Washington · Social Work

LSWAIC to LICSW: Washington's Clinical Social Work Hour Requirements

Last updated July 10, 2026

Washington's LSWAIC → LICSW path looks superficially like Oregon's CSWA → LCSW track, but the Department of Health runs it on a very different rhythm: lower hour targets, two overlapping supervision floors instead of an individual/group split, and — the big one — no periodic reporting at all. Everything is verified once, at the end.

The hour targets

Two floors, not two buckets

Oregon splits supervision into "at least 50 individual, at most 50 group." Washington instead puts two independent floors on the same 100 hours:

• By supervisor type: at least 70 hours with an LICSW. Up to 30 may be with an equally qualified licensed mental health practitioner.
• By format: at least 60 hours one-to-one. Up to 40 may be one-to-one or group.

Because these are floors rather than exclusive buckets, the simplest arrangement — all 100 hours one-to-one with an LICSW — satisfies both at once, and is common.

Supervisor qualifications

Your LICSW supervisor must have held the license for at least two years in good standing and completed at least 15 clock hours of clinical supervision training. You may have multiple supervisors; each one completes their own verification form. Unlike Oregon, Washington sets no fixed session frequency per month for social work associates.

No reports until the end — then DOH 670-011

There are no birth-month windows and no six-month reports. You track your hours across the whole supervised period, and each supervisor completes a DOH 670-011 Supervised Postgraduate Experience Verification form — one per supervisor and per practice setting — submitted with your final LICSW application. The form asks for direct client contact hours, one-to-one supervision, group supervision, other (indirect) hours, supervisor qualifications, the practice setting, and the date range.

The catch: "no reports" means no forcing function. If your tracking drifts for a year, nobody notices until the end — when reconstructing hours across supervisors and settings gets genuinely painful. Keep the log current as you go.

Exam, renewal, and a shortcut

• Exam: the ASWB Clinical exam, passed before or during the associate period. Washington requires the clinical-level exam even at the LSWAIC stage.
• Renewal: annual on your birthday ($41), with 18 CE hours per year — including 6 hours of suicide assessment at first renewal, 6 hours of ethics/law every two years, and 2 hours of health equity every four years.
• SUDP credit: 3+ years as a Substance Use Disorder Professional within the past 10 years reduces the total requirement from 3,000 to 2,700 hours.

This guide is informational, not legal advice. Licensure rules change — always verify current requirements with your board before making decisions about your supervision plan, and flag any discrepancies to support@almostlicensed.com so we can fix them.