PMHNP Residency Programs: All 21 Verified for 2026

PMHNP residency programs give you a paid year of supervised psychiatric practice before you take a staff job. You do not need one. Once your certification clears you can start seeing patients, and most new PMHNPs do exactly that. But if you want the structured version of your first year, the list of places offering it is short, and nobody publishes it properly.

So we built the list. Every entry below was read off the institution's own page or off an accreditor's public register, not copied from another directory. There are 21 PMHNP residency programs across 13 states, 14 of them run by the VA and 7 by everyone else. Three things in the data will change how you apply: the season opens far earlier than the advice you have probably read, only 4 programs hold the accreditation people assume they all have, and the 7 programs that publish a stipend pay more than the ranges floating around suggest.

All 21 PMHNP Residency Programs, by State

Sorted by state, because that is how you will search. Be ready for how thin it is: California and Ohio hold 3 programs each and nothing holds more, 8 states hold exactly one, and 37 states have none in this directory, Texas and Florida among them. If you are searching for a PMHNP residency in a specific state, that is the number to plan around.

Two things worth flagging in that table before you scan it again.

The first is that 14 of the 21 are VA programs. If you have any interest in veteran mental health, that is where the training capacity is. It also means most PMHNP residency programs come with federal hiring rules attached, including a background investigation and, at several sites, a requirement to resign an existing VA post before you can start as a trainee.

The second is Modyfi Health, the one program advertised as fully remote. Read its eligibility line carefully. You need to be licensed or license-eligible in Maryland, DC or Virginia, so "fully remote" describes where you sit rather than where you can live. It is also recruiting its first class, which means no program has graduated from it yet.

When PMHNP Residency Applications Close

This is the part that costs people a year, so it goes above the money.

The common advice is that postgraduate nursing programs recruit from roughly January to April. That advice would have you miss the first program on this list entirely. VA Western Colorado in Grand Junction runs its window from october 1 to january 1, so it has already closed by the time a January search begins. At the other end, Southern Arizona VA stays open until May.

Of the 14 PMHNP residency programs that publish a window, 11 close in February or March. That is the real season, and it is tighter than it looks: you are assembling three letters of recommendation, a CV, a letter of interest and in the VA's case a federal trainee form, for several programs, inside about six weeks.

Start in the fall. Not because most deadlines fall then, but because the two that do are invisible to anyone who starts in January, and because your recommenders need more than two weeks.

What PMHNP Residency Programs Pay

Only 7 of the 21 programs publish a number. Here is every one we found.

The published figures run from $82,278 to $100,944, and the top of that range sits at San Francisco VA. That is worth knowing because the ranges circulating elsewhere cap VA residencies near $100,000, and one program is already above it.

Now the honest part. The BLS puts the median nurse practitioner wage at $132,000 (BLS OEWS, May 2025). Against that median, the best-paid PMHNP residency on this list still costs you about $31,000 in forgone earnings over the year, and the lowest-paid costs about $50,000. That is the actual price of the training, and no amount of enthusiasm about mentorship changes it.

Two caveats on the figures above, both of which matter if you are budgeting. VA stipends are reset every year by the Office of Academic Affiliations and vary by locality, which is why each row carries the period it applies to rather than a bare number. And a stipend is not a salary: at several sites the residency is explicitly a trainee position rather than VA employment, which changes your benefits and your leave. Our PMHNP salary guide has what the job pays once you are past this year.

Which PMHNP Residency Programs Are Accredited

Here is where the other directories are simply wrong, and it is the single most useful thing on this page.

Postgraduate residency accreditation is not the same as the accreditation your degree carried. The body that accredits PMHNP residency programs is the Consortium for Advanced Practice Providers, usually written CAPP, whose accreditation commission has been federally recognized by the US Department of Education since 2022. Its public register lists every accredited program with the exact term dates.

We read that register. Exactly 4 PMHNP programs in the country hold CAPP accreditation. They are Community Health Center, Inc. in Connecticut, Community Healthcare Network in New York, Thundermist Health Center in Rhode Island, and the child and adolescent fellowship at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Ohio. That is the whole list.

A further 3 programs state on their own pages that they are accredited by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education, which accredits residency and fellowship programs alongside degree programs. CCNE gets left out of most write-ups of this topic even though it is what the VA sites actually hold. If you want the distinction between the accreditors on the degree side, we cover CCNE and ACEN accreditation separately.

That leaves 14 of 21 PMHNP residency programs naming no accrediting body at all. Including some very well known ones.

And watch the wording when you check for yourself, because two VA pages phrase this in a way that reads like accreditation and is not. One says its curriculum is "designed around" CCNE accreditation standards. Another says it operates "in keeping with" CCNE guidelines. Both are statements about alignment. Neither is a claim to hold accreditation, and we have recorded them as dashes in the table above rather than promoting them.

Does an unaccredited program mean a bad program? No, and it would be dishonest to imply it. Accreditation costs money and staff time, and a strong program at a small health center may simply never have applied. What accreditation buys you is an outside body checking that the curriculum, the supervision ratio and the hours are what the brochure says. Without it you are relying on the program's own account of itself, so ask harder questions.

Should You Do a PMHNP Residency at All?

For most new PMHNPs, no. That is the honest answer and it is worth saying plainly, because every page written about PMHNP residency programs is written by someone who wants you to want one.

You are already qualified. Your PMHNP-BC certification is what lets you practice, and a residency adds nothing to your license or your credential. It is a year of lower pay in exchange for structure. Whether that trade is worth it depends on things nobody else can assess for you: whether your program's clinical placements were any good, whether the job you would otherwise take has a real onboarding plan, and how you handle being the only prescriber in the building at 4pm on a Friday.

A residency is worth serious thought if your clinical hours were thin or badly supervised, if you want inpatient or forensic or child and adolescent work and did not get it as a student, or if you are moving into veteran care where the VA route doubles as a hiring pipeline. Several VA sites say directly that they exist to prepare residents for VA employment.

It is probably the wrong call if you already have a job offer with a named mentor, a reduced caseload for the first few months and a written orientation plan. That is most of what a residency provides, without the pay cut. Ask for it in the interview and get the answer in writing. If your placements were the problem, our guide to finding a nurse practitioner preceptor covers the same gap from the student side.

How to Apply to a PMHNP Residency Program

The requirements are consistent enough across programs that you can prepare one packet and adapt it.

• Graduate within the last 12 months. Nearly every program on this list caps eligibility at a year post-graduation, and several will not consider you if you have already worked as a PMHNP. These programs are built for new graduates and they mean it.
• Apply before you are certified. Most programs accept applications from students who will graduate and sit their boards before the start date. Several then require board certification within 90 days of starting, so read each program's own wording rather than assuming.
• Three letters of recommendation, usually including one from graduate nursing faculty. Ask in the fall.
• A letter of interest, capped at two pages by some programs.
• A CV rather than a resume. One VA program spells out that these are different documents and asks you to look up how.
• VA Form 10-2850D for any VA program, plus a background and security investigation.
• A DEA registration at some sites, required within 30 to 90 days of starting rather than at application.

One procedural detail that catches people: at least one program states that applications submitted outside its window will not be reviewed at all, and another that no late applications are accepted. These are not soft deadlines.

If you are still choosing where to study rather than where to train afterwards, start with our PMHNP programs ranking, and check what the PMHNP career actually involves before you commit to either.

We check this page against the programs' own pages and CAPP's register. If you run a PMHNP residency program that belongs here, or one of these details has moved, tell us and we will verify and update it.