Find a Supervisor

Are you one of the supervisors listed here? Add your rate and availability, or ask to be removed. The state file does not carry either, so interns are calling people who are full.

Before you start: the mistake that costs people months

Your hours do not count until the board has your supervisor on file.

A qualified supervisor has to submit Form DH-MQA 5049, the Qualified Supervisor Statement, to the board before supervision begins. Not after. Not at the end when you apply. Before.

Interns lose entire blocks of hours to this every year. They find a supervisor, start meeting, log months of work, and discover at application time that the paperwork was never filed or was filed late. There is no retroactive fix.

Two things to do before your first session:

1. Look the person up yourself in the state’s license verification system. The Qualified Supervisor designation appears under Qualifications on their record. If nothing is listed there, they are not a qualified supervisor, whatever they told you.
2. Ask them directly whether they have submitted the form for you specifically, and ask for a copy.

A supervisor who hesitates at either question is telling you something.

What makes someone a qualified supervisor

It is a designation the board adds to an existing license, not a separate credential. To get it for mental health counselor interns, a clinician needs five years of clinical experience, of which two can come from a post-master’s clinical internship and three must be post-licensure. On top of that they need supervision training completed after they were licensed: a graduate course in supervision, an approved CE course in supervisory training, a post-graduate field instructor course in clinical social work, or designation as an Approved Clinical Supervisor through CCE or an Approved Supervisor through AAMFT.

That is a real bar. It is also the only bar. Nothing about the designation tells you whether someone is good at supervising, available, affordable, or a fit for how you want to practice. That part is on you to find out, which is what the questions further down are for.

You are probably ignoring about 1,800 qualified people

If you came out of a counseling program, you have been told to find an LMHC. So that is what you search for, and you look at maybe 6,900 people.

Clinical social workers and marriage and family therapists can also supervise mental health counselor interns. There are roughly 1,800 of them holding that designation in Florida, and most counseling interns never look at a single one, because it does not occur to them to search outside their own credential.

An LCSW or LMFT supervising a mental health counselor intern has to show graduate coursework in three of six counseling content areas: counseling theories, counseling practice, assessment, career counseling, substance abuse, or legal, ethical and professional standards. The board checks that before granting the designation, so anyone who appears in this list with the MHC designation has already cleared it.

Use the license filter above to see them. It is a much less crowded pool.

What the state actually requires

Two years of clinical experience as a registered intern means all of the following:

• At least 1,500 hours of face-to-face psychotherapy with clients
• At least 100 hours of supervision
• At least one hour of supervision every two weeks
• Accrued over no fewer than 100 weeks

That last one is the part people miss. The 100-week floor is a floor. You cannot compress it by seeing more clients or meeting your supervisor more often. Even at a heavy caseload, this is a two-year minimum, and for most people it runs closer to three.

Group supervision counts, but each hour of group has to alternate with an hour of individual supervision. You cannot do it all in a group.

One supervisor can carry up to 25 interns at once. Worth asking how many they currently have.

In person or by video

The general rule is that you and your supervisor can use electronic methods for supervisory sessions, but at least 50% of your required interactions have to be in person, and you have to meet in person at least once before you start using video at all.

There is a narrower provision allowing a supervisor to conduct all sessions electronically when they determine, through professional judgment, that doing so is not detrimental to your clients and is necessary to protect the health, safety or welfare of you or them. That is a conditional exception with a necessity test, not a general permission, and the Board was scheduled to review it in 2026.

Practical translation: assume you need someone you can sit with, at least half the time, and confirm the current rule with the board before you plan around anything else. Ask any prospective supervisor how they handle this. Their answer tells you how carefully they track the rules generally.

Who cannot supervise you

The board prohibits supervision by your own therapist, your parents, your spouse or former spouse, your siblings, or your children. If a working relationship starts to blur into a therapeutic one, that is a problem for your hours, not just for the relationship.

What to ask before you commit

You will be with this person for two to three years and paying them for most of it. Twenty minutes of questions now is cheap.

• Have you submitted the qualified supervisor form to the board for me?
• What do you charge, and is that per hour or per session?
• Individual, group, or a mix? How is the group hour paired with individual?
• How many interns are you supervising right now?
• How do you handle the in-person requirement?
• What happens if I need to reschedule, or if you go on leave?
• Will we have a written supervision contract?
• What is your experience with the population I want to work with?
• If I leave this job, does the supervision relationship continue?

That last one matters more than it sounds. If your supervisor is also your employer, leaving the job can mean losing the supervision, and the two decisions get tangled in a way that is hard to undo.

What it costs

The board does not set a rate and nobody publishes one, so this is the part of the process with the least public information and the widest spread. Reported rates in Florida run from roughly $25 to $195 an hour. Across 100 required hours, that is the difference between $2,500 and $19,500 for a requirement that is legally identical either way.

Some employers provide supervision as part of the job, which is worth real money and should be counted when you compare offers. Some supervisors charge a flat monthly rate rather than hourly. Some bundle group supervision at a lower rate.

Supervision is not the only recurring cost while you are pre-licensed. Professional liability insurance is the one people most often leave out of the math. You carry your own, separate from anything your employer provides, and you need it from your first session.

We are collecting current Florida rates directly from supervisors and will publish them here. If you are a qualified supervisor and want your rate and availability listed, get in touch.

Where this list comes from

The Florida Department of Health publishes its licensure file under Chapter 119, the public records law. Qualified supervisor status is recorded on the clinician’s own license record, so this is the state’s list, filtered to people whose designation covers mental health counselor interns and whose license is currently active. It includes LMHCs, LCSWs and LMFTs.

City and county come from the address each licensee filed with the board. Records identified as outside Florida are excluded, and counties are withheld when the location data conflicts too strongly to resolve safely. For solo practitioners that is often a home address, so street addresses are not shown here.

Rates, availability and specialties are not in the state file. Nobody publishes them, which is the next thing being built.

Always verify a supervisor yourself before you begin. Look up their license number in MQA Search Services and confirm the designation is current.

Data downloaded from the state on 19 September 2026.