License verification at signup, which state cosmetology board APIs work?

State board API coverage is uneven. The states with searchable public APIs or scrapable license lookups:

• California, Board of Barbering and Cosmetology DCA license search. Public, scrapable, no API key. Cosmetology, esthetician, barber, electrologist, manicurist all covered.
• New York, NYS DOS Division of Licensing Services. Public license search, name + license number lookup.
• Texas, TDLR cosmetology license search. Public, scrapable.
• Florida, MyFloridaLicense.com DBPR cosmetology board. Public lookup.
• Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, all have public license lookups, varying quality.

For the remaining ~38 states: scrape the public lookup page (slow, fragile) or fall back to manual review queue, customer uploads license card photo, admin reviews within 24h, customer gets a verification email. About 30-40% of signups will route to manual queue at launch; this drops to ~15% as you onboard more states with API coverage.

Architecture: customer registers with name + license number + state + license type. Magento customer registration extension fires a state-router; if the state has an API, verify in real-time; if not, drop into a pending_verification customer group with manual queue notification to admin. Verified customers move to licensed_pro group and see trade pricing.

The renewal sweep: cron runs every 90 days, re-verifies the license against the state API, if expired demotes back to MSRP-only pricing and triggers a re-verify email. SalonCentric and CosmoProf do exactly this; brand-portal contracts (Wella Pro, L’Oréal Pro) require it.