BCBA Fieldwork and Supervision Requirements: 2026 Rules and 2027 Changes

Under the current BACB rules, BCBA applicants complete 2,000 hours of Supervised Fieldwork with at least 5% supervised, or 1,500 hours of Concentrated Supervised Fieldwork with at least 10% supervised, accruing 20 to 130 hours a month. For applications from January 1, 2027, concentrated supervision drops to 7.5%, the monthly maximum rises to 160 hours, and observations become 60 or 90 minutes a month.

Everything below comes from the BACB BCBA Handbook (updated 06/2026), the 2027 BCBA Requirements summary (updated 02/2026) and the BACB's guidance for the 2027 transition. The rule that matters most: your fieldwork must meet the requirements in place on the date you submit your application, not the date you accrued the hours.

Under the current handbook, a supervisory period is one calendar month and there must be at least 4 supervisor-trainee contacts per month for Supervised Fieldwork and 6 for Concentrated. Fieldwork must be completed within five continuous years, counted by calendar month.

The 2027 requirements state that a fieldwork supervisor must be an active BCBA with no current disciplinary sanctions and either (a) certified for at least one year and meeting the ongoing supervision CEU requirement, or (b) certified for less than one year and receiving monthly consultation from a qualified consulting supervisor. Supervisors also complete the 8-hour supervision training before supervising.

Unless the trainee is at an organization with multiple supervisors, group supervision must come from the same supervisor who provides individual supervision.

At least 60% of total fieldwork hours must be unrestricted: the work most like what a BCBA does. The handbook's examples include observation and data collection, training staff and caregivers, conducting assessments (such as functional analyses and preference assessments), meeting with clients about programming, graphing and analyzing data, researching literature for a current client, and writing and revising behavior-analytic programs.

Restricted activities, mainly delivering therapeutic and instructional procedures, may make up no more than 40% of the total. The 60% applies across all your hours, not each month. Data collection can be restricted if you collect it only as part of delivering a client's treatment.

• Contacts are real-time interactions between supervisor and trainee, individual or group.
• Group supervision is an interactive meeting of 2 to 10 trainees, and group hours may not exceed half of supervised hours in a month.
• Observation means a supervisor watching the trainee with a client in the natural environment. In-person is preferred, but the current handbook allows synchronous (live video) or asynchronous (recorded video) observation.
• Watching a recorded video without real-time feedback can count toward the observation requirement but not as a contact or as supervised hours.

The 2027 transition guidance says observation tracking moves from a count of contacts to minutes, so it recommends recording both the number of observations and the minutes of each one every month.

If you are not sure whether you will apply before or after January 1, 2027, the BACB recommends meeting both sets of requirements at once and completing both the 2022 and 2027 Monthly Fieldwork Verification Forms (M-FVFs) each month. Points from the transition guidance:

• Concentrated hours: hours supervised at 7.5% under the 2027 rules cannot count as concentrated hours under the current rules, which need 10%. Hours supervised at 10% meet both.
• Monthly maximum: if you log 160 hours in a month under the 2027 rules and later apply under the current rules, you must adjust those months to 130 hours or fewer.
• Forms: M-FVFs are not submitted with the application, but you and your supervisor must keep all fieldwork documentation for at least seven years and provide it if the BACB asks.
• Pathways: from January 1, 2027, there are only two eligibility pathways (accredited or recognized program, and behavior-analytic coursework). Pathways 3 and 4 must be completed and applied for before that date. Coursework requirements for pathway 2 also change, including freestanding courses for several content areas.

The BACB tracks later dated changes, including the planned move to pathway 1 only in 2032, on its Recent and Upcoming Changes page.

Supervisors juggling trainees and RBTs can use the BCBA supervision calculator for the monthly percentages. For the RBT side of the caseload, see RBT supervision requirements, and for documenting the sessions themselves, the guide to ABA session notes.