Due diligence
How to verify a compounding pharmacy’s state licence
Ask the supplier for its licence number, the agency that issued it, and the expiry, then look that number up on the issuing agency’s own portal rather than accepting the supplier’s copy of it. Then run the check most prescribers skip — the credential required in the state the product is being shipped into, which in several states is issued by an agency other than the board of pharmacy. A licence establishes that an entity may operate; it does not establish which federal pathway it operates under, and it does not establish that the preparation you are ordering may be supplied to you without a patient-specific prescription.
Why is a licence check two checks rather than one?
Because two different regulators have to be satisfied, and only one of them regulates the supplier.
The first question is whether the entity may lawfully operate where it sits. That is answered by the licensing agency in the supplier's own state, or — for a facility that has registered under section 503B — partly by FDA's own register. The second question is whether it may lawfully send product into your state, and that is a question of your state's law about receiving, not of the supplier's law about operating.
A supplier can be entirely clean on the first and hold nothing on the second. That combination is not exotic; it is the ordinary shape of the problem, because federal registration under section 353b is an exemption from specified federal requirements that preempts no state licensing scheme, and because it regulates the facility rather than the facility's customer. Running only the first check answers a question you did not ask.
Which register answers which question?
They are not symmetrical, and the asymmetry decides where you spend your time.
FDA publishes a register of facilities that have registered under section 503B, and maintains no comparable public list for state-licensed 503A pharmacies. There is no federal shortcut available for a 503A. Diligence on one runs through the state board and the accreditor, and there is nothing else to substitute.
| What you are checking | Where the answer lives |
|---|---|
| A 503B's federal registration | FDA's registered-outsourcing-facilities table, rebuilt weekly against a data-lock date |
| A 503A's licence to operate | The board of pharmacy in the pharmacy's own state — there is no federal equivalent |
| Either one's credential to ship into your state | Your state's licensing agency, which is not always the board of pharmacy |
Reading the FDA register row by row is a separate exercise with its own traps, set out in how to read FDA’s registered-outsourcing-facilities list.
Which agency issues the credential in your state?
Not the board of pharmacy, in several states — and this is the step the vertical skips.
Among the states we have read from primary sources, an outsourcing facility must hold that state's own credential before it may ship compounded office stock in, and in three of them the credential does not come from the board of pharmacy at all. A prescriber who searches the board's register finds nothing and concludes, wrongly, that nothing was required.
| State | Agency that credentials an out-of-state outsourcing facility | Authority |
|---|---|---|
| North Carolina | Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services — the word "outsourcing" appears nowhere in the Board of Pharmacy's rules | G.S. § 106-140.1 |
| Texas | Department of State Health Services — out-of-state wholesale distributor licence, one per place of business | Tex. Health & Safety Code § 431.402 |
| Louisiana | Board of Drug and Device Distributors, a separate agency from the Board of Pharmacy; plus a Board of Pharmacy controlled-substance licence for scheduled product | La. BOP CDS facility categories |
| California | Board of Pharmacy — nonresident outsourcing facility licence, with an annual board inspection at the facility's expense | Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 4129.2 |
| New York | State Education Department — nonresident establishment registration, expressly naming outsourcing facilities | N.Y. Educ. Law § 6808-b |
| Colorado | Board of Pharmacy — nonresident registration, which requires the facility's most recent FDA inspection report | C.R.S. § 12-280-133.5 |
| Florida | Board of Pharmacy — nonresident sterile compounding permit | Fla. Stat. § 465.0158 |
The per-state rule text and citations sit on the state-by-state office-use guide.
What do you need from the supplier before you can look anything up?
Four things, and a supplier that will not give you them has answered the question.
Ask for the licence or registration number, the agency that issued it, the expiry date, and the legal entity name the credential is held in. Then verify all four with the issuing agency rather than with the supplier. A copy of a certificate, a badge on a website, or a PDF attached to a quote is the supplier's own representation of a public record, and the public record is free to read.
The fourth item is the one people leave out and then get stuck on. A portal searches the licensed entity, and if you search the name on the invoice you may be searching something that was never licensed — which returns nothing and tells you nothing.
Why does the name on the licence so often not match the invoice?
Because trading names and licensed entities are different objects, and the mismatch is common rather than suspicious.
On FDA's own 503B register as retrieved on 2026-08-28, 11 of 97 rows carried a legal entity together with a separate trading name, and 97 registrations were held across 92 distinct company names — five companies held two each, because registration attaches to a geographic location rather than to a company. In at least one case a single trading name was shared by two different legal entities, so the brand alone could not identify which registrant a buyer was dealing with.
The operative rule that falls out of this: check the credential for the specific address the product ships from, under the legal entity name that appears on the invoice, not the brand on the box. If the two names differ, ask which entity holds the licence before assuming either.
What can a board portal not tell you?
More than it looks like, and the limits are worth knowing before you read a result as reassurance.
Some portals search only individual pharmacists rather than pharmacy licences — 2 of the 51 jurisdictions in our directory publish a lookup of that kind, and 4 more have a search scope that could not be read from a public page. A pharmacist-only portal cannot answer whether a pharmacy is licensed, and a result from one is not the answer to your question even though it looks like an answer.
Beyond scope, a current licence establishes that an entity is permitted to operate. It does not establish which federal pathway it is operating under — a state-licensed 503A pharmacy and a facility registered with FDA under section 503B are credentialed by different bodies under different rules, and only one of them is the federal route for non-patient-specific office stock. Nor does a licence establish that the preparation you are ordering may lawfully be supplied to you without a patient-specific prescription. That turns on your own state's office-use rule, and those answers are not close to uniform.
What does an empty result mean?
Ambiguity, in at least four directions — which is why an empty result is not a finding.
A search that returns nothing may mean the entity is not licensed. It may also mean you searched a trading name rather than the licensed entity, searched the wrong state, searched a pharmacist-only portal for a pharmacy, or hit an anti-bot layer that answered instead of the page. That last one is real and measurable: when we re-fetched every board URL and lookup portal in our directory on 2026-08-28, 3 of 51 board sites and 4 of 51 lookup portals refused automated checks despite being the jurisdictions' own published URLs. A refusal carries no information about whether a licence exists.
Treat "not found" as a prompt to ask the supplier a narrower question — which entity, which agency, which number — rather than as a verdict. The verdict comes from the agency confirming or denying a specific number, not from a search box returning nothing.
Where is the directory?
Every U.S. state board of pharmacy and the District of Columbia, with each board's own site and its licence-lookup portal, is at state boards of pharmacy: official sites and licence-lookup portals. Each URL there was independently re-fetched and marked with what that check established, and rows where the check was refused say so rather than carrying a verification they did not earn.
Where this check sits in the wider exercise is set out in how to vet a compounding pharmacy. What a nonresident credential is, and why it substitutes neither for federal registration nor for accreditation, is defined at non-resident pharmacy licence. What accreditation does and does not attest is at PCAB accreditation.
To have your own licences, your sites and your intended pathway mapped once rather than per supplier, you can apply for an account.