Confirm your supervisor qualifies
Before you log a single hour, confirm exactly who is signing off on your work and what license they hold. This is the LCSW rule that has no equivalent for AMFTs or APCCs: at least 1,700 of your 3,000 total hours, and at least 13 of your 52 required individual or triadic supervision weeks, must be supervised by an LCSW specifically. Your other hours can be supervised by another BBS-qualified professional, but that 1,700-hour LCSW share is non-negotiable.
The practical version: if your primary supervisor is an LMFT, LPCC, psychologist, or a physician certified in psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology rather than an LCSW, you will need LCSW supervision for at least 1,700 of your 3,000 hours. Find that out in week one, not after 800 hours that do not count toward the 1,700.
Ask the direct question now: "Do you hold an active California LCSW license, and what is your license number?" If the answer is any other license type, map out where your 1,700 LCSW-supervised hours are going to come from before you get comfortable.
Full breakdown of who qualifies and how the 1,700-hour and 13-week rules interact: Who can supervise an ASW in California.
Sign your supervision agreement
For any supervisory relationship that began on or after January 1, 2022, the BBS requires a signed supervision agreement between you and each of your supervisors. It documents the terms of your supervision, and it needs to be signed at the start of the relationship, within 60 days. This is a week-one task precisely because the deadline is tied to when you start, not when you remember to do it.
If you have more than one supervisor or work at more than one site, you need an agreement for each supervisory relationship. Get them all signed early. An unsigned stretch of supervision is the kind of gap that is painful to explain and hard to reconstruct when you are assembling your licensure application two years from now.
One agreement per supervisor. Two supervisors means two agreements. Sign them within 60 days of starting with each person. Week one is the easy time to do it.
What the agreement covers and how to complete it: The BBS supervision agreement, explained.
Confirm your setting and hours are countable
Two things determine whether the hours you are about to work will actually count. The first is timing: LCSW hours are post-degree only. There is no pre-degree credit at all. Every practicum and fieldwork hour from your MSW program is worth zero toward LCSW, no matter how clinical it was. Your hours generally count from the day your ASW registration is issued.
The second is the gap before your number arrived. If you started working after your degree was awarded but before your registration was issued, those hours can count only under the 90-day rule: the BBS must have received your registration application within 90 days of your degree award date, the BBS must then grant the registration, and, if you graduated on or after January 1, 2020, your workplace must have required completed Live Scan fingerprinting before you gained the hours. If you meet those conditions, document those early hours carefully. If not, they do not count, and it is better to know that now.
Do not assume the gap counts. The 90-day rule is a narrow exception, not a general grace period. Confirm the date the BBS received your application against your degree award date before you rely on any pre-number hours.
How the 90-day rule works and exactly which hours it covers: The 90-day registration rule.
Set up a weekly log habit
You will record your hours on the ASW Weekly Log of Experience Hours, one log per supervisor per work setting, and your supervisor signs each week. You keep the signed logs. The single best week-one habit you can build is to record your hours in a structure that mirrors that log from the very first week, rather than trying to reverse-engineer it later.
Every week, capture the same fields the BBS log expects:
- ✓Week of (the date)
- ✓Work setting name and address
- ✓Supervisor name
- ✓Clinical hours: psychosocial diagnosis, assessment, and treatment
- ✓Psychotherapy subset: face-to-face therapy hours (a subset of clinical)
- ✓Non-clinical hours: advocacy, consultation, evaluation, research, supervisor contact, and workshops or trainings directly related to clinical social work that your supervisor approved
- ✓Weekly total (A + B; all settings together count toward 40 hours in any 7 consecutive days)
- ✓Supervision received: individual, triadic, or group (hours and type)
- ✓Supervisor signature
Track the psychotherapy subset (line A1) as its own number from week one. A column-by-column walkthrough of the log: The ASW Weekly Log of Experience Hours.
Understand your targets
It is a lot easier to stay on pace when you can see the whole map from week one. Here are the numbers you are working toward, all of them post-degree:
| Target | Requirement | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Total hours | 3,000 | All supervised, all post-degree |
| Supervised weeks | 104 | Minimum span, at least 52 with individual/triadic supervision |
| Clinical | 2,000 | Psychosocial diagnosis, assessment, and treatment |
| Psychotherapy | 750 | Face-to-face therapy, a subset of the 2,000 |
| Non-clinical | 1,000 | Maximum that counts (advocacy, consultation, evaluation, research, supervisor contact, approved workshops) |
The trap hidden in this table is the 750-hour psychotherapy subset. You can pile up 2,000 clinical hours doing mostly intakes and assessments and still fall short on the 750 therapy hours, because assessments count toward the 2,000 but not toward the 750. Watch that ratio from the start. Also keep the 40-hour limit in mind: hours above 40 across all your settings in any 7 consecutive days are not credited.
The full tracking deep-dive on how these categories interact: How to track LCSW hours in California.
Start tracking
You have confirmed your supervisor, signed your agreement, verified your hours count, chosen a weekly log structure, and internalized your targets. The last step is to move the tracking into a tool, so the numbers from steps one through five are tallied for you.
Three numbers are easy to lose in a spreadsheet: the 750 psychotherapy subset inside the 2,000 clinical total, the hours supervised by an LCSW against the 1,700 minimum, and the 40-hour limit across every site.
- ✓Shows your 750 psychotherapy subset against the 2,000 clinical total on your dashboard.
- ✓Shows your LCSW-supervised hours and weeks against the 1,700-hour and 13-week LCSW requirements.
- ✓Will not save a week over 40 hours. A week's entry cannot exceed the 40-hour limit.
- ✓Counts your 104 supervised weeks and your 52 individual or triadic supervision weeks as separate running totals.
- ✓Generates the ASW Weekly Log as a PDF with the signature line blank, for your supervisor to sign.
Want to see the finish date? The LCSW hours calculator projects your completion date from your weekly pace, so you can sanity-check your plan in week one instead of year two.