The interstate teaching licence maze, decoded one corridor at a time
Three overlapping frameworks — the Interstate Teacher Mobility Compact, the NASDTEC Interstate Agreement, and each state's own rules — make generic answers wrong. We read the rules, quote them, and date them.
The finding most guides get wrong
The Interstate Teacher Mobility Compact has been enacted in 15 states, and whether it actually works depends entirely on which state you are moving to. Pennsylvania runs it: it has published the list of licences it will accept and reviews applications under Compact rules automatically. Colorado publishes no compact guidance at all, and its 2026 legislature wrote a temporary substitute whose repeal trigger is “when CDE begins issuing licenses pursuant to the Compact”. Florida does not mention the compact in its certification statute.
The compact is not one thing. It is 15 states at 15 different stages, and the membership list tells you almost nothing about your own move. The five primary sources, quoted →
Start with your corridor
A corridor is a state pair in one direction — the rules that apply moving from New York to New Jersey are not the rules that apply coming back.
New York → New Jersey
The highest-volume corridor in the country, and it turns on a single sentence about two years of teaching — plus a grade-band gap between New York’s 5-9 and New Jersey’s 5-8 that nothing bridges.
Regime: state-specific · about 730 K-12 teachers make this move each year
California → Texas
The largest hard corridor. Texas's rules changed on 2 August 2026.
Regime: state-specific · about 685 K-12 teachers make this move each year
New York → Florida
The statutory tier trap: one word in the statute decides between no examinations and three.
Regime: state-specific · about 651 K-12 teachers make this move each year
Texas → California
The two-year experience line decides whether you owe California a full induction programme, and a 10-to-12-week fingerprint queue applies to you purely for living in Texas.
Regime: state-specific · about 639 K-12 teachers make this move each year
Texas → Florida
The same statutory tier test as New York to Florida, but Texas arrives holding a better hand.
Regime: state-specific · about 636 K-12 teachers make this move each year
New Jersey → Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania waives every examination for compact-state teachers and content-tests everyone else. New Jersey is not a compact state, so this corridor pays the difference.
Regime: compact-adjacent · about 548 K-12 teachers make this move each year
New Jersey → New York
New York endorses you at the Initial certificate level whatever you held in New Jersey, and wants three years of public school experience "exclusively" in the subject and grade band you are applying for.
Regime: state-specific · about 513 K-12 teachers make this move each year
California → Nevada
Nevada reciprocates only a non-provisional licence, and California’s first credential is called Preliminary. Nevada’s bands are also far narrower than California’s preschool-to-12 Single Subject authorisation.
Regime: state-specific · about 473 K-12 teachers make this move each year
Florida → Georgia
Florida is a compact member and Georgia is not, and Georgia's own acceptance table names only Florida's Professional certificate. Since 1 July 2026 there is also a literacy assessment nobody who moved before then had to pass.
Regime: state-specific · about 464 K-12 teachers make this move each year
Florida → Texas
Which Florida certificate you hold decides everything, and one of the two is probably disqualifying.
Regime: state-specific · about 463 K-12 teachers make this move each year
Pennsylvania → Florida
A Pennsylvania teacher arrives holding certificates in bands Florida does not issue — PK-4 against Florida’s K-6, and 4-8 against Florida’s 5-9 — and Florida applies a ten-year recency limit to every examination score.
Regime: state-specific · about 392 K-12 teachers make this move each year
California → Washington
Washington accepts a California credential valid or expired, but its checklist still lists two tests, your California scores only help at the first application, and a general Science credential cannot stand alone in Washington.
Regime: state-specific · about 390 K-12 teachers make this move each year
Texas → Colorado
Compact asymmetry, a five-week-old state law, and the Fort Cavazos to Fort Carson military corridor.
Regime: state-specific · about 388 K-12 teachers make this move each year
Virginia → North Carolina
North Carolina’s full licence turns on a signed evaluation from the Virginia school you are leaving, and its military provision lets a spouse teach without ever being issued a North Carolina licence.
Regime: state-specific · about 351 K-12 teachers make this move each year
Virginia → Florida
Virginia’s first licence is a nonrenewable Provisional License issued with allowable deficiencies, and Florida’s no-examination route depends on the word “professional”. Virginia middle education is 6-8 by concentration; Florida’s middle grades are 5-9.
Regime: state-specific · about 357 K-12 teachers make this move each year
All 15 ranked corridors → (15 researched and published, 0 ranked and scoped but not yet researched — we do not publish a corridor until we have read its rules.)
Four claims we checked, and what the sources actually say
Each of these appears on guides that currently rank for interstate licence queries.
Explore
The Interstate Teacher Mobility Compact
What it would do, what it would not, who has enacted it, and which states have actually opened the route.
The NASDTEC Interstate Agreement
What it is and is not, in NASDTEC's own words — and the 2025–2030 cycle turnover that makes older guides stale.
Guides we checked
What the guides that rank for your move say, set beside the agency's own page and the law — archived, dated, and quoted.
Moving on military orders
Federal law makes a spouse's teaching certificate valid in a new state on three documents. Which state education agencies say so — and which still print a condition the law dropped.
Teacher migration corridors
Our own computation: how many credentialed K-12 teachers move between each state pair per year. Published nowhere else.
State overviews
12 states, each fact cited to the rule or agency page and dated.
How we verify
The archive, the quarterly re-check, and what we do when a rule is genuinely ambiguous.
What changed, and when
In the first three states we researched, two changed materially inside one quarter. Here is the record.
Pathway Packs
The free pages above tell you which regime applies and where the traps are. A Pathway Pack is the whole path for one corridor and one licence class: every requirement with its citation and as-of date, the sequence in the order that matters, the fees, the published timelines, the provisional options, and — stated plainly rather than guessed at — the questions the published record does not answer.
5 packs written, none on sale yet — each waits until the agency answers the question its corridor turns on. When on sale: $59 each, 12 months of updates included, 14-day refund. See what is in a pack →
Last verified 11 September 2026. Every fact on this site names its source and the date we read it. Where a rule is genuinely unclear we say so and point you at the agency, because a confident wrong answer is the thing that actually costs a teacher a move.