One Profession, Fifty Rulebooks: The Quiet Tax on Practising Across State Lines

An engineer who can design a retaining wall in Denver can design the same retaining wall in Columbus. The soil mechanics do not consult a map. What changes at the state line is not the engineering — it is the paperwork, and the profession has quietly agreed to pretend the paperwork difference is meaningful.

It is not. And the cost of pretending falls entirely on licensees.

Take one small, fully documentable slice of the fragmentation: the geometry of the seal itself. California specifies a circular seal 1.5 inches in diameter under Cal. Code Regs. tit. 16, § 411. New York specifies 1.75 inches under 8 NYCRR § 68.13. Colorado allows 1.5 to 2 inches under Colo. Rev. Stat. § 12-25-217, as does Ohio under Ohio Rev. Code § 4733.14 and Texas under 22 TAC § 137.31. Across the 51 US jurisdictions there are ten distinct diameter specifications.

Ten. For a circle with a name in it.

What the quarter-inch buys

Ask what public-safety objective is served by the difference between a 1.5-inch circle and a 1.75-inch circle. There is no answer that survives the question. Nothing is protected by a quarter inch of seal diameter.

What the variation does buy is friction. A licensee registered in four states does not have one seal. They have four artifacts with four geometries, four sets of required text, four placement conventions. Each has to be produced correctly, kept current with license expiry, and applied to the right drawing set. Each is an opportunity for a clerical error that a board can characterise as a violation — because the seal is the one part of the deliverable where form is the substance. The state-by-state breakdown of stamp requirements reads less like a safety standard than an archive of independent decisions made at different times by people who never spoke to each other.

That is the honest explanation. No conspiracy, no design. Fifty-one bodies wrote fifty-one rules — and the fragmentation runs wider still, since NCEES's roster of 69 member licensing boards spans all 50 states plus the US territories — each locally reasonable, none coordinated. The result is not a policy. It is sediment.

The tax nobody itemises

Call it a tax because that is its shape: a recurring, mandatory cost that produces no corresponding good. It is unusual only in never being itemised, so it never gets argued about.

The line items, if you did itemise them:

• Artifact production. Every jurisdiction needs its own compliant seal file, regenerated whenever the license renews or the rules shift. That is the only reason per-state tooling exists at all — a Texas-specific stamp generator and an Ohio-specific one are separate products because the two states wrote different specifications.
• Continuing education. Ohio requires 30 PDH per two years. Texas requires 15 PDH per year. New York requires 36 PDH per three years. Colorado requires no continuing education for engineers at all. A licensee in all four tracks four clocks against four accounting periods.
• Verification of standing. Each board runs its own public record, its own interface, its own idea of what a license number looks like. Confirming a colleague is current means knowing which board's system to visit and how it wants the query formatted — the reason a guide to finding the right state lookup needs to exist.
• Vigilance. The largest cost is not any line item but the standing obligation to know which rulebook governs the drawing in front of you right now, and to notice when one of them changes.

None of this is engineering. All of it is billable time nobody bills.

The Colorado problem

Colorado requires no continuing education for engineers. That is the most useful fact in the whole picture and it gets almost no attention.

If mandatory CE were load-bearing for public safety, a state requiring none of it should be visibly worse. If Ohio's 30 hours per two years and Texas's 15 per year mark the floor beneath which competence decays, Colorado is standing on nothing.

I will not claim Colorado's outcomes are better, worse, or the same. I do not have that data, and neither does anyone waving it around. But the burden of proof runs one direction. Colorado is a functioning jurisdiction with a functioning board and enforceable seal and practice requirements. If states with heavy CE mandates cannot point to a difference, the mandate is a ritual, and the profession should say so rather than quietly paying for it.

The strongest objection

The counter-argument is serious: state boards are not arbitrary. Engineering failures are local and physical. A coastal board carries institutional knowledge about wind and storm loading that a national body would flatten into a lowest common denominator. Decentralised regulation keeps that knowledge close to the practice it governs.

I accept it. It is the best case for state-level licensure and I think it wins.

But notice what it justifies. It justifies substantive variation — different structural provisions, different design criteria, different scope-of-practice boundaries where the physical facts genuinely differ.

It justifies nothing about seal diameter. No local hazard is addressed by a 1.75-inch circle and missed by a 1.5-inch one. The local-conditions argument does real work for the substance of state codes and zero work for the format of the stamp, and the two have been bundled so long that defending the first reads as defending the second.

Separate them. The defensible core of state regulation is a board with authority to investigate and discipline, plus a public record of who holds a license and in what standing. Consequences and transparency are what protect the public. Everything downstream — the geometry, the font, the placement of the expiry date — is administrative convention wearing a safety costume.

