How Often Are Ohio Professionals Disciplined? Board Action Rates by Profession
We counted every Ohio license carrying a recorded board action. The honest headline: disciplinary action is rare — and it varies a lot by profession.
August 22, 2026 · 7 min read · Original analysis by OhioLicenseCheck
1.6%
of Ohio licenses on record carry a board action of any kind
Whenever someone verifies a license, the unspoken question is usually about trust: has this person ever been disciplined? Ohio boards record that on the license itself, so we can answer it at population scale rather than case by case.
Across 2,092,966 issued Ohio licenses, 33,555 — about 1.6% — carry a recorded board action. Put the other way: roughly 98.4% of Ohio licenses have no board action on record at all.
Board action rates by profession
Healthcare boards sit at the top, which is expected rather than alarming: professions with direct patient contact, prescribing authority, and mandatory reporting obligations are both more heavily monitored and more consequential when something goes wrong. The clinical boards also tend to act on impairment and practice-standard issues that simply do not arise in most other licensed trades.
| Licensing board | Licenses with a board action | Share of that board’s licenses |
|---|---|---|
| Nursing Board | 15,240 | 2.49% |
| Medical Board | 6,052 | 1.96% |
| Chemical Dependency Professionals Board | 1,253 | 1.82% |
| Dental Board | 1,710 | 1.72% |
| Board of Pharmacy | 2,541 | 1.54% |
| OTPTAT Board (OT/PT/AT) | 1,010 | 1.46% |
| Counselor, Social Worker & MFT Board | 1,675 | 1.32% |
| Accountancy Board | 428 | 0.80% |
| Engineers and Surveyors Board | 447 | 0.71% |
| Cosmetology and Barber Board | 1,291 | 0.36% |
What a “board action” does and does not mean
- It is cumulative over the life of the license, not a snapshot of today — a decades-old resolved matter still shows.
- It covers a wide severity range: from a consent agreement or continuing-education deficiency up to suspension and revocation.
- It does not by itself mean the person cannot practice now. Check the license STATUS for that — Active means currently authorized.
- It is not a criminal record. Boards act on professional-practice standards, which overlap with but are distinct from the courts.
An important caution about “suspended”
Not every alarming-sounding status is disciplinary. In Ohio, several boards — accountancy most notably — use “suspended” as an administrative state for a license that lapsed on renewal or continuing education, with no misconduct involved. That is why this report counts the board’s explicit action flag rather than inferring discipline from a status label. Reading the raw status alone would have produced a wildly overstated figure for CPAs.
If you see a disciplinary status on a record that matters to you, go to the issuing board for the underlying document before drawing conclusions. We link every board directly from our board pages.
Methodology
Computed by OhioLicenseCheck from the complete Ohio eLicense dataset as of August 2026, counting issued licenses (application records excluded) where the board action flag published by the issuing board is set to Yes. Rates shown for boards with more than 25,000 licenses on record. Board actions are cumulative over the life of a license and vary widely in severity; consult the issuing board for case detail.
Check a license and its status
Free, instant, and sourced from the same official data.