Best School Psychology Programs in Maryland Rankings for 2026

Maryland runs school psychology through two separate credentials, and knowing which one you need saves a lot of confusion. The one almost everybody gets is the School Psychologist certificate from the Maryland State Department of Education. It authorizes you to work in Maryland public K-12 schools, doing psycho-educational assessment, counseling, crisis response, and intervention design. Here is the path, step by step. First, you earn a master's or higher degree in school psychology from a state-approved program, which in practice means one of the three NASP-approved Maryland programs or an equivalent approved program from another state. Second, your training has to include a minimum 1,200-hour internship in school psychology, with at least 600 of those hours in a school setting, completed over roughly one academic year. Third, you pass the Praxis School Psychologist exam (#5403) at the Maryland qualifying score of 155, which is also the national NCSP cut score. Maryland also recognizes an alternate route: if you already hold a valid Nationally Certified School Psychologist (NCSP) credential, that can satisfy the bulk of the certification standard, with a small amount of additional special-education coursework. You apply to MSDE, clear a background check, and you are certified to work in Maryland schools.

The second credential, the Licensed Psychologist (LP), comes from the Maryland Board of Examiners of Psychologists, part of the Maryland Department of Health, and it lets you practice psychology privately outside the school system. You cannot get there with a specialist degree. The LP requires a doctoral degree in psychology, 3,250 hours of supervised professional experience (including a 1,750-hour internship), and passing scores on the national EPPP exam plus a Maryland jurisprudence exam. That is why the University of Maryland PhD matters for anyone who wants a private practice later: a doctorate is the educational base the LP is built on. Most Maryland school psychologists never pursue the LP. You only need it if you want to bill clients privately.

Either way, plan to take the Praxis School Psychologist exam. It is the MSDE certification test, and a passing score also earns you the NCSP credential, which makes it far easier to move your career to another state later without re-doing your coursework review.

Maryland pays school psychologists clearly above the national line. The BLS May 2025 data puts the Maryland median at $109,700, against a national median of $95,990, a premium of about 14%. The range runs from a 10th-percentile figure of $64,360 up to a 90th-percentile figure of $138,250, and the state employs 1,520 school psychologists. Pay is steady at entry because it follows the certificated salary schedules that Maryland's local school systems negotiate, the same step-and-column scales that pay teachers, so your salary climbs with years of service and graduate credits rather than with whatever the market will bear in a given year.

Where you work inside Maryland matters. The Baltimore-Columbia-Towson metro is the largest in-state employer of school psychologists, with about 570 of them and a median of $114,520, above the statewide figure. The Hagerstown-Martinsburg area in western Maryland is much smaller, around 50 school psychologists, and pays a lower median near $92,280, which still beats the national number. The DC suburbs are the wrinkle in the data. Montgomery County and Prince George's County school psychologists are counted by BLS under the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV metro, reported in the DC column, where the median for school psychologists is about $106,550. Those districts pay competitive salaries, but the cost of living in the DC suburbs is among the highest in the state, so the take-home advantage over Baltimore is thinner than the headline numbers suggest. One honest caveat across all of these figures: they reflect a roughly 10-month, school-year work calendar, so the annual numbers are not a 12-month salary.

All three NASP-approved Maryland programs lead to the same MSDE School Psychologist certificate, so the real decision is location, degree level, and timeline. With only three options, the choice is more about fit than ranking. Here is how they sort out.