2.2 The NCARB Record, Score Validity Policy & Reciprocity

Your NCARB Record is the file that holds your education verification, AXP hours, exam eligibilities and scores, and professional history. It is the instrument through which a board grants you eligibility, and later the instrument through which you obtain licenses in additional jurisdictions.

Maintaining the Record

• Application fee: $105 for a licensure candidate.
• Annual renewal: $105, payable for every year you remain active.
• Transmittal: once education, experience, and examination requirements are satisfied, NCARB transmits your Record to the board that will issue the license.

NCARB reserves the right to withhold scores and suspend testing privileges while an outstanding balance exists, so a lapsed renewal can stall a testing plan.

The Score Validity Policy (the Rolling Clock Is Retired)

For years the ARE ran on a "rolling clock": a passed division expired five years after you passed it, and candidates who stalled lost credit they had already earned. That policy is gone.

NCARB's Board of Directors voted unanimously to retire the rolling clock and replaced it with the score validity policy, which ties validity to the version of the exam rather than to the calendar:

• A passed ARE division is valid throughout the delivery of the version of the exam under which it was taken. A division you pass in ARE 5.0 stays valid for as long as ARE 5.0 is delivered.
• When the next version launches, your passed divisions are used to establish appropriate credit under that next version (for example, ARE 6.0).
• Once you have passed all six divisions you are ARE complete, and your scores are no longer subject to the score validity policy at all.

Two consequences follow that candidates frequently get wrong:

1. A career pause no longer destroys credit. Parental leave, illness, a stint outside practice — none of these erase a passed division under the score validity policy.
2. Mixing exam versions is where expiration still bites. NCARB's own example: a candidate who passed an ARE 4.0 division that provided credit toward ARE 5.0, then passed three ARE 5.0 divisions, will lose the ARE 4.0-derived credit if ARE 5.0 ends before they finish — while the three genuine ARE 5.0 passes carry forward.

The Jurisdiction Exception

All 55 U.S. boards have adopted the score validity policy, and NCARB has reinstated thousands of previously expired credits. But some jurisdictions still carry a rolling-clock requirement in their own statute or rules, and a candidate seeking licensure in one of those jurisdictions remains subject to it until the statute is amended. This is why your official score report shows rolling-clock information and expiration dates only if your jurisdiction has such a requirement — and why a passing score report may still display a five-year expiration date for those candidates.

Check your own jurisdiction rather than assuming. The national policy and your board's statute are two different things.

Reciprocity, the NCARB Certificate & Mobility

Passing the ARE licenses you in one jurisdiction. Practicing in a second jurisdiction requires reciprocity (also called comity), and the standard vehicle is the NCARB Certificate.

• The Certificate is issued to architects who have satisfied NCARB's education, experience, and examination standards.
• Holding it lets you request electronic transmittal of your verified Record to another board, rather than reassembling transcripts, employment verifications, and score reports for each new jurisdiction.
• Certificate fees are separate from candidate Record fees — a $1,415 application and $300 annual renewal for a registered architect.

International Mutual Recognition

NCARB maintains Mutual Recognition Agreements (MRAs) that let U.S. architects holding an NCARB Certificate pursue registration abroad — and let foreign-registered architects pursue U.S. registration — through negotiated terms rather than a full re-examination. Current partners include Canada, Mexico (through the tri-national agreement), Australia and New Zealand, and the United Kingdom (with the Architects Registration Board).

Two qualifications matter. First, each MRA sets its own eligibility conditions, and those conditions change: the Australia and New Zealand agreement implemented in November 2024 removed a 6,000-hour post-licensure experience requirement, and the updated Canada agreement implemented in January 2026 removed a 2,000-hour requirement along with citizenship and residency conditions. Second, because each U.S. jurisdiction regulates practice within its own borders, a jurisdiction decides individually whether it will accept a given MRA. Verify both the current MRA terms and your jurisdiction's participation before relying on either.

Exam Tip: The single most testable fact in this material is jurisdictional authority. NCARB does not license anyone. It maintains records, administers the AXP and the ARE, and issues the Certificate. Only a jurisdiction's board of architecture grants, denies, suspends, or revokes a license — and several boards add their own supplemental examination, such as California's Supplemental Examination, on top of the ARE.