Your Client Moves Out of State Mid-Treatment. Now What?

It is one of the most common questions in telepsychology and one of the least comfortable, because the answer sometimes overrides what is clinically best.

The governing principle

The practice of psychology occurs where the client is located. Not where you are, not where the relationship began, not where the file is kept. If your client is sitting in another state during a session, you are practicing in that state and you need authority there.

The therapeutic relationship confers nothing legally. Years of good work do not create an exception.

Work out which case you are in

Both states participate, and you hold an APIT®. The straightforward case. Your authorization reaches the client's new location and care continues — provided you are physically in your declared home state during sessions.

Both participate, but you have no APIT®. The compact is available to you, but not retroactively and not instantly: the E.Passport review runs two to three weeks and the APIT® follows. You cannot lawfully continue in the interim on the basis that the paperwork is coming.

The client has moved to a non-participating state. California, New York, Oregon, Massachusetts, Hawaii, Louisiana, New Mexico, Alaska, Iowa or Montana. The compact does not reach them. Your options are a license in that state, a narrow temporary-practice allowance if one exists, or referral.

The client has moved temporarily. A student home for the summer, an extended work assignment, a stay with family. This is the genuinely grey area, and it is grey because "temporarily located" is not defined uniformly. Do not treat a long absence as though it were a short trip because the alternative is inconvenient.

Temporary-practice allowances are narrower than they sound

Several non-participating states permit some out-of-state practice, and the terms reward close reading.

California allows psychologists licensed elsewhere in the US or Canada to practice temporarily — but SB 775 changed that, effective 1 January 2026, from 30 non-consecutive days per calendar year to 30 consecutive days. That is a narrowing. The old framing supported intermittent contact across the year, which is exactly the shape of continuing therapy with a relocated client. The new one gives a single continuous window and then closes.

Anyone whose plan for a California-bound client relies on the old arithmetic needs a new plan.

What to actually do

1. Ask about moves before they happen. Build it into intake and into periodic review. Clients do not know their relocation is a licensure event and will not volunteer it.
2. Establish the client's physical location at each session where it may have changed. This sounds bureaucratic; it is the fact your authority rests on.
3. When a move is announced, determine authority immediately — before the next appointment, not after.
4. If authority does not extend, say so plainly and early. A planned three-session termination with a warm referral is a clinical act. An abrupt stop when someone notices the problem is a rupture.
5. Build a referral network in the states your clients actually move to. For a university-adjacent or military-adjacent practice, those destinations are predictable.

The exposure if you carry on regardless

Three layers, and they compound. The receiving state's board can act on unlicensed practice within its borders. Payers can recoup for services rendered without proper authority, sometimes years later during an audit. And if the episode is ever reviewed, "the psychologist was not authorized to practice in the client's jurisdiction" is a fact that sits badly on the record regardless of the quality of the care.

None of that is a reason to abandon people. It is a reason to see the move coming, and to have the authority — or the referral — in place before the next session rather than after.