Florida licenses 23,899 association managers and Virginia certificates 282. That gap is a drafting difference between two statutes.
Florida and Virginia are the only two states that both license community association management and publish the register in bulk. Put their numbers side by side and three comparisons present themselves. Two of them are invalid, and the invalid ones are the quotable ones.
The short version. Virginia's CIC Manager licence is held by firms. Individuals hold a separate certificate. Florida licenses every individual manager directly and its firms hold a second licence on top.
So "Florida has 85 times more licensed managers" divides a count of people by a count of companies. It is arithmetically correct and describes nothing.
| Comparison | Florida | Virginia | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Individually licensed people | 23,899 | 282 | invaliddifferent credentials: Florida licenses every manager, Virginia issues a certificate alongside a firm licence |
| Licensed management firms | 1,994 | 148 | validboth mean a business licensed to manage associations. 13.5 to one. |
| Registered associations | not published | 7,198 | impossibleFlorida does not register associations, so there is no Florida number to compare |
Florida licenses the person. Anyone managing an association of more than ten units, or with a budget over $100,000, holds an individual CAM licence. Since 1 January 2009 the firm employing them holds a separate licence as well. Two registers, both of people-and-companies doing the work.
Virginia licenses the business. Its CIC Manager credential is held by companies, and reading the register makes that unmistakable: Great Eastern Resort Management, Trimark Corporation, Thalhimer. Individuals appear separately as certificate holders, a smaller and differently-scoped population.
⭐ Neither regime is better and that is not the point. The point is that a register is a record of what a legislature decided to count. Two states can regulate the same work and produce populations that differ by two orders of magnitude without the work differing at all.
7,198 community associations are registered with the Virginia Common Interest Community Board. Florida registers none of them.
This is the demand side of the same industry, and it exists in one state's public record and not the other's. Nobody publishes a national list of community associations; the widely cited national counts are estimates, not enumerations. ⚠️ Which also means the Virginia figure is not a sample of anything. It is the whole of one state and tells you nothing about the other forty-nine.
Searchable, with licence number, city and licence dates, from the state extract rather than a directory that charges a firm to appear.
1,994 firms FindingThe September 2026 renewal cliffSixty percent of the licensed population renews against a single date the state has already published.
14,418 licences FindingNew licences have roughly doubled since 2019The profession managing Florida associations is being re-staffed, and the register shows it a year at a time.
2,179 in 2025 ComparisonHOA software pricing, read from each vendorTwo of five publish a rate card, and the band edges do not line up, so the cheapest product changes with association size.
$45 to $275Florida figures are computed from the DBPR bulk extract lic38cam.csv, refreshed weekly. Virginia figures come from the DPOR Common Interest Community regulant lists 0501, 0510 and 0550, refreshed every five business days. Both retrieved 2026-08-31. The credential definitions were confirmed by reading the register rows themselves rather than the column headings, which is how the firm-versus-individual difference surfaced.
We have not divided these figures by state population, and that is deliberate. A per-capita version would imply the comparison becomes valid once it is adjusted. It does not. The objects being counted are different, and no denominator repairs a mismatch of kind. Offering the adjusted number would undo this page's argument while appearing to strengthen it.
And the coverage is two states because two states is what exists. Only seven or eight license this profession at all, and of those only these two publish bulk files. Nevada offers a lookup with no download. Both registers are downloadable here.
Dwellory. "Counting licensed managers across states measures the law, not the market." Computed from the Florida DBPR weekly licensure extracts and the Virginia DPOR Common Interest Community regulant lists, retrieved 2026-08-31. https://dwellory.org/comparing-manager-licences-across-states
Quote the retrieval date with any figure. The source refreshes weekly and these counts move with it.
The same method, applied to registers in other professions. FreightProbe, the ELD and carrier-compliance register, read the same way. GrantProbe, public grant programmes, enumerated from the awarding bodies.