The five rows below carry the operative statutory language verbatim, each quote pulled from the official code. This page is one state from the full state-by-state reference. Nothing here is legal, tax, or financial advice.
The five-part test in brief
Whether an ABA practice needs a professional entity is a stack of five questions. The licensing act is the gateway, because an unlicensed profession is generally not a professional service and an ordinary entity governs. The professional-entity statute supplies the form and the ownership rule that applies if that form is used. The scope definition decides whether ABA is actually inside that statute. The corporate-practice doctrine, a separate body of law that often lives in the medical practice act or case law rather than the entity statute, is usually what forces licensed ownership and pushes outside capital into a management company. And the fee-splitting and anti-remuneration rules constrain management-fee economics even where ownership is open. The rows below run those five against this state's actual code, quoting the operative language so the position rests on the statute.
Oregon, provision by provision
Oregon
Ownership openYes. Behavior analysts are licensed by the Behavior Analysis Regulatory Board under ORS 676.802 to 676.830. The act is structured principally as title protection: a licensed behavior analyst may practice applied behavior analysis, and the titles licensed behavior analyst, licensed assistant behavior analyst, and registered behavior analysis interventionist are reserved to those licensed or registered. The existence of the license is what raises the professional-entity question below, while the title-protection structure bears on whether ABA is a professional service for entity purposes.
Oregon does not force a licensed profession into a professional entity. The Professional Corporation Act in ORS chapter 58 supplies an optional professional-corporation form whose ownership, in the medical context, is restricted to licensed practitioners. But the limited liability company chapter expressly allows an ordinary LLC, and its members, to render professional services, and it imposes no requirement that those members be licensed in the profession. A non-licensee may therefore be a member of an Oregon LLC that renders a professional service.
Partly, and it does not change the ownership outcome. A professional service under the Professional Corporation Act is one that may be lawfully rendered only pursuant to a license by a professional, a defined term that lists named professions and then adds a catch-all for others providing substantially similar licensed services. ABA arguably falls within that catch-all, which makes the professional-corporation form available; but the licensing act's title-protection structure leaves it genuinely uncertain whether ABA may be lawfully rendered only pursuant to a license at all. Either way the professional form is optional, and the ordinary LLC in the second row remains available with open ownership.
Oregon recognizes a corporate-practice doctrine, but it is medicine-specific. The Professional Corporation Act requires that a professional corporation organized to practice medicine be majority-owned and majority-directed by licensed physicians, and the 2025 management-company restrictions, effective for new arrangements on January 1, 2026, limit ownership and control of a professional medical entity. Both are framed around the practice of medicine as defined in ORS 677.085, and behavior analysts are licensed outside that framework under ORS chapter 676, so neither reaches an ABA practice. No statute requires licensed-behavior-analyst ownership of an Oregon ABA entity.
No ABA-specific Oregon fee-splitting statute was identified. The state's fee-splitting and patient-referral restrictions, including the physician unprofessional-conduct rules and the Patient Referral Law, are oriented to the medical professions. For an ABA practice the operative remuneration constraints are federal, principally the Medicaid anti-kickback rules, together with payor contract terms and the ethics rules adopted by the Behavior Analysis Regulatory Board. This row will be updated if a directly applicable provision is confirmed.
Outlook: how this verdict could change
Likelihood of change: Moderate. Oregon enacted the nation's most aggressive corporate-practice law in 2025, but it is currently scoped to medical practices and does not yet reach ABA. The verdict would change only if the SB 951 and HB 3410 corporate-ownership and MSO-control rules were extended beyond medical practices to behavioral-health entities.
What to watch. SB 951 (signed June 2025), whose compliance requirements roll out through 2029, and any expansion of the "professional medical entity" scope to behavioral health.
Disruption if it changes: High. An SB 951-style extension to behavioral health would force ownership and structure changes, with recredentialing and payor re-enrollment exposure.
Where professional advice is essential, not optional
Verbatim statutory text is a starting point, not a conclusion. Statutes are amended, agencies issue rules that fill them in, and courts interpret them, so the corporate-practice and fee-splitting questions in particular often turn on interpretation rather than the words on the page. Use this page to locate the operative provisions and to speak from the source, then confirm the current text against the official code and engage qualified Oregon counsel before acting. The entity verdict is also only one layer of a Oregon practice's obligations, alongside the facility and records rules and the Oregon Medicaid enrollment that discloses the entity and its owners. Nothing here is legal, tax, or financial advice.
The provisions quoted here change and are interpreted by agencies and courts. The official Oregon Revised Statutes and qualified Oregon counsel are the authoritative sources. Neither this page nor any secondary source should be relied on in place of direct verification and professional advice.