GetMassageLicense

About GetMassageLicense

Our Mission

GetMassageLicense exists to give massage therapists and massage therapy students a single, clear answer to one question: what do I need to become licensed to practice massage therapy in my state?

Free. No sign-up. No lead-gate. Just the information you need to plan your training, exam, and license application — sourced from the same primary documents a state licensing board would point you to, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, since massage therapy licensure in the US is set state by state, not nationally.

Authorship & Methodology

Every page on this site is produced by the same published methodology, applied by the GetMassageLicense Research Team— not by an individual writer claiming personal expertise we don’t have. The methodology is the author. We publish under the Research Team / organizational byline deliberately: no page on this site has a named human author, headshot, or personal credential, because none of that would be genuine. Concretely, the methodology is:

  • Primary sources only.Every factual claim traces to a primary source — a state statute, a state licensing board’s own page, or an official publication from the Federation of State Massage Therapy Boards (FSMTB) or the National Certification Board for Therapeutic Massage & Bodywork (NCBTMB) — linked directly on the page that makes the claim.
  • Cite-or-deny.If we can’t find a specific number (a fee amount, an hour requirement, a phone number) in a source we can actually verify, we leave that field blank (shown as —) rather than estimate, guess, or reuse another state’s figure. You’ll sometimes see a state page missing a figure other sites publish confidently — that’s usually because we couldn’t confirm it against a primary source, not an oversight.
  • Dated, per-state verification. Every state record carries its own lastVerified date and a verifiedBy flag (agent or human), shown at the top and bottom of every state page, so you can see exactly how current that specific jurisdiction’s data is and how it was checked — not a single site-wide “updated” date standing in for all 51.

Article and page metadata credit GetMassageLicense— the publishing organization — as the author, with this published methodology linked (via schema.org publishingPrinciples) as the editorial standard behind every claim. We’re accountable for that process, and any error is ours to fix; we’d rather stand behind a transparent, primary-sourced methodology than invent a personal byline.

Our Data Sources

State-level licensing data — training-hour minimums, accepted exams, fees, continuing-education rules, and licensure-by-endorsement pathways — is sourced directly from official state licensing board websites and state statutes: primary .gov and state-code sources, cited on every state page. We never cite third-party aggregators or competing directory sites as a source of record.

National exam and credentialing information — the MBLEx and related standards — is sourced from the Federation of State Massage Therapy Boards (FSMTB), and national board certification information from the National Certification Board for Therapeutic Massage & Bodywork (NCBTMB). We do not cite competing directory sites or private massage-school marketing pages as a source of licensing fact.

Editorial Standards

  • We link the specific source for every fact we publish, not just a homepage.
  • We do not publish specific dollar amounts, hour counts, or dates we can’t confirm against a source we can actually cite — cite-or-deny, no exceptions.
  • When a source is stale or conflicting — for example, a state statute and its board’s current guidance disagree on an hour count or fee — we say so directly on that state’s page, in a “Source Notes” section, and explain which figure we use and why, rather than presenting a single confident-sounding number. Most states have no such conflict to disclose; where one exists, it’s documented on that state’s page, not buried.
  • We describe 51 US jurisdictions (50 states plus the District of Columbia) accurately — we don’t round to “50 states” when DC is part of what a claim covers, and we don’t assert full 51-jurisdiction coverage until the data actually supports it.
  • Corrections are welcome and reviewed against primary sources before we change a page — see contact info below.

AI Transparency

Research, drafting, and verification on this site are performed with AI assistance under a documented process, not by an anonymous human staff. Where a state record is flagged verifiedBy: "agent", an AI research agent located and cited the primary sources for that page; where flagged verifiedBy: "human", a person independently reviewed it. We disclose this rather than implying a large editorial staff wrote every page by hand.

AI assistance does not change our sourcing standard: every published figure still needs a citable primary source, whether it was found by a human or an AI agent, and every field we can’t verify is left blank rather than filled in with a plausible-sounding guess.

How We’re Funded

GetMassageLicense is free to use and, where we display a sponsored placement, we disclose it directly next to the link. As of this writing we have not signed an affiliate partnership for continuing-education providers, exam-prep providers, or any other product referenced on this site — where we name a provider (for example, on our continuing-education page), it is for informational context only, not a paid placement. If that changes, the relevant page will carry its own visible disclosure, and it will never affect which state requirements or exam facts we publish — the underlying licensing data is the same whether or not a page carries a sponsored link.

Corrections

Found something out of date or wrong? Email the page URL and the official source it should match to editor@getmassagelicense.com. Because every claim links to its primary source, corrections are quick to verify — we review them against that source and update the page (and its lastVerified date) promptly.

Every error we have published and fixed is listed on our corrections and verification log, with what it said, what it says now, and how long it stood.

Contact

Have a question, correction, or suggestion? Email the GetMassageLicense Research Team at editor@getmassagelicense.com.