{
  "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register",
  "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/counselors-all-other/",
  "methodology": "https://cookedindex.com/methodology",
  "notice": "Verdicts are re-examined as evidence accumulates. Re-fetch before relying on this; the page above always carries the current score.",
  "scored_at": "2026-08-11",
  "model": "claude-opus-5",
  "occupation": {
    "title": "Counselors, All Other",
    "soc_code": "21-1019",
    "category": "Social Service",
    "us_employment": 28580,
    "median_annual_wage": 50860
  },
  "verdict": "EXPOSED",
  "risk_resistance": 60,
  "contested": false,
  "near_boundary": false,
  "dimensions": {
    "task_resistance": 13,
    "embodiment": 9,
    "liability_shield": 8,
    "trust_premium": 17,
    "judgment_accountability": 13
  },
  "reasoning": {
    "task_resistance": "At 13 the session work holds — a client disclosing a foreclosure notice or a bad genetic result needs a person across the table who will call them back — but roughly the other half of the week is HUD-mandated intake and budget worksheets, benefits eligibility screening, resource-directory lookups, referral letters and template action plans, all of which draft themselves now, which keeps this out of the 14+ band.",
    "embodiment": "A 9 rather than a 3 reflects that this bucket works out of community agencies, hospitals, prisons, schools and clients' living rooms — home visits for housing counseling, bedside grief support, worksite financial-wellness sessions — but no one is lifting, driving a route, or operating equipment, so the physical demand is presence-in-place rather than hands-on work.",
    "liability_shield": "An 8 is the honest middle: many in this bucket hold real credentials — HUD certification for housing counselors, NFCC/AFCPE for credit and financial counselors, GCC or NBCC-adjacent letters for genetic and career work — but these are agency-level or voluntary certifications, not a state licence with a board that can strip your right to practice, and the agency, lender, or supervising clinician carries the exposure when advice goes wrong.",
    "trust_premium": "17 is warranted because the client came back for you specifically — the person who knows they hid the second credit card, who sat with them the week their child died, who remembers which employer rejected them last month — and a referral to a program lands only if the client believes the counselor is on their side; the reason it isn't 19 is that some of this work is single-encounter, agency-assigned, and closes when the file closes.",
    "judgment_accountability": "13 covers real discretion inside guardrails: deciding whether a client is stable enough for a repayment plan versus bankruptcy referral, whether grief has crossed into something needing clinical handoff, whether to flag suspected abuse — consequential calls, but made against agency protocol, funder rules and escalation paths rather than as the final unreviewable decision-maker."
  },
  "rationale": "This is a residual bucket — career counselors in niche settings, financial-wellness counselors, genetic-support and grief counselors, credit and housing counselors — so score the modal worker: someone who runs one-on-one sessions, assesses a client's situation, and connects them to programs or plans. The session itself, where a person discloses something hard and needs to be heard by a human who will follow up, is the product and does not automate. What does automate is the paperwork spine: intake forms, progress notes, eligibility screening, resource lookups, referral letters, and the standard-plan drafting that consumes much of the week, plus the low-acuity informational conversations chatbots now handle acceptably.",
  "outlook": "Informational and form-driven counseling roles thin out as agencies route those inquiries to chatbots, while the crisis-facing, licensed, in-person tier holds steady or grows.",
  "what_would_raise_it": {
    "levers": [
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "HUD's housing counseling program already requires agency approval and certified counselors (HUD Housing Counselor Certification exam) for services funded by HUD grants; extending an equivalent named-certified-counselor sign-off to loss-mitigation packages, or a CFPB/state rule that debt management plans and reverse-mortgage (HECM) counseling certificates must be issued by an identified certified human who attests the session occurred, would raise this. Similarly, state licensure of genetic counselors (now in ~35 states, with NSGC pushing the remaining ones plus the federal Access to Genetic Counselor Services Act for Medicare billing) puts a personally-liable licensee in the loop.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 5
      },
      {
        "dimension": "task_resistance",
        "change": "Genuine two-tier structure: if intake, eligibility screening, resource lookup, referral letters and standard-plan drafting are absorbed by agency case-management software, the residual day is crisis disclosure, contested eligibility appeals, and clients whose situation does not fit any program — the tier current models cannot close out. Watch for caseload-per-counselor rising while session length rises too.",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 4
      },
      {
        "dimension": "trust_premium",
        "change": "Already high and hard to raise much further, but a route exists: if funders and accreditors (COA, NFCC member standards, HUD grant terms) begin requiring that a disclosed-human session be offered as the default rather than an escalation from a chatbot tier, the human contact becomes the billable unit rather than an upsell. Conversely a state consumer-protection rule requiring disclosure when counseling is AI-delivered — as in the Illinois 2025 WOPR Act restricting AI therapy — makes the human label purchasable.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 2
      },
      {
        "dimension": "judgment_accountability",
        "change": "If the role formally owns the adverse call — denying eligibility, certifying that a client understood a reverse-mortgage risk, escalating a grief or genetic-result session to psychiatric referral, mandated reporting — and that call is attributable by name in an auditable file, this rises. Watch for HUD/CFPB exam findings that name individual counselors, or agency policy that AI-generated plan recommendations require a documented human override rationale.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 3
      }
    ],
    "ceiling_note": "Embodiment has no route; sessions are increasingly remote, which lowers it. The structural ceiling is fragmentation: this is a residual SOC bucket with no single licensing board, so gains accrue to the sub-groups that have one (genetic counselors, HUD-certified housing counselors) and not to career or financial-wellness counselors, who may see no liability shield at all. Also, most of these roles are grant- or fee-funded at low margin, so cost pressure pushes agencies toward the chatbot tier even where the human product is preferred."
  },
  "adjudication": null,
  "employment_history": {
    "points": [
      {
        "y": 2017,
        "emp": 27150,
        "wage": 43370
      },
      {
        "y": 2018,
        "emp": 26530,
        "wage": 42130
      },
      {
        "y": 2019,
        "emp": 25420,
        "wage": 42930
      },
      {
        "y": 2020,
        "emp": 27310,
        "wage": 45760
      },
      {
        "y": 2021,
        "emp": 29480,
        "wage": 45160
      },
      {
        "y": 2022,
        "emp": 37270,
        "wage": 43390
      },
      {
        "y": 2023,
        "emp": 35580,
        "wage": 46130
      },
      {
        "y": 2024,
        "emp": 33340,
        "wage": 49830
      },
      {
        "y": 2025,
        "emp": 28580,
        "wage": 50860
      }
    ],
    "from": 2017,
    "to": 2025,
    "change_pct": 5.3,
    "comparable_from": 2019,
    "spans_soc_revision": true
  },
  "pivots": [],
  "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms"
}