Who may inject you, or use a laser: how to find out

MedSpaGrades editorial teamUpdated 22 Oct 20265 sources checkedHow we write

There is no single national answer to who may inject you, treat you with a laser or supervise a med spa. These rules are set by each state, and they change. This page does not tell you what the rules are in your state. It tells you why they differ, what the sources say, and how to find out who is treating you.

Why there is no one answer

The American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), a society of plastic surgeons, says some med spa services, among them cosmetic injections, soft tissue fillers, laser skin procedures and hair transplants, are legally classified as "the practice of medicine". It says oversight requirements vary by state, and that all procedures should be supervised by a physician in accordance with your state's laws.

The American Med Spa Association (AmSpa), an industry group, publishes state-by-state legal summaries for med spa owners. It says its summaries include a table of who can perform 21 procedures across six professional titles: nurse practitioner, physician assistant, registered nurse, licensed practical or vocational nurse, aesthetician and laser technician. Its own disclaimer says that medical spa laws and regulations "change very frequently". The question of who may do what is therefore asked separately for each state and each title.

What federal sources say

The FDA does not decide who may inject in each state. For dermal fillers it advises working with a licensed health care provider who has experience in dermatology or plastic surgery and is trained to inject fillers, and it says having filler injected should be considered a medical procedure, not a cosmetic treatment. For medical lasers, it says laser products used for medical applications must also comply with the medical device regulations. It is not the FDA that licenses the person holding the needle or the laser.

The kinds of people you may meet

AmSpa's six titles, above, are a useful list of who might treat you. ASPS also names doctors, nurses, physician assistants and estheticians. Which of them may give a given treatment, and under whose supervision, is a matter of your state's law. In some states the answer is different for injections than for lasers, and different again for a nurse than for an aesthetician. We have not read every state's rules, and we do not state them here.

How to find out, in order

Here is how to find out who is treating you. The steps are ours. The questions come from ASPS, whose checklist suggests asking whether the supervising physician is on site or able to be on site within 24 hours.

State pages

We are building state pages that set out what the state's own boards and statutes say, with the dates we read them. Arizona is the first. See the Arizona page. Where a state has no page yet, the steps above are the way to find out.

What this page cannot tell you

It cannot tell you whether a particular clinic is operating within the rules. A clinic's own website is not proof. If you have a concern about a license or a clinic, the state board that issued the license is the place to raise it.