What Changed in California Supervision Rules in 2025 - Attestly
2025 brought a real change to California AMFT supervision — the SB 1024 supervisee cap. Here's a plain-language look at what changed and what it means if you were already mid-supervision.
Regulatory changes rarely arrive with a clean before-and-after line. Most associates and supervisors find out about a change gradually, through their supervisor, their agency, or a passing mention somewhere online. If you were mid-supervision in early 2025, here’s what actually changed.
The headline change: the SB 1024 supervisee cap
Effective January 1, 2025, supervisors are limited to six supervisees at a time in nonexempt settings. This wasn’t a clarification of an existing rule — it was a new limit, and it applies across every employer a supervisor works for, not per practice.
If your supervisor was juggling a larger caseload across multiple agencies before this date, the rule change may have required a real restructuring of who supervises whom, not just a paperwork update.
Why a mid-relationship rule change is disruptive
Supervision relationships are built around consistency: the same supervisor, reviewing the same associate’s work, week after week, ideally for a long stretch of an associate’s pre-licensure experience. A cap that takes effect partway through that relationship can force practices to reassign associates to different supervisors, which has real continuity costs — a new supervisor has to get up to speed on an associate’s history, strengths, and areas that need attention.
What this means if you’re logging hours right now
If you’re an associate, it’s worth asking your supervisor directly:
- Were you affected by the SB 1024 cap when it took effect?
- Has your supervision setup changed since January 2025?
- Do you know your current nonexempt-setting supervisee count across every place you work?
None of these questions are accusatory — they’re just the kind of due diligence that protects your hours if a supervision arrangement ever gets scrutinized at licensure.
The broader lesson
Rule changes like this are exactly why a hardcoded checklist goes stale. A system that tracks supervision rules needs to know not just what the rule is today, but when it took effect, so historical weeks are evaluated against the rule that applied at the time they were logged — not retroactively held to a standard that didn’t exist yet.