DDD says New Jersey cannot extend its ABA licensure deadline. A provider group has asked three licensing boards whether their licensees may provide the service.
Key Takeaways
- The deadline: After May 6, 2027, functional behavior assessments and behavior support plans paid for by DDD must be done by a New Jersey licensee or an exempt professional. DDD says it cannot extend the date.
- The shift: Board certification alone will no longer qualify a clinician, and DDD or Medicaid authorization will not substitute for a license, according to the October 27 bulletin.
- The open question: ABCD says the Board of Psychological Examiners found in September that ABA can fall within a trained psychologist’s scope. Answers from the social work and nursing boards have not been made public.
- What comes next: Providers have six months to verify licenses and reassign work. The bulletin warns that noncompliance can mean repaying claims.
Since 2020, New Jersey law has required people who practice applied behavior analysis to hold a state license. For clinicians in the state’s developmental disabilities system, the requirement has come with a carve-out: a temporary exemption, written into the licensing board’s rules, for ABA work paid for by the Division of Developmental Disabilities. The exemption expires on May 6, 2027. In a bulletin dated October 27, the division told its providers that it has no authority to extend the date, and that the licensing board has none either.
The bulletin, issued by Jonathan Seifried, Assistant Commissioner for the division, runs three pages and is mostly practical. Its central instruction is that after the deadline, a Board Certified Behavior Analyst who does this work must also hold a New Jersey license, and that “DDD authorization and Medicaid prior authorization do not replace professional licensure requirements.” It leaves a second matter partly open: which other licensed professionals may perform the same work, and how they establish that they can.
What DDD’s Behavioral Supports Licensure Bulletin Requires
The bulletin covers Behavioral Supports billed under procedure code H0004HI22, along with services for people funded at an acuity-differentiated rate. Within those services, it identifies the work that falls under the state’s legal definition of applied behavior analysis: conducting a functional behavior assessment, developing or revising a behavior support plan, developing behavioral interventions, evaluating whether a plan or intervention is working, and making clinical decisions based on behavioral data.
From May 6, 2027, that work must be done by a Licensed Behavior Analyst or by a professional licensed in another field who qualifies for an exemption under the board’s rules. The division tells providers to identify every employee and contractor who performs those tasks, verify each person’s license, and set up supervision that complies with the board’s rules for Licensed Assistant Behavior Analysts, Registered Behavior Technicians, students, and other supervised staff. It also asks for a transition plan “that prevents interruptions in services or delays in payment.” Noncompliance, the bulletin says, can lead to repayment of claims, loss of the ability to bill for the affected services, and referral to the relevant licensing board.
Why New Jersey’s ABA Licensure Exemption for DDD Providers Ends in 2027
The Applied Behavior Analyst Licensing Act, P.L. 2019, c. 337, was signed into law in January 2020 and created a State Board of Applied Behavior Analyst Examiners to write and enforce the standards. The board’s rules took effect May 6, 2024. They exempted people practicing ABA solely under the authority of, or under contract with, DDD until May 6, 2027, and those working for the state’s Early Intervention Program until May 6, 2029.
The Alliance for the Betterment of Citizens with Disabilities (ABCD), a trade association of New Jersey disability service providers, has described the exemptions as a ramp-up period for a board that did not yet exist when the law was signed. The board opened its application process in September 2024, according to Autism New Jersey, which advocated for the law and reports more than 3,000 licensees authorized to practice in the state. Behavior analysis has no interstate licensure compact, unlike counseling and psychology, so a clinician licensed elsewhere still needs a New Jersey license to do this work in the state.
Which Licensed Professionals May Provide ABA in DDD Behavioral Supports
The board’s rules exempt several licensed professions from the behavior analyst license when the work falls within their own scope of practice. The bulletin lists physicians, psychologists, psychoanalysts, marriage and family therapists, social workers, professional or rehabilitation counselors, speech-language pathologists, and audiologists. It attaches a condition: holding one of those licenses “does not automatically authorize the person to provide every ABA service.” Where a clinician’s authority is unclear, the provider must obtain verification from the board that regulates that profession, or from the behavior analyst board, before assigning or billing the service, and must produce that documentation for state or federal auditors on request.
