PMHNP Practice Authority in Utah: Independence, Physician Agreements and Schedule II

AANP's May 2026 map puts Utah in its full practice tier.

The label is AANP's advocacy classification; the legal fact behind it is one sentence of the Nurse Practice Act: subject only to the CRNA subsection, a licensed advanced practice registered nurse may prescribe or administer a prescription drug, including a Schedule II-V controlled substance.

No collaboration or supervision requirement appears in the sections read, and the sentence's only cross-reference — Subsection (2) — limits certified registered nurse anesthetists, not certified nurse practitioners.

For a PMHNP, prescribing authority is part of the licence itself, not a separate agreement, registration or physician delegation.

Current law sets no hours or years threshold: § 58-31b-803 conditions nothing about a new graduate's first prescriptions, and no certificate or registration marks the move into practice.

The gate that used to exist shows what Utah's rules were designed to catch.

Until May 3, 2023, an APRN engaged in independent solo practice who had been licensed less than one year, or had less than 2,000 hours of experience practising as a licensed APRN, could not prescribe Schedule II without meeting all of the following: receiving a board certification from a nationally recognized organization; completing at least 30 hours of instruction, or the equivalent number of credit hours, pertaining to advanced pharmacology during a graduate education program; demonstrating, when obtaining licensure, at least seven hours of continuing education pertaining to prescribing opioids; and a prescribing mentorship — by a physician or an APRN licensed at least three years — under which the APRN periodically provided the mentor timesheets demonstrating 1,000 hours of clinical experience.

The 2023 General Session removed that structure; a new Utah PMHNP today counts no supervised-practice clock.

The research section records no collaborative or supervisory agreement for Utah APRNs, and the sections read contain no physician ratio, no meeting cadence, no chart-review percentage and nothing filed with a medical board.

The absence is structural rather than an exemption: § 58-31b-803(1) authorizes prescribing directly from the licence, so there is no agreement a new graduate has to find before the first job and no agreement a relocating PMHNP has to terminate.

Nothing in the statute read requires one.

Said plainly: an outpatient Utah PMHNP can prescribe Schedule II ADHD stimulants.

Subsection (1) authorizes Schedule II-V in one sentence, and no day-supply cap, setting restriction or physician-consult condition appears in the sections read.

The subsection it is subject to governs only certified registered nurse anesthetists, whose peri-procedure prescribing is capped at a five-day supply and excludes ketamine — limits that never attach to a psychiatric NP's practice.

History confirms the direction of travel: the 2023 version of the section authorized Schedule II without conditions for non-CRNA APRNs because the 2023 General Session removed the mentorship requirement, the opposite of the consultation requirement that circulates in older guides.

A separate state controlled-substance registration was not located in the sources read; federally, the PMHNP registers with the DEA.

The only prescribing conditions written into § 58-31b-803 apply to certified registered nurse anesthetists: up to a five-day supply immediately before or after a procedure, where the drug is not ketamine, the CRNA will participate or participated in the procedure, a patient record has been established, and the drug relates to the procedure.

Utah rewrote the chapter's definitions in 2026, and one gap shows in the 2026 text: the definition of the practice of advanced practice registered nursing was not in the § 58-31b-102 as read — it appears to have been moved and was not located.

Federally, a PMHNP registers with the DEA as a mid-level practitioner, and that registration covers only what Utah allows.

The DEA and HHS telemedicine flexibilities, extended through December 31, 2026, remove the federal in-person visit requirement; they lift no state limit, and the Utah sections read set none to lift.

Utah is among the compact's five enacting states as of September 2026, alongside Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming; the current compact text at § 58-31d-101 was Repealed and Re-enacted by Chapter 438 of the 2022 General Session, effective May 4, 2022.

It is not in effect: the compact comes into limited effect only when enacted in seven party states, so no APRN holds a multistate APRN licence today.

When it takes effect, a multistate licence will require at least 2,080 hours of practice as an APRN in a congruent role and population focus, and hours from the APRN education program itself do not count.

The multistate licence would carry prescriptive authority for non-controlled drugs, while controlled-substance authority in each state still runs through that state's own requirements.

The RN-only Nurse Licensure Compact confers no nurse practitioner authority.

Utah's prescribing section has been rewritten twice in four years.

The 2023 General Session deleted the Schedule II mentorship conditions, effective May 3, 2023 — the enacting chapter number was not captured in the sources read — and retitled the section from Limitations on prescriptive authority for advanced practice registered nurses to Advanced practice registered nurse prescriptive authority.

Chapter 96 of the 2026 General Session rewrote § 58-31b-803 again, effective May 6, 2026, replacing the Schedule II-only grant with the current prescription-drug sentence and moving its only limits onto CRNAs, and repealed and re-enacted the definitions section with a licence transition: under § 58-31b-102(7), a licence includes a certification until the earlier of renewal or May 6, 2028.

Whether anything further moved in the 2026 session was not researched beyond Chapter 96, so check the Utah Legislature before assuming the text is unchanged.