Why there is no single list of recognised qualifications, and what to check instead

There is no single list that tells you what your qualification counts as in every country. Not because nobody has tried to build one, and not because the information is secret. It is because each register belongs to a different body, and almost none of those bodies permit anyone else to republish it.

That is a licensing fact, not a technical one. Understanding it changes what you should do: stop looking for the combined list, and go to the individual registers in a deliberate order.

What we actually checked

We read the published terms of use, copyright pages and robots.txt files of 42 regulators, qualification authorities and professional bodies across Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates and Canada. The question was narrow: does this body permit a third party to republish its register of accredited qualifications or programmes?

Two of the 42 publish an open licence covering their site content. The rest either restrict re-use explicitly, or say nothing at all — and saying nothing is not permission. Under copyright, the default is that rights are reserved. A footer reading “all rights reserved” is a claim of rights, not a grant of them.

The two open ones are worth naming, because they are the exception that shows the shape of the rule.

The Office for Students, the regulator of higher education in England, states on its copyright page that “All content owned by the OfS is available for re-use under the terms of the Open Government Licence (OGL)”, adding that “If you re-use any of the content owned by the OfS you must acknowledge the source.” That is a genuine open licence, with the usual carve-outs for logos, images and third-party material.

TEQSA, the Australian higher education regulator, states that “With the exception of the Commonwealth Coat of Arms, and where otherwise noted, all material presented on this website is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia licence.”

And then TEQSA’s own robots.txt disallows /national-register and /national-register* for every crawler. The open licence covers the website; the register is fenced off from automated collection. The two statements sit on the same domain and are not reconciled anywhere we could find.

Where the register is a product

Some qualification data is not merely unlicensed for re-use. It is sold.

The UK’s national agency for qualification comparability, Ecctis, operating as UK ENIC, runs its online databases as a paid subscription. Its business terms and conditions (version stamped 23 March 2026) place title to those databases with the UK Department for Education, and state that “Online Databases data must not be used by the Corporate Organisation in any publications or reports.” A separate schedule adds that a subscriber “will not make copies of, lend, sell, provide access or publish the Online Databases or any information contained in them”.

Read that plainly: the comparability data that would form the backbone of any “what does my degree equal in the UK” table is Crown property, licensed to paying subscribers, and contractually barred from appearing in their publications. A free, complete, public version of that table cannot lawfully be built by a third party. That is why you have never found one.

Where a regulator has said it out loud

Most bodies express this through general copyright wording. One addressed the specific behaviour directly.

The Malaysian Qualifications Agency publishes a notice stating that “MQA discovered that certain parties have published printed and electronic materials using the MQA name and logo without the written permission of MQA.” It records what those parties said their purpose was: “The parties claimed that their actions were aimed at facilitating the search for MQA accredited programs.”

That is precisely the pitch every aggregator makes — we are only making it easier to find. MQA’s answer was to disclaim any connection with those publications and to ask anyone wanting to use its name or logo to apply in writing.

The registers themselves are closed to crawlers

Beyond copyright wording, several bodies use robots.txt — the machine-readable file that tells automated crawlers where they may not go — to close off the register specifically. Checked on 3 September 2026:

• TEQSA disallows /national-register and /national-register*.
• CPA Australia disallows its accredited course search endpoint by name, alongside a general block on its search paths.
• NZQA disallows /nzqf/search/*.html$, the search pages of the New Zealand qualifications framework.
• HCPC disallows /check-the-register/register-results/.
• SRA disallows /search-results/* and its register lookup query endpoint.
• AACA disallows PDF files under its uploads directory, which is where its programme list lives.

Separately, Ahpra, which holds the national registers for regulated health professions in Australia, leaves its robots.txt almost entirely open but handles the same question in its terms of use, which prohibit “the downloading of any account information, the use of data-gathering or data extraction tools or the downloading and copying of National Register information for any commercial or data storage purpose.”

NZQA grants a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence over its site “Except in the restricted circumstances set out below” — and the restricted circumstances cover qualification details and standards, which is the part anyone building a list would want.

Two further bodies state the position in a newer form. Engineers Australia and the Occupational Therapy Council both publish robots.txt files disallowing a list of named AI crawlers site-wide, while carrying the line Content-Signal: search=yes, ai-train=no, use=reference. Read together, that says: index this for search, do not ingest it to train models, and citing it is fine.

That is a precise position rather than a closed door, and it is roughly the position most of the 42 bodies occupy once you read them carefully. They are content to be quoted, linked and explained. They are not content to have their register lifted and re-hosted. Almost every attempt to build the combined list runs into the second half of that sentence.

What this means when you are the one searching

Three consequences follow, and all three are practical.

Any third-party list you find is a copy. Someone assembled it at some past moment from one or more official registers. It may have been accurate then. Nothing obliges it to stay accurate, and nothing tells you when it was made. Copies do not receive corrections, withdrawals or new entries.

The absence of a combined list is not a gap in your research. It is a structural feature of how qualification recognition is governed. Each body is answerable for its own register and for nobody else’s. There is no authority above them that could publish the union of their data, and no obligation on them to make one possible.

Recognition is jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction and body-by-body. A qualification listed by an education regulator may still need separate assessment by a professional body in the same country. The two registers answer different questions and neither substitutes for the other.

How to check, in order

Work outward from the narrowest authority to the broadest. The narrow ones decide; the broad ones describe.

1. Start with the body that will actually decide about you. If your goal is to practise a regulated profession, that is the professional regulator or assessing authority for that profession in that country — not the education ministry, and not a qualifications framework. Its rules are what will be applied to your file. Examples of official lookups: Ahpra’s registers of practitioners in Australia, HCPC’s Check the Register and the NMC’s register search in the UK.

2. Then check the provider or programme register held by the education regulator. This answers a different question: was the institution authorised to award this qualification at the time. In Australia that is TEQSA’s National Register; in England, the OfS register of providers; in Ireland, the Irish Register of Qualifications; in Malaysia, the Malaysian Qualifications Register.

3. Check the year, not just the entry. Accreditation takes effect by intake year. A programme accredited today may not have been accredited when you started, and the reverse also happens. When a register or list offers a year filter or a dated version, use the year you commenced, not the current one. If a page gives no date at all, treat that as missing information rather than as reassurance.

4. Record what you saw and when. Take the entry, the identifier or course code, and the date you looked. Registers change without notice and without a changelog. Your own dated record is the only evidence you will have that an entry existed on a particular day.

5. Use comparability statements for what they are. A statement of comparability from a national recognition agency describes how a qualification compares to a domestic framework level. It is a professional opinion for the holder, not a ruling that binds any regulator or employer. Where a body wants one, it will say so and will name the agency it accepts.

What this site does not do

degree.help summarises publicly available rules and explains what they mean. It does not assess qualifications, does not decide recognition, and does not stand in for a formal evaluation by a national recognition agency or a professional regulator. Where a decision about your individual case is involved, only the body holding that power can make it.

We also do not republish these registers. The audit described above is the reason: on the evidence of the bodies’ own published terms, that permission does not exist. What we publish is the explanation of how the registers work, what their fields mean, where their wording conflicts, and how to read them — and then we send you to the official source for the data itself.