Occupational licensing laws cost California $22 billion

With the midterms now behind us, lawmakers should focus on eliminating one of the biggest barriers to creating jobs in California: occupational licensing. Once limited to fields like medicine and dentistry, licensing laws have spread dramatically in recent years. Today, nearly 2.5 million California workers need a license to work. That’s over 17 percent of the state’s workforce.
In California, the average occupational license for a lower-income occupation requires $486 in fees, over