Opinion: Missouri has cut licensing barriers before. Let's do it again.

Imagine you're a working mother with a professional teaching license. You've spent years building your career and earning the credentials required to do your job. Then your family moves to a new state.

You arrive ready to work. But your license doesn't automatically come with you. Suddenly, you're filling out applications, paying new fees, gathering records and waiting for another state to determine whether you're qualified to do work you've already been licensed to do.

Nothing about your ability changed. Only your ZIP code did. What makes sense about that?

Missouri has been asking that question for years regarding other professions. And in July, the state took another important step.

Gov. Mike Kehoe signed House Bill 2974 into law, building on a decade of work to make occupational licenses more portable without lowering professional standards. It passed with bipartisan majorities in both chambers and earned support from Missouri's largest health systems, including BJC, SSM Health and Mercy.

The new law clarifies telehealth authority for qualified health professionals and adds physician assistants, athletic trainers and dietitians to interstate licensing compacts — agreements that allow qualified professionals licensed in participating states to practice in other member states without starting the licensing process from scratch.

For the people affected, it's about the ability to work, support a family and accept a job opportunity without unnecessary red tape standing in the way.

It's part of an effective playbook Missouri has been building for a decade. Since 2016, the state has joined 12 professional licensing compacts covering physical therapy, nursing, emergency medical services, psychology, occupational therapy, audiology and speech-language pathology, counseling, social work, medicine and the three new professions made possible by HB 2974.

That's progress. But nearly all of Missouri's compacts are in healthcare-related professions. Teachers and cosmetologists are still waiting.

Fourteen states have joined the Interstate Teacher Mobility Compact, including four of Missouri's neighbors: Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Kentucky. Missouri competes with those states for teachers while requiring qualified educators to navigate a separate licensing process.

Cosmetologists are among the most heavily licensed workers in the country. A Cosmetology Licensure Compact now exists and 13 states — including Kansas, Kentucky and Tennessee — have joined. Missouri has not.

This matters. In 2025, 25.1% of employed women held a professional license, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Women are highly represented in many licensed occupations, including nursing, teaching, cosmetology, child care and social work. That means licensing requirements can have significant implications for women’s ability to enter the workforce, pursue new opportunities and entrepreneurship — and move their careers across state lines.

When licensing rules are written one state at a time, women absorb more of the cost — in fees, months of waiting and wages they aren't earning.

Since 2018, Missouri has recognized out-of-state licenses outright, including for professions where no interstate compact exists. But recognition and compacts aren't the same thing.

Under general recognition, a professional moves here, submits an application and waits for a licensing board to make its determination. Under a compact, participating states have agreed in advance how qualified professionals will be recognized.

One approach reviews your credentials after you arrive. The other settles the question before you get there.

Neither approach requires lowering professional standards. The issue is often not the standard itself. It's requiring a qualified person to prove the same qualification again, in a new state, to a different licensing board.

This is what good government looks like: protecting the standards that keep Missourians safe while removing unnecessary bureaucracy that keeps qualified people from working.

HB 2974 shows what can happen when policymakers look at an established system and ask a simple question: How can we make it work better?

Missouri has answered that question once. We can do it again.

As legislators prepare for the 2027 session, Missouri should join the Interstate Teacher Mobility Compact and the Cosmetology Licensure Compact — and continue looking for other places where qualified people face barriers to working in Missouri that don't make Missourians safer, healthier or better served.

A professional license should certify that you can do the work. It shouldn't prevent you from doing it simply because you crossed a state line.

Missouri has shown that we can remove those barriers without lowering our standards. 

Now let's keep going.

Wendy Doyle is president and CEO of United WE, a national nonpartisan think-and-do tank focused on advancing economic and civic leadership.