The path to licensure: NAAB, AXP and the ARE

In the third week Eberle asks each student to draw a timeline of the next few years of their life, from graduation to the day they stamp their first drawing. Wren's timeline is neat and short. Callum's has a gap where he plans to travel. Ingrid's includes a year working in a construction company, and Joon-ho's includes a possible move to another country. Eberle collects the drawings and says that all four are realistic, and that the path to licensure is long enough that a plan helps. The rest of the class is about the three parts of that path: education, experience and examination.

Eberle Moss has four candidates for licensure this year. One has passed five of the six examination divisions and is studying for the last; one has just started reporting experience; and two are somewhere in the middle. They join the class for an hour to describe what the path is really like, and their accounts give the rules a human shape.

Education

The first part is a professional degree from a program accredited by the National Architectural Accrediting Board. In the United States this can be a five-year bachelor of architecture, a master of architecture taken after a pre-professional bachelor's degree, or a doctor of architecture. The University of Minnesota's master of architecture is one of the accredited programs in the region. The NAAB accredits programs through regular visits and reviews against its conditions for accreditation, the current version of which dates from 2020 and was revised in 2024; they include shared criteria such as design synthesis and building integration that every program must show its students meet. Minnesota requires an accredited degree for the standard path, although some states offer paths for people without one, and NCARB reported that about 11% of new architects in 2024 earned extra experience instead of an accredited degree.

Eberle points out that the four students are close to the end of this first part, and that the accredited degree is the foundation the others rest on. Accreditation exists because the regulator cannot examine everything a graduate knows. Instead it trusts an accrediting body to make sure that every accredited program teaches the knowledge and skills that a beginning architect needs, from history and theory to structures, building science, codes, accessibility, professional practice and ethics. This very course is one of the requirements.

Experience

The second part is supervised experience, documented through NCARB's Architectural Experience Program, known as the AXP. A candidate opens an NCARB Record, finds a supervisor who is usually a licensed architect, and reports experience in six practice areas: practice management, project management, programming and analysis, project planning and design, project development and documentation, and construction and evaluation. The AXP requires 3,740 hours in total, with a minimum in each area. In November 2025 NCARB updated the program so that the six areas now describe the capabilities in its 2024 Competency Standard for Architects rather than a list of tasks, and it changed the reporting rules: experience reported within a year earns full credit, and older experience earns 75% credit with no time limit. The total hours and the hours in each area did not change.

The candidates at Eberle Moss say that the hardest part is not the hours but the range. A firm that designs schools may give a candidate plenty of design and documentation time but little experience in construction or practice management, and the candidate must ask for time on a building site or in the office's business side. Eberle says that good firms plan this, rotating candidates through different roles, and that the supervisor's job includes noticing when a candidate has stalled in one area. NCARB's changes in 2025 also allow up to a set number of hours of approved continuing education in each area to count, which helps candidates who struggle to find experience in a particular area.

# AXP tracker: hours reported against the 3,740-hour requirement.
# Area minimums are the AXP's published values for the six practice areas.
minimums = {
    "practice management": 160,
    "project management": 360,
    "programming and analysis": 260,
    "project planning and design": 1080,
    "development and documentation": 1520,
    "construction and evaluation": 360,
}
reported = {
    "practice management": 60,
    "project management": 240,
    "programming and analysis": 300,
    "project planning and design": 1410,
    "development and documentation": 1300,
    "construction and evaluation": 120,
}
total_min = 3740
total = sum(reported.values())
print(f"{'area':<32}{'reported':>9}{'minimum':>9}{'left':>7}")
for area, need in minimums.items():
    have = reported[area]
    print(f"{area:<32}{have:>9}{need:>9}{max(0, need - have):>7}")
print(f"{'total':<32}{total:>9}{total_min:>9}{max(0, total_min - total):>7}")
print("areas still short:", ", ".join(a for a in minimums if reported[a] < minimums[a]))

area                             reported  minimum   left
practice management                    60      160    100
project management                    240      360    120
programming and analysis              300      260      0
project planning and design          1410     1080      0
development and documentation        1300     1520    220
construction and evaluation           120      360    240
total                                3430     3740    310
areas still short: practice management, project management, development and documentation, construction and evaluation

The tracker shows a common pattern: the candidate has more than enough design hours but is short in practice management, project management, documentation and construction. Because surplus hours in one area do not make up for a shortfall in another, the 3,430 hours already reported are less useful than they look. The candidate needs months of deliberate work on site visits, submittals and the business side of a project, which is exactly the conversation the supervisor should start. The area minimums in the sketch are the program's published values, which the candidate should confirm in NCARB's current guidelines.

