Three wrong answers that circulate constantly
RBT supervision rules are simple enough to state in a paragraph, which is exactly why so much wrong information about them spreads. A confident sentence in a training deck or a forum reply gets repeated until it sounds official.
Three specific claims come up over and over. All three are false. Two of them are numbers that have never appeared in any edition of the requirements, and the third is a real rule that belongs to a completely different credential. Here is each one, why it is wrong, and what the actual requirement is.
Myth one: your first hours have to be 100% supervised
The claim is that new RBTs must have all of their early service hours supervised, sometimes framed as a training period before you are allowed to work unsupervised.
There is no such rule. No requirement exists for 100% supervision of training hours, or of any hours. The monthly minimum is a percentage of the behavior-analytic service hours you provided that calendar month, and it applies from your first month exactly as it applies in your fortieth.
Where the confusion comes from is understandable. Becoming an RBT does involve a substantial training requirement and a competency assessment conducted with an assessor before you are certified. Those are real, and they are demanding. But they are certification prerequisites, not ongoing supervision, and they happen before you hold the credential rather than during your first months of practice.
The practical cost of believing this myth is that new RBTs assume they are covered by a special beginner rule, then discover months later that ordinary monthly requirements applied the whole time. The requirements page carries the sourced monthly figures.
Myth two: it drops to 2% after ninety days
This one is remarkably specific, which is probably why it persists. The claim is that the supervision requirement starts higher and steps down to 2% once you have been practicing for around three months.
The 2% figure has never been an RBT number. It does not appear in any edition of the requirements, current or historical. Neither does the tiering concept behind it.
The requirement is a flat monthly percentage. There is no tier, no probationary rate, no step-down at ninety days or at any other point. It does not change with experience, tenure, caseload, or how well your last review went.
This myth is the most dangerous of the three, because unlike the others it causes people to do less than the rule requires. An RBT who believes the requirement halves after three months and adjusts accordingly is under-supervised every month from then on, and every one of those months is documented as such.
Myth three: group supervision is capped at half
The claim is that no more than 50% of your monthly supervision can be delivered in a group format.
That rule is real. It is just not yours. The limit on group supervision as a proportion of supervised hours belongs to BCBA and BCaBA fieldwork, not to RBT ongoing supervision. Applying it to RBT supervision means importing a requirement from a different credential.
There is no percentage cap on group supervision for RBTs. The structural constraint is different: of your required monthly contacts, at least one must be individual, meaning no other RBTs or trainees present. The other may be a small group, and small groups have a size limit rather than a percentage limit.
The difference matters in practice. Under the imagined percentage rule, a supervisor might restructure a month to balance group against individual time. Under the actual rule, what matters is that at least one contact was genuinely one to one. Those lead to different schedules, and only one of them is the requirement.
This conflation is easy to fall into if you work somewhere that supervises both RBTs and fieldwork trainees, since both rule sets are in the air. It is worth knowing which one you are subject to. The pathway pages keep the fieldwork numbers separate from the RBT ones for exactly this reason.
Why these persist
All three share a shape. Each is plausible, each sounds like the kind of rule a certifying body would write, and each is easier to remember than the real requirement.
They also survive because almost nothing checks them. RBT supervision records are retained rather than routinely submitted, so a misunderstanding can persist for years without anything contradicting it. There is no monthly filing that would bounce back.
The correction is not to memorize more rules. It is to check monthly against the requirement itself rather than against what you remember being told, which is what live monthly checks exist to do. A month that is short shows up while you can still fix it.
What is actually true
Stripped of the myths, the shape of the requirement is short. A flat monthly percentage of your behavior-analytic service hours must be supervised, from your first month onward, with no tiers. You need a minimum number of real-time contacts each month, at least one of which is individual. Your supervisor must directly observe you working with a client. It resets every calendar month, and it is measured separately at each organization.
No beginner period, no step-down, no group percentage cap. The RBT overview covers how that translates into monthly tracking, and if you have been operating under any of the three myths, it is worth re-checking your recent months against the real figures rather than assuming.