The register · August 2026 · 165,235 licensees
Every therapist in California, counted.
In short
How many therapists are there in my county, and how crowded is it?
The whole California register counted by county and license type, with the associate-per-supervisor ratio and the delinquency rates nobody publishes
165,235 on the registerCalifornia publishes its whole register every month and nobody reads it. Here is what is in this month’s: where the competition for supervision is, and who is quietly dropping off the register.
The competition mapEvery countyWho drops outWhat the register isWhat it cannot tell you
The question this page was built to answer
I am an AMFT and I’m having a horrible time finding employment. Everywhere I apply they are looking for someone with almost totally completed hours. I only have 547. How do I get hours if everyone expects me to have them already?
That post drew eighty-seven replies, almost all of them sympathy. Sympathy is not wrong, but there is also a number, and it is in the state’s own register.
The reframe
How crowded your county is, measured.
Every associate needs a licensed clinician to employ and supervise them. So the ratio that matters is not how many therapists your county has — it is how many associates there are for each licensed clinician who could take one on. Statewide that is 48,107 associates against 101,939 licensed clinicians, or 0.47 each. It is nowhere near evenly spread.
| County | Associates | Licensed | Associates each |
|---|---|---|---|
| Merced | 217 | 264 | 0.82 |
| Tulare | 499 | 669 | 0.75 |
| San Joaquin | 649 | 906 | 0.72 |
| San Bernardino | 2,619 | 4,042 | 0.65 |
| Riverside | 2,885 | 4,531 | 0.64 |
| Fresno | 1,194 | 1,946 | 0.61 |
| Kern | 767 | 1,252 | 0.61 |
| Stanislaus | 520 | 855 | 0.61 |
| El Dorado | 174 | 505 | 0.34 |
| Santa Cruz | 414 | 1,360 | 0.30 |
| San Luis Obispo | 316 | 1,107 | 0.28 |
| Nevada | 126 | 451 | 0.28 |
| Sonoma | 589 | 2,116 | 0.28 |
| Marin | 396 | 1,662 | 0.24 |
The eight most crowded counties and the six least, of the 33 with at least 400 clinicians. Merced has 0.82 associates for every licensed clinician; Marin has 0.24. An associate in Merced is looking for a supervisor in a market more than 3.5 times denser.
What this does and does not say
It does say where the queue for supervision is longest, and that the queue is a local fact rather than a personal failing. If you are in one of the counties at the top of that table, the difficulty you are having is measurable and it is not about you.
It does not say where the jobs are. A county with few associates may have few employers as well. Read it as competition for each available supervisor, which is the constraint associates actually hit — and pair it with what the jobs actually pay.
All 58, largest first
Every county in California.
Associates are AMFT, ASW and APCC registrations. Licensed is LMFT, LCSW, LPCC and LEP. Counties with fewer than 400 clinicians are shown but not ranked, because a ratio built on twenty people moves when one of them renews.
| County | Associates | Licensed | Total | Associates each |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Los Angeles | 14,325 | 28,438 | 42,763 | 0.50 |
| San Diego | 3,879 | 9,162 | 13,041 | 0.42 |
| Orange | 3,825 | 8,353 | 12,178 | 0.46 |
| Alameda | 2,282 | 5,775 | 8,057 | 0.40 |
| Riverside | 2,885 | 4,531 | 7,416 | 0.64 |
| San Bernardino | 2,619 | 4,042 | 6,661 | 0.65 |
| Santa Clara | 2,035 | 4,128 | 6,163 | 0.49 |
| Sacramento | 1,775 | 4,184 | 5,959 | 0.42 |
| San Francisco | 1,383 | 3,491 | 4,874 | 0.40 |
| Contra Costa | 1,204 | 3,068 | 4,272 | 0.39 |
| Ventura | 1,011 | 2,619 | 3,630 | 0.39 |
| Fresno | 1,194 | 1,946 | 3,140 | 0.61 |
| Sonoma | 589 | 2,116 | 2,705 | 0.28 |
| San Mateo | 739 | 1,871 | 2,610 | 0.40 |
| Marin | 396 | 1,662 | 2,058 | 0.24 |
| Kern | 767 | 1,252 | 2,019 | 0.61 |
| Santa Barbara | 553 | 1,424 | 1,977 | 0.39 |
| Placer | 502 | 1,346 | 1,848 | 0.37 |
| Santa Cruz | 414 | 1,360 | 1,774 | 0.30 |
| San Joaquin | 649 | 906 | 1,555 | 0.72 |
| Solano | 512 | 955 | 1,467 | 0.54 |
| Monterey | 495 | 931 | 1,426 | 0.53 |
| San Luis Obispo | 316 | 1,107 | 1,423 | 0.28 |
| Stanislaus | 520 | 855 | 1,375 | 0.61 |
| Tulare | 499 | 669 | 1,168 | 0.75 |
| Butte | 299 | 648 | 947 | 0.46 |
| Humboldt | 251 | 557 | 808 | 0.45 |
| Shasta | 248 | 517 | 765 | 0.48 |
| Yolo | 216 | 490 | 706 | 0.44 |
| El Dorado | 174 | 505 | 679 | 0.34 |
| Nevada | 126 | 451 | 577 | 0.28 |
| Napa | 151 | 421 | 572 | 0.36 |
| Merced | 217 | 264 | 481 | 0.82 |
| Mendocino | 86 | 268 | 354 | — |
| Imperial | 173 | 164 | 337 | — |
| Madera | 121 | 187 | 308 | — |
| Kings | 130 | 162 | 292 | — |
| Sutter | 88 | 147 | 235 | — |
| Yuba | 77 | 76 | 153 | — |
| San Benito | 62 | 86 | 148 | — |
| Tehama | 56 | 81 | 137 | — |
| Tuolumne | 37 | 99 | 136 | — |
| Siskiyou | 30 | 95 | 125 | — |
| Calaveras | 30 | 92 | 122 | — |
| Lake | 25 | 85 | 110 | — |
| Amador | 19 | 52 | 71 | — |
| Del Norte | 17 | 43 | 60 | — |
| Glenn | 19 | 38 | 57 | — |
| Inyo | 13 | 37 | 50 | — |
| Mariposa | 15 | 33 | 48 | — |
| Plumas | 7 | 36 | 43 | — |
| Lassen | 14 | 27 | 41 | — |
| Trinity | 9 | 25 | 34 | — |
| Colusa | 12 | 21 | 33 | — |
| Mono | 12 | 19 | 31 | — |
| Modoc | 3 | 17 | 20 | — |
| Alpine | 1 | 3 | 4 | — |
| Sierra | 1 | 2 | 3 | — |
150,046 of the 165,235 records carry a California county. The rest are licensees at out-of-state addresses (14,710 of them) or records with no county on file.
