How to get your Washington, D.C. Tour Guide License

The first step to becoming a tour guide in Washington D.C. is to get your official license. If you’re going to be hired as a tour guide in Washington, D.C., then you need to have a professional tour guide license. You’re in luck: while in the past this process involved a difficult test and a lot of administrative hoops, now it’s pretty easy to obtain.

Tell me more about the Washington, D.C. tour guide license.

• To put it starkly, if you’re pointing out sights to tourists for pay, you need a license. Just get it.
• The license is administered by the Department of Licensing and Consumer Protection. They license everything from tattoo artists and barbers to tour guides.
• According to the latest publicly available data (2017), the DCRA claims there are 1,670 currently active tour guide licenses.
• If you want to geek out, you can read the DC bylaws about tour guiding here.

How do I get the Washington, D.C. tour guide license?

• It’s pretty simple: start here by registering for an account and filling out the form. The entire process is done online.
• The license costs $150, and $150 to renew it each year. If you let it lapse, you can reinstate the license within five years for $220.
• There is no knowledge examination. There used to be a test, but they abolished it.
• After submitting the required information, including a passport photograph, you’ll receive your official DC license, probably a digital copy that you can print out (a practice they started during the pandemic).

Are tour guiding regulations strict in Washington, D.C.?

• No, not at all. DC is not like cities such as Florence or Venice, where police may stop you and demand your license. In practice, you’ll never be asked to produce the license, and you don’t need to be zealous about wearing it in public, etc. Do it, but don’t obsess over it. The point is that the municipal government wants to keep tabs on the industry, and make some money off of what you’re doing.