Green Since 1899 Blog

State Licensure Adoption

November 4, 2025

Signing the Pennsylvania Landscape Architect Registration Act / PA-DE ASLA Archives

The American Society of Landscape Architects believes it’s important for landscape architects to be licensed in every part of the U.S. This helps keep people safe and protects their health, safety, and welfare. ASLA wants the rules for getting licensed to be the same everywhere, with clear requirements for education, work experience, passing exams, and keeping up with learning over time. Getting a license means only trained and qualified people can call themselves “landscape architects” and do the job legally. This helps prevent things like injuries, damage to property, or extra costs caused by bad design work. Since landscape architects work on big projects—like traffic systems and stormwater control—their work affects a lot of people. Licensing also makes sure everyone in the field competes fairly.

Since 2017, all 50 states and Washington, D.C. have required landscape architects to be licensed. This helps protect the public’s health, safety, and welfare—a major achievement that ASLA and its members continue to defend and support. But when did licensing first start? The list below shows when each state began regulating the profession.

A map showing when each state started requiring landscape architects to be licensed. States with lighter colors adopted licensure more recently. Modified from a map by Traselu. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

State Licensure Adoption

A few things to keep in mind:

This chart doesn’t show the difference between title laws (which regulate who can use the title “landscape architect”) and practice laws (which regulate the actual work). It simply marks when any form of regulation was first put in place.

Starting in the late 1970s, many states began reviewing and sometimes ending their regulatory boards. Because of this, some states have gaps in their licensure history. For example, Colorado didn’t reinstate its licensure law until 2008. Still, all states currently require landscape architects to be licensed.

ASLA originally missed Louisiana’s law when it was first passed. Back then, Georgia and New York were thought to be the second and third states to regulate the profession. This confusion may be because Louisiana’s law was actually an amendment to an existing law about the Horticultural Commission, which added rules for licensing landscape architects and included a landscape architect on the commission.

Virginia also tried to pass a regulation in 1960—it was mentioned in publications at the time—but by 1964, ASLA no longer referenced it, and it’s unclear what happened.