Examination

The third part is the Architect Registration Examination, the ARE, which is developed and administered by NCARB and used by every state. The current version, ARE 5.0, has six divisions: practice management, project management, programming and analysis, project planning and design, project development and documentation, and construction and evaluation. Each is taken separately on a computer at a testing center or online, in any order, and combines multiple-choice and other item types with case studies. In April 2026 NCARB updated twelve of the exam's ninety-one objectives and divided the case studies into a larger number of shorter ones. NCARB reported a pass rate of 55% across divisions in 2024 and an average of 2.3 years to pass all six. Minnesota, like most states, allows candidates to begin the examination while they are still gaining experience.

The interns describe the examination as a test of practice rather than design. It asks about codes, contracts, project delivery, construction administration, structures, building systems, accessibility, the business of a firm and the architect's legal duties. Eberle says that the students' coursework will cover much of it, but that the examination rewards people who have worked on real projects and seen how decisions are made. The best preparation, he says, is to take the examination while the experience is fresh, to study in a group and to treat failed sections as information rather than defeat.

How long it takes, and why

NCARB's 2025 report put the average time from the start of architectural education to licensure at 12.9 years, about six months less than the year before. The report also found that women typically earn their licenses more than a year sooner than men. The candidates at Eberle Moss say that the time stretches because experience in some areas is hard to find, because the examination is expensive and divisions are often retaken, and because people move between firms, leave practice to raise children or go back to school. NCARB has made several changes in the last decade to shorten the path without lowering the standard, including allowing experience and examination to overlap and making older experience count.

Eberle encourages the students to plan. Start recording experience as soon as the program allows, choose employers who will give a range of work, find a mentor early, take the examination when you are eligible rather than waiting until you feel ready, and keep the record up to date so that hours are not lost to late reporting. A path that is planned is not necessarily short, but it is rarely as long as one that is not.

Alternative paths and international applicants

Not everyone follows the standard path. Some states, though not all, license people without an accredited degree if they have more experience, and NCARB offers a certificate path for licensed architects without an accredited degree who have practiced for some years. NCARB also runs a program for architects licensed in other countries that allows them to earn the Certificate through a portfolio of experience, and the mutual recognition agreements with Canada and with Australia and New Zealand give architects from those countries a shorter route. Each path ends at the same point, a license from a state board, and each has its own requirements and costs. Eberle points out that a firm that hires an internationally trained architect should understand how long their path to a license may be.

Exercise 3: your own path

• Draw your own timeline from graduation to licensure, with the experience areas and the examination shown separately.
• Open an NCARB Record, read the AXP guidelines and identify the practice areas in which you expect to have the most trouble finding experience.
• Interview an intern or recently licensed architect about their path and note one thing they would do differently.

Self-check

• Can I describe the three parts of the path to licensure where I intend to practice?
• Do I know the total hours of experience required and why each area has its own minimum?
• Do I know when I will be eligible to take the examination?
• Do I have a plan to find a mentor or supervisor?

What the path costs, and who pays

The path also costs money. A candidate pays NCARB for the Record and for each ARE division, pays again to retake a failed division, buys study materials and, after passing, pays the state's application fee and the fee for the NCARB Certificate. None of these costs is large on its own, but with retakes and years of lower salaries they add up, and they fall on people at the start of their careers. Eberle Moss pays its candidates' examination fees, including one retake of each division, gives them paid time off to test, and counts supervision as part of each senior architect's job. Eberle tells the students to ask about these policies when they look for work. A firm that supports its candidates is telling them something about how it treats people in general.

Firms gain from that support as well. A licensed architect can take responsibility for projects, sign drawings, lead teams and win the trust of clients, and a firm with more licensed staff can take on more work. A firm that lets its young staff drift for years without finishing their licensure loses them to competitors who will help them, or keeps people who are capable of more than they are allowed to do. Eberle says that the conversation about licensure should start at the job interview and continue at every performance review, and that the best mentors he knew treated an intern's progress as their own responsibility.

There is also a quieter cost: the gap between what school teaches and what practice needs. The interns at Eberle Moss say that they arrived knowing how to design a building but not how to read a contract, estimate a fee, run a meeting or respond to a contractor's question on site. The experience program exists to close that gap, but it works only when the firm treats the intern as a professional in training rather than as a pair of hands for drafting. This course is meant to start closing the gap before the students arrive.