How that verification works has been the subject of a months-long exchange. In a July 23 notice, ABCD said DDD’s draft rules would require a Licensed Behavior Analyst for assessments and behavior support plans, and that DDD had told the association, on the advice of counsel, that other professions could not perform functional behavioral analysis or update behavior plans because the work fell outside their scope. ABCD then asked the State Board of Psychological Examiners, the Board of Social Work Examiners, and the Board of Nursing to determine whether, and in what capacity, ABA falls within their licensees’ scope of practice.
In an update dated October 6 and posted November 4, ABCD reported that at its September meeting the psychology board found that ABA services “do not fall outside of a psychologist’s scope of practice,” and that psychologists may provide them if trained and educated accordingly, with each licensee responsible for obtaining verification from the board. The association thanked DDD, the board, and the New Jersey Psychological Association. The board’s minutes for that meeting had not been posted as of November 5. ABCD has not reported responses from the social work or nursing boards, and nursing does not appear among the professions listed in DDD’s bulletin.
The psychologists’ association had pressed the point before. In a March 2024 statement, it urged DDD to determine that Behavioral Supports may be provided by psychologists, noting that mental health conditions can affect the behaviors that behavior analysts address.
The Debate Over Who Should Deliver DDD Behavioral Supports
Beneath the scope question is a broader one about the service itself. In an October 12 paper, ABCD argued that the licensing law sets the terms for practicing ABA but says nothing about who may provide Behavioral Supports under the state’s Medicaid waiver, a decision it said belongs to state and federal program authorities. If the service is limited to Licensed Behavior Analysts and exempt professions, the association wrote, Behavioral Supports becomes ABA alone. A Licensed Clinical Social Worker could still help a client under the plan, but could not bill that help as Behavioral Supports, which ABCD said would mean the system “remains skewed against those with co-occurring mental illness, like PTSD and psychosis.”
Autism New Jersey has pushed in the other direction on qualifications. Its public policy agenda lists among its achievements both the licensing act and the strengthening of DDD’s Behavioral Support Services provider qualifications, an effort it describes as aligning them more closely with those of professional behavior analysts. DDD’s bulletin does not take up the policy argument. It describes what the law requires and what providers must document.
How the ABA Licensure Deadline Meets DDD’s New Behavioral Supports Billing Limits
The licensure bulletin follows another, issued September 15, that set unit limits on the same services. An initial functional behavior assessment and behavior support plan may be authorized for no more than 40 hours across eight weeks, after which assessment and plan development is capped at two hours a month for the life of the plan. Monitoring is limited to 48 hours over a new plan’s first six months, then two hours a month. Providers may request more with written justification. DDD has scheduled webinars on the parameters for November 18 and December 16.
Together, the two bulletins narrow the work on two fronts: who may perform it, and how many hours may be billed for it. For a provider that has staffed Behavioral Supports with BACB-certified analysts who have not yet obtained a New Jersey license, the licensure deadline is the more pressing of the two. New Jersey’s Medicaid ABA benefit for children, whose rates Acuity examined in October, is administered by a separate division and is not addressed in the bulletin.
New Jersey Joins Other States Tightening Who May Bill for ABA
New Jersey is one of several states narrowing who may deliver or bill for ABA this year. Georgia made a state behavior analyst license a condition of Medicaid enrollment in its October autism services manual. North Carolina’s House Bill 696 bars Board Certified Behavior Analysts from enrolling as out-of-state providers. Kansas now accepts autism diagnoses for ABA only from doctoral psychologists and physicians, and Minnesota required its autism agencies to apply for provisional licensure by May 31. New Jersey’s deadline arrives amid an ABA workforce shortage that Viventium Chief Executive Navin Gupta has described to Acuity as, at bottom, a retention problem.
Acuity requested comment from the Division of Developmental Disabilities and from ABCD. Neither had responded by publication.
