What does it mean to be an interior designer? It’s an existential industry question, but, increasingly, it’s one that’s also being posed inside state legislatures. Since 2023, the American Society of Interior Designers, the Council for Interior Design Qualification and the International Interior Design Association have been working together—through their advocacy alliance, the Consortium for Interior Design—to expand and modernize the practice rights of interior designers, and their efforts are gaining momentum.
Expanding those rights gives NCIDQ-certified designers the ability to sign, stamp and seal their own blueprints. In Missouri, for example, which passed Senate Bill 1233 in May, all designers previously had to bring plans to a third-party architect or engineer for approval before construction could begin on a project.
In St. Louis, designer and VVell Studio founder Kerry Schuette hired an interior architect in large part to avoid needing to bring her company’s drawings to an outside firm. “We became an architecture firm so that we could practice interior design,” she jokes. The move made her studio more competitive, as hiring an architect or engineer as a consultant for every project had inherently made her firm more expensive. “We were absorbing those costs, which meant our rates were higher than if you went to an architectural firm that offered interior design services,” says Schuette, who is also the vice president of advocacy for the IIDA chapter in St. Louis. Now, with the new legislation in place, she’s able to skip that step.
Missouri is not the only place where laws are changing. In 2026 alone, Alaska, Idaho and Utah also passed legislation to update the legal rights of certified interior designers. To date, interior design is regulated in 29 states as well as Washington, D.C., and 20 of those allow NCIDQ-certified interior designers to sign and seal their own documents.
For states with no existing legal structure around interior design, the first step to regulation is for a state to pass what’s called a Title Act, legally recognizing the profession. From there, designers can push for expanded practice rights like signing plans. In other cases, the lobbying efforts center around modernizing existing laws that put out-of-date restrictions on design professionals.
While the specifics of state laws vary, they can significantly impact the type of work that registered designers can pursue, limiting the size of code-compliant commercial spaces or residential projects without architect or engineer oversight. In some cases, says Marci Merola, the IIDA’s director of advocacy, state laws are simply outdated, setting parameters for spatial components like wall height or occupancy that restrict which projects designers can oversee themselves. “If you’re trained and tested, those kinds of constrictions shouldn’t apply,” explains Merola. “Within the design-build profession, interior design is the last [sector] that is not being regulated around the country. The earliest interior design legislation was in the 1980s, but we’re still working toward getting recognition in all 50 states.”
The “trained and tested” aspect is crucial to keep in mind here, as only designers who are NCIDQ certified will benefit from such legislation. To be eligible for the exam, designers must have a certain level of education in addition to a set number of interior design credit hours as well as work hours. If you have a bachelor’s degree from a CIDA-accredited university, for example, you’d still need 3,520 work hours (the equivalent of two years of full-time employment) in order to qualify. If those conditions are met, then a designer can sit for the exam—administered by the CIDQ—which covers interior design fundamentals as well as subjects like code compliance and construction documentation.
Part of Merola and Schuette’s work is simply educating legislators (as well as the general public) on the scope of what a modern interior designer does. When Merola and designers go to meet with state representatives, they hear some version of the same quip: “It’s a lot of, ‘You’re a designer? Great! My wife wants to repaint the kitchen. Maybe we’ll give you a call,’” she says. While things like paint and finishes might be one aspect of a designer’s job, it hardly accounts for the breadth of the field. Schuette’s firm, for example, is commercially focused, with a specialty in designing spaces for hospital systems. “Simplifying what we do as interior designers [down] to paint and finishes would be like saying architects only select the brick on a building or landscape architects only select plants,” she says.
Over the past year, she and a contingent of other Missouri-based interior designers made it their mission to meet with state lawmakers every Tuesday, essentially going door to door in the state capitol in Jefferson City. It was a cue she’d taken from a surprising source: cattle ranchers. “There are a lot of cattle ranchers in Missouri, and we learned that every Wednesday, an association of cattle ranchers go to the state capitol and meet with representatives about any concerns they have,” says Schuette. “They walk in with their big cowboy hats and their big belt buckles and everybody knows it’s Wednesday at the capitol. We made the decision to strategically speak to every senator and representative that we possibly could. And if we couldn't speak to them, then we would talk to their chiefs of staff. So for us, it was really just a matter of telling our story over and over again.”
In meeting with representatives, Schuette could see people’s understanding of her job expanding in real time. “We were amazed that after sitting with a senator or a representative just for a few minutes, that there was really great support [for this],” she says. “Our leadership was listening. And those moments led to people really becoming advocates for us within our own government.”
Now that their efforts have paid off (Governor Mike Kehoe signed the bill into law on July 13), Schuette and Merola are hopeful about the impact bills like SB 1233 can have on the future of interior design. “This really does open doors for interior designers—residential and commercial,” says Schuette. “It helps us to be treated as an equal at the table. Right now, we’re often the only profession that isn’t licensed [on a project]. So when we have an opinion or when we have expert advice to give, oftentimes that can be overlooked. I just hope more states pass this legislation so that we can really use our education to the fullest extent.”
