Substance Abuse Counselor Requirements in Tennessee: Credentials, Hours and Exams

Tennessee licenses this profession at two levels rather than pairing a registration with a single licence.

Level I (LADAC I) is a full state licence starting at a high school diploma; it may practise in a treatment or recovery-support setting but not as a self-employed private practitioner.

Level II (LADAC II) requires at least a bachelor's degree and may practise privately and apply to become a Qualified Clinical Supervisor.

Rule .03(3) exempts anyone in a labeled training status — 'alcohol and drug abuse counseling intern' or a similar designation under a qualified supervisor — from needing a licence for that status, so a trainee title is not itself a credential rung.

The Tennessee Certification Board (TCB) is a wholly separate private IC&RC member board; its CADC/CAADC certifications are optional and sit beside the licence, not below or above it.

Level I needs a high school diploma or equivalency plus 270 total hours of alcohol and drug abuse counseling education and training across the rule's eight domains, six of those hours on professional ethics.

Level II raises the degree floor to a bachelor's degree in a behavioral-health-related field (or a higher degree outside that field), or a master's or higher degree in a behavioral-health-related field — but rule .04(1)(c)'s Education subsection requires the same 270 classroom hours of Level II applicants too, not only Level I.

So the two levels share the classroom-hour floor and diverge on the underlying degree and the supervised-hours total.

Level I needs 6,000 hours of experience across all eight counseling domains, over a minimum of three years; up to one of those three years may be substituted with time in a recognized counselor internship or counselor trainee program.

Level I hours may be paid or volunteer, but volunteer hours only count when earned in a facility or agency whose director authorized the volunteer program, appointed the person to it in writing, and supervised the work under written guidelines such as a job description.

Level II's hours are stated as alternatives rather than an hours-over-years formula: two years of full-time experience or 4,000 hours with a bachelor's-level degree, or one year of full-time experience or 2,000 hours with a master's-level degree.

These hours are logged under a Qualified Clinical Supervisor before the licensure application is filed, not counted under a separate prior registration step.

Both levels take the Board's open-book jurisprudence examination, covering the Tennessee statutes and rules governing the profession plus the NAADAC Code of Ethics; correctly answering 90% of its questions is required to pass.

Separately, Level I applicants take the NCAC Level I written exam and Level II applicants take the NCAC Level II exam — both developed by NAADAC and administered by its designated testing agency, with the Master Addiction Counselor (MAC) exam accepted as a substitute at either level.

An applicant who fails to complete the required exams within twelve months of approval has the application deemed abandoned and must reapply under whatever requirements are then current.

Within Level I's 6,000-hour total, 100 hours must be face-to-face supervision, with no more than 50 of those 100 hours and no fewer than 12 of them counted in any single calendar year the supervised hours span.

A Qualified Clinical Supervisor is defined by rule .01(17) as meeting either of two routes: under .10(2), a Level II licensee for at least five years whose licence must currently be active, unencumbered and unconditioned (and who must stop supervising if it becomes encumbered or conditioned), who has two years of experience supervising counselors, has received 36 contact hours of supervision on their own supervisory work from a qualified supervisor, and has completed 30 hours of training in alcohol and drug abuse clinical supervision, six of those hours on supervision ethics; or under .10(3), a supervisor who meets those same requirements but is not licensed in Tennessee, once the Board approves a request documenting the supervisor's qualifications filed with the licensure application.

The rule splits practice setting by level: Level I may counsel in a treatment or recovery-support program but not as a self-employed private practitioner, while Level II may practise privately and apply to become a Qualified Clinical Supervisor.

Both levels may also evaluate and treat compulsive gambling disorder once the licensee has completed 60 hours of specialized Board-approved education on the disorder and their supervised experience included contact with at least 10 patients affected by it, under a supervisor who had obtained the same 60 classroom hours.

Neither level may perform psychological testing intended to measure or diagnose mental illness, and neither may administer, dispense or prescribe drugs or otherwise practise medicine.

Whether an LADAC may diagnose a substance use disorder itself is not addressed in the rule text read.

The Board may issue a Tennessee licence, at whichever level the applicant seeks, to anyone who holds a current licence in good standing or its equivalent from another state, once it determines that state's standards are comparable to or exceed Tennessee's.

The applicant must be 21, submit character references, and have the out-of-state board send a statement confirming the licence is current and how it was issued; Tennessee's jurisprudence exam is still required, but the written NCAC/MAC exam is not repeated.

TCB, separately, is Tennessee's private IC&RC member board, and it states plainly that its certification is not required to practice — an IC&RC CADC/CAADC transferred from another member board does not produce the state LADAC licence, and TCB currently limits new applications to the matching state licence: a current LADAC for CADC, or a current LADAC II plus a master's degree for CAADC, or an IC&RC-eligible reciprocity transfer for either.

Current-licensee applicants must still pass the corresponding IC&RC exam to be certified; TCB directs reciprocity applicants to contact their existing member board instead.

Both levels renew on a two-year cycle and must complete 30 contact hours of alcohol and drug abuse continuing education every two calendar years, 18 of those hours face-to-face and at least six on ethics.

A Qualified Clinical Supervisor adds 10 more contact hours specific to clinical supervision every two years, six of them on supervision ethics, on top of the standard 30.

Since January 1, 2020, every LADAC I, LADAC II and QCS must also complete a Board-approved suicide-prevention training at least once every four years, with a two-year grace period for a new licensee who completed a qualifying training within two years before applying.

Some older guides cite this credential's rules as chapter 0440-01; the current chapter is 1200-30-01, current through the January 2021 revision read for this page.

The underlying statute, T.C.A. § 68-24-6xx, was not retrieved for this page, so anything about practice-versus-title protection beyond rule .03's own wording, or an other-licensees exemption, should be confirmed directly with the Board.

No rule revision after January 2021 was checked.