Where fragmentation is getting worse

The electronic transition should have dissolved the format question. It mostly has not.

All 51 jurisdictions now permit digital or electronic seals in some form. That is real progress. But permission was largely granted for electronic versions of each state's existing rules rather than a shared one, so the diameter specifications survived the jump into a medium where diameter barely means anything. Board guidance still tends to centre the physical artifact — Washington's stamp and seal requirements for engineers and land surveyors govern the rubber stamp itself, down to the required wording, the license number, and a signature in permanent ink across the face of the seal. A seal rendered as a vector on a PDF has whatever dimensions the renderer gives it, at whatever zoom the reviewer chooses, on a document that may never be printed. The 1.5-versus-1.75-inch distinction is now a rule about an object that frequently has no physical size.

Meanwhile the thing that does matter in this medium — cryptographic integrity, so a reviewer can tell whether the file changed after sealing — is where the rules are thinnest. Sit with that inversion. States are precise about the part that does not matter and vague about the part that does. If you have not worked through the difference between an electronic signature and a digital one, that gap is where your real exposure lives, and no amount of correct seal geometry closes it. The mechanism of how a digital signature binds a document to a signer is what makes forging a sealed document hard. The circle does not.

What standardisation would and would not touch

The reform is narrower than it sounds, which is why it is worth arguing for — and narrower still given how much machinery already exists: NCEES's Records program lets a multi-state licensee build one record that carries most of what comity licensure elsewhere requires, sparing them from re-submitting transcripts, exam results, employment verification, and references to every board in turn.

Standardise seal geometry and required content: a common dimensional range and a common set of required fields — name, license number, jurisdiction, profession. Colorado, Ohio, and Texas already share the same 1.5-to-2-inch range. Ten distinct specifications across 51 jurisdictions is not ten competing safety philosophies. It is ten accidents of drafting.

Standardise machine-readable license status. Every board already publishes who is licensed. Publishing it in a consistent format would cost boards almost nothing and eliminate an entire category of manual work — the gap that a unified license lookup exists to paper over. Papering over a gap is not as good as closing it.

Do not standardise scope of practice, technical codes, or disciplinary authority. Keep those local, keep them enforceable. That is the part that earns the licence its meaning.

The asymmetry worth holding onto: standardising format costs boards nothing they should want to keep. No enforcement power weakens because the seal is a common size. The only loss is the historical accident of having decided independently.

Why this falls to individuals

The tax persists because no single party is big enough to feel it. A licensee in one state notices nothing. A licensee in six notices plenty and has no lever. Boards never see the aggregate, because each board sees only its own rule, which is not burdensome in isolation. The burden is emergent. It exists only in the sum, and nobody occupies the seat from which the sum is visible.

So it does not get fixed by anyone waiting to be asked. Boards hold comment periods and rulemaking dockets. They are attended by whoever bothers to attend. A comment from a multi-state licensee describing concretely what format variation costs may be the only data the board receives from the governed side.

Three things worth doing

Not a summary — actual moves, in ascending order of effort.

Audit your exposure. List your jurisdictions against the four variables that actually differ: seal specification, CE obligation and its accounting period, renewal date, and the board's lookup interface. Do it once, on one page. The exercise usually surfaces something that has drifted — a seal built to a superseded spec, a CE clock counted against the wrong window. Start from your primary jurisdiction: what a PE stamp must contain and what dimensions it must meet, then work outward. If your licences span professions rather than states, the same audit applies to the boundary between an architect's seal and an engineer's, and to the separate rules governing a land surveyor's seal.

Regenerate rather than reuse. The common failure mode in multi-state practice is carrying one seal artifact across jurisdictions because it is close enough. It is not close enough; that is the entire problem. Producing a correct file per jurisdiction takes minutes, and you can check what a compliant seal looks like for your state with a free preview tool that requires no signup before committing to anything. The point is not the tool. The point is that "close enough" is where fragmentation converts from an annoyance into a disciplinary exposure.

Say it on the record. When your board opens comment on seal or signature rules, file one. Be specific: name the jurisdictions you hold, the format differences, the hours. A board can act on a documented burden; it has nothing to act on when it receives an abstract complaint. Be equally specific about what you are not asking for. You are not asking them to surrender disciplinary authority or defer to a national body on technical codes. You are asking them to stop specifying a circle differently from their neighbours for no reason either of them can articulate.

The profession has spent decades treating the regulatory apparatus as one object to be defended or attacked. It is not one object. It is a defensible core — accountability and a public record — wrapped in accumulated administrative sediment that nobody chose and nobody will miss. Separating them is the work. Engineering competence does not stop at the state line. Neither should the seal that certifies it.