Credentials · For families

Is my child’s therapist actually certified?

You can check this yourself, on the certifying board’s own public registry, in about two minutes. This page shows you how — and, just as importantly, what the answer does and does not tell you.

First: which certification are we talking about?

“Certified” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Several different bodies certify people who may work with your child, and they are not the same thing.

Credential	Who issues it
BCBA, BCBA-D, BCaBA, RBT	The Behavior Analyst Certification Board (BACB)
QASP-S, QBA, ABAT, QAP	The QABA Credentialing Board
IBA and related	The International Behavior Analysis Organization (IBAO)
A state license to practice behavior analysis	Your state’s licensing board — separate again, and not every state has one
A state program role — for example Pennsylvania’s BHT, BC or MT	Nobody “certifies” these. They are job roles defined in state regulation.

So the useful question is not “are you certified?” but “certified as what, by whom?” A person can hold one of these, several, or none, and still be doing the job their employer hired them for.

How to check, for the most common one

For BACB credentials — BCBA, BCaBA and RBT, the ones you are most likely to meet — the board publishes a registry anyone can search:

https://www.bacb.com/verify-certification/

You will be asked to confirm you are a person before it will run a search. That is normal. Search by the name as it appears on their certificate, which is not always the name they go by.

The QABA Credentialing Board (https://qababoard.com/) and IBAO publish their own verification routes. If your provider names a credential you do not recognize, ask which board issues it, then look for that board’s registry rather than taking a logo at face value.

What a registry cannot tell you — and the trap

This is the part that is usually missing, so read it before you act on a search result.

A registry answers one narrow question: does this person hold this credential right now. It does not tell you whether they are a good fit for your child, whether they are well supervised, or whether what happened in your home last week was appropriate.
Not finding someone does not mean they are not certified. Names get entered differently from how people use them, married and maiden names diverge, and they may hold a credential from a different board entirely. A blank result is a reason to ask a question, not a conclusion.
⛔ The trap. Searching the web for BACB verification will often land you on the board’s Disciplinary Actions page. It looks official, it loads normally — and it contains no certificant records at all. It lists people who have been disciplined. Searching a name there and finding nothing tells you nothing whatsoever about whether they are certified. Make sure you are on the verification page linked above.

What to ask, alongside the search

Which credential do you hold, and what is your certification number?
Who supervises you, what is their credential, and how often do they observe a real session with my child?
If a credential is not required for your role, what training does your employer require instead, and who checks it?

An agency meeting its obligations can answer all three without difficulty. One that cannot is telling you something worth noticing.

What we can and cannot do

We cannot verify an individual for you, and we would not trust any website that offered to. We do not hold anyone’s certification records — the certifying boards do, and your provider’s employer holds their training file. What we can do is show you where to look and what the answer means, which is what this page is.