise, nor an employee supervising their own employer or a student their own teacher.

Maryland does not leave psychological testing to a scope-of-practice footnote; it regulates "advanced assessment" in its own chapter, with its own qualifications.

An LCPC who wants it needs an active independent licence, a master's or doctorate carrying nine named graduate courses of at least 3 semester hours each — psychopathology, biological bases of behavior, research methods, advanced statistics, tests and measures, intellectual assessment, personality assessment, ethics, and a practicum in advanced assessment — plus 500 hours of supervised direct client-related advanced assessment testing completed in not less than 2 years after the master's, at least 100 hours of it under face-to-face supervision by a supervisor proficient in advanced assessment, and the NCE or an examination the Board finds comparable.

In this chapter, face-to-face supervision means physical presence only: video conferencing is expressly excluded.

An LGPC cannot engage in advanced assessment at all.

A counselor licensed as a clinical professional counselor or its equivalent in another state, territory, or jurisdiction is eligible if the licence is current and in good standing with no disciplinary history, both exams are passed, a criminal background check clears, and Maryland's education requirement is met or substituted.

The Board may waive the exams for an applicant licensed in a state or country that grants a similar endorsement to Maryland licensees and who passed a Board-approved exam.

Out-of-state hours count toward the 3,000 when the Board includes them, but must have been obtained under that jurisdiction's rules and include the coursework of Regulation .06D — diagnosis and psychopathology, psychotherapy and treatment of mental and emotional disorders, and professional, legal, and ethical responsibilities, which no course waiver touches.

An equivalent-experience route exists: a master's of at least 60 graduate credit hours needs not less than 3 years and 3,000 hours of supervised clinical experience, 2 years of which are completed after the award of the master's degree; one under 60 credit hours owes 3 years practising as an LCPC instead.

Maryland is on the Counseling Compact commission's member list — it has enacted the Compact — but as of September 2026 it is not among the states issuing and accepting privileges, and no go-live date appears in the sources read.

The enacting statute's section and date were not located in the sources read either.

One detail is already fixed on the commission's own table: privilege holders in Maryland must pass a Maryland jurisprudence exam, linked to CCE's Maryland module.

Until the commission lists Maryland as live, an LCPC cannot use the Compact to practise elsewhere and a counselor licensed elsewhere cannot use it to practise here; the route in is a Maryland licence, by examination or endorsement under COMAR 10.58.12.06.

The renewal period is the 2-year period immediately before the renewal date, and each one requires a minimum of 40 CEUs — at least 30 in Category A activities, no more than 10 in Category B, or all 40 in Category A.

A CEU is 60 minutes of board-approved activity.

Excess hours do not carry over to the next period.

The excluded-activities list is blunt: home study — independent study without formal mastery evaluation or a verification of completion — earns no credit, and neither do business meetings or presentations for a lay audience.

Reinstatement within 5 calendar years — the same rule for the LGPC under .04G and the LCPC under .05F — requires the minimum of 20 CEUs required for each year, and attendance documentation must be retained for 4 years for possible board inspection.

The COMAR pages read do not print effective dates on the section pages, so the sources establish no 2023–2026 amendment to the counselor rules — and a guide citing Regulation .04 or .05 cannot be dated from the rule text alone.

The one dated change in the sources is the Counseling Compact: Maryland appears on the commission's enacted-member list while the homepage does not list it as live, as of the 2026-09-24 retrieval.

For anything else that may have moved — fees, forms, exam policy — the board's own pages are the check before you rely on a figure.