The finding nobody has published
More than one in four APCC registrations is delinquent.
This was computed as a check on the data and turned out to be the most striking thing in it. Every associate category lapses more often than every licensed category, and the gap between the two professional clinical counselor grades is nine-fold.
| License or registration | On the register | Delinquent | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| APCC — associate | 8,736 | 2,329 | 26.7% |
| LEP | 2,486 | 450 | 18.1% |
| ASW — associate | 21,217 | 2,831 | 13.3% |
| AMFT — associate | 19,403 | 1,818 | 9.4% |
| LMFT | 59,706 | 3,823 | 6.4% |
| LCSW | 45,129 | 2,352 | 5.2% |
| LPCC | 6,969 | 197 | 2.8% |
14,949 of the 165,235 records on the register are delinquent, and 5,813 are current-but-inactive. APCC at 26.7% against LPCC at 2.8% is the widest gap between two grades of the same profession.
Four things a delinquency rate is not
- It is not an attrition rate. A delinquent registration means the renewal date passed without a renewal. Some of those people left the profession; some are between jobs; some paid late.
- It is not a measure of anybody’s competence. The commonest reason a registration lapses is that a fee and a form fell past a date.
- It does not say the license is gone. California allows a delinquent license to be renewed, with a fee, for a period after expiry — a delinquent record is a warning, not a headstone.
- It is one month’s snapshot. The register is republished monthly and this page is rebuilt from the current file, so the figure moves. It was last read in August 2026.
If your own registration has gone delinquent or is close to it, the two things worth knowing are how long the Board is currently taking — that is published quarterly and is on this site — and whether your hours are still inside their validity window, which the hours calculator works out from your own dates.
Where every number here comes from
The state publishes this. Monthly. To anyone.
The Department of Consumer Affairs puts the complete register of Board of Behavioral Sciences licensees on its public-information page, refreshed every month, free, with no account and no key. This month’s file holds 165,235 records across 1,290 California cities. It is a plain tab-delimited text file that happens to be named as a spreadsheet, which may be part of why so few people have opened it.
| What is on the register | How many |
|---|---|
| Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist | 59,706 |
| Licensed Clinical Social Worker | 45,129 |
| Associate Clinical Social Worker | 21,217 |
| Associate Marriage & Family Therapist | 19,403 |
| Assoc. Professional Clinical Counselor | 8,736 |
| Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor | 6,969 |
| Licensed Educational Psychologist | 2,486 |
| Temp 30Day Practice Allow(OOS Lic Only) | 1,560 |
| MRF | 25 |
| Temp MSP Assoc. Clinical Social Worker | 4 |
Every license and registration type the Board issues, as at August 2026.
What this site did not publish, and why
The state’s file also contains an address for every one of those 165,235 people. It is the address of record, and for a therapist in solo practice that is very often the address they sleep at.
This page publishes counts and nothing else. No names, no addresses, no license numbers. The build refuses to run if the raw file would be committed, and re-reads its own output afterwards to check that nothing identifying survived into it.
That the data is public does not mean every use of it is decent. If you want to check a specific license, the Board’s own verification search is the right place, and it is linked below.
Read this before quoting the page
What the register cannot tell you.
| The question | What the file can say |
|---|---|
| How many new therapists were licensed last year? | Nothing reliable. The file carries an “original issue date”, and counting by it produces a collapse in new licenses that did not happen — license numbers do not band by year, and the Board’s own quarterly report records more applications processed in three months than that field attributes to a whole year. The build refuses to emit the series. For real issuance figures, use the Board’s licensing reports. |
| Who is taking new clients, and in what? | Nothing. No specialty, no modality, no availability, no fee. The register is an administrative list, not a directory of practice. |
| Who has been disciplined? | Nothing. There is no discipline field. The Board publishes enforcement outcomes only through per-licensee lookup — the case library on this site is built from the decisions themselves, not from this file. |
| Where does somebody actually work? | Not reliably. The address is the address of record, which may be a home, an employer, or a mail drop. County counts are sound in aggregate and should not be read as a workplace map. |
| Is this person licensed right now? | Only as at August 2026. A monthly snapshot is a month stale by construction. Verify a specific license with the Board. |
The rule this site works to: publish what the source supports and say plainly what it does not. The issue-date row above is a figure that would have made a striking chart, and it is not on the page because it would have been wrong.
Where every figure came from
Sources.
The register
What the register cannot answer, and what does
Every figure on this page is computed from the file at build time rather than typed into the text, so when the state republishes, the page changes with it. The file was last read in August 2026.
