Original research
U.S. Dental Access Report 2026
By Pete Johnson, founder of dentalist.ai · June 10, 2026 · Updated October 21, 2026
All 272,669 NPI-registered dentists in the U.S., practicing at 208,892 addresses, analyzed against U.S. Census Bureau 2024 population estimates. Here is where dental care is easy to reach, where it is not, and why the gap for kids is the story nobody is telling.
October 2026 update
The June edition counted 301,526 registry records (88.7 per 100k people, 17.3 pediatric per 100k children). That count mixed practice organizations with individual dentists, and the data layer behind it was missing most dentists registered after 2013. This edition counts every individual dentist in the federal registry, removes deactivated registrations, and uses Census Vintage 2024 population estimates. Totals and several rankings changed; every figure on this page and the state cards is current.
272,669
NPI-registered dentists
208,892
Practice addresses
80.2
Dentists per 100k people
14.9
Pediatric dentists per 100k children
America has one pediatric dentist for every 6,705 children. That sounds workable until you look at where those dentists actually are.
In Washington, DC, there is one pediatric dentist for every 3,091 kids. In West Virginia, it is one for every 18,335. A child in Washington, DC has about 6 times the pediatric dental coverage of a child in West Virginia, and that gap does not show up in any waiting room sign. It shows up as a general dentist squeezing in a scared 6-year-old, or a family driving 90 minutes for a sedation appointment.
We built the dentalist.ai matching engine on top of the federal NPI registry, which means we sit on one of the largest live datasets of dental providers in the country. This report is what that data says about who can actually reach dental care in 2026.
Where dental access is best, and worst
Dentists per 100,000 residents, by state. Arkansas has 39% of the per-capita dental coverage of Washington, DC, and all five of the worst spots are in the Census South.
Best five
| Rank | State | Per 100k |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | District of Columbia | 133.9 |
| 2 | Massachusetts | 121.3 |
| 3 | Alaska | 110.4 |
| 4 | California | 100.8 |
| 5 | Hawaii | 98.3 |
Worst five
| Rank | State | Per 100k |
|---|---|---|
| 47 | Georgia | 59.6 |
| 48 | Mississippi | 56.7 |
| 49 | Delaware | 53.8 |
| 50 | Alabama | 53.7 |
| 51 | Arkansas | 52.3 |
The Pediatric Desert Index
This is the finding that surprised us most. We ranked every state by pediatric dentists per 100,000 children, expecting the bottom of the table to look like a map of rural America. It does not. Six of the ten worst states for kids are in the Midwest: Illinois, South Dakota, Missouri, Michigan, Kansas, North Dakota. The pediatric dental gap is a Midwest problem.
Illinois is the stat we keep coming back to. It ranks 12th in the country for overall dental access (90.5 dentists per 100k) and 10th worst for kids (9.6 pediatric dentists per 100k children). Chicago has no shortage of dentists. What it has is a shortage of people trained to handle a 4-year-old with a cavity and a meltdown at the same time.
Worst ten for kids
| Rank | State | Per 100k kids |
|---|---|---|
| 42 | Illinois | 9.6 |
| 43 | Arkansas | 9.5 |
| 44 | South Dakota | 9.5 |
| 45 | Missouri | 9.3 |
| 46 | Michigan | 8.7 |
| 47 | Kansas | 7.9 |
| 48 | North Dakota | 7.6 |
| 49 | New Mexico | 7.4 |
| 50 | Oklahoma | 7.3 |
| 51 | West Virginia | 5.5 |
Best five for kids
| Rank | State | Per 100k kids |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | District of Columbia | 32.3 |
| 2 | Connecticut | 26.8 |
| 3 | Massachusetts | 26.3 |
| 4 | New York | 23.8 |
| 5 | Hawaii | 22.8 |
Cities with plenty of dentists and zero pediatric specialists
State averages hide the local version of this problem, so we went city level: every city with at least 80 dentists, not a single pediatric dentist, and no pediatric dentist in any ZIP code those dentists practice in. Military bases are left out.
| City | State | Dentists | Pediatric |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vallejo | CA | 110 | 0 |
| Shelby Township | MI | 106 | 0 |
| Seminole | FL | 103 | 0 |
| Port Charlotte | FL | 97 | 0 |
| Waterbury | CT | 96 | 0 |
| Manchester | NH | 96 | 0 |
| Ypsilanti | MI | 92 | 0 |
| Victorville | CA | 90 | 0 |
| El Monte | CA | 90 | 0 |
| Janesville | WI | 89 | 0 |
| Turlock | CA | 88 | 0 |
| Warwick | RI | 87 | 0 |
| Miami Beach | FL | 86 | 0 |
| Lawrence | MA | 85 | 0 |
| Brea | CA | 82 | 0 |
Vallejo, CA has 110 registered dentists and zero registered pediatric dentists. Parents there are not short on dentists. They are short on the right one, and no amount of scrolling solves that without knowing what to look for.
Specialist access follows the same fault lines
- Orthodontists are scarcest in Arkansas (2.4 per 100k) and South Dakota (2.4 per 100k). The national pool is 13,565.
- Oral surgeons bottom out in Kansas (1.9), Alabama (1.8), New Mexico (1.8), Arkansas (1.4) per 100k, against 9,069 nationally.
- Specialist share of workforce tells the concentration story: 23.9% of Massachusetts dentists are specialists. In 10 states it is under 15%, including Michigan, South Dakota, Wyoming. If you need a root canal in Boston, an endodontist probably does it. In rural Missouri, your general dentist does.
Why this matters for how people reach care
The standard advice when you need a dentist is to search, scan ratings, and pick whoever is close with 4.5 stars. This data shows why that breaks: in big parts of the country, the provider you actually need is not in your city at all, and a star rating will not tell you that the practice 15 minutes further out has the pediatric specialist or the sedation credentials you are looking for.
That is the problem we built dentalist.ai to solve. Our matching engine reads the verified signals underneath every practice profile, specialty registrations included, and matches people to the practice that fits, not just the closest one. If you are in one of the gap zones in this report, that difference is the whole ballgame.
State report cards
Every state plus DC gets its own report card: access rank, pediatric score, specialty coverage, and the cities where its dentists concentrate. For the 50 largest metro areas, county by county, see the Metro Dental Reports.
Methodology
Dentist counts are every individual registration with a dental taxonomy code (1223) in the National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES, October 2026), with registrations in the CMS deactivation report removed. Practice organizations are not counted as dentists; their addresses count toward practice locations. Registry counts run higher than the professionally active dentist counts published by the ADA (roughly 61 per 100k), since an NPI can stay active after a dentist retires. Rankings hold up regardless: the same counting rule applies to every state.
Specialtiesuse each dentist's primary NPPES taxonomy, so every dentist counts in exactly one specialty.
Population denominators are U.S. Census Bureau Vintage 2024 estimates (July 1, 2024). Child population means under 18.
Scope is the 50 states plus DC. 4,455 registrations at territory, military-mail and foreign addresses were excluded. Locations means unique street addresses across all dental registrations: 208,892 of them.
No ratings, reviews, or predicted data appear anywhere in this report. Every number is a count from the federal registry against a Census denominator. Questions about the data, or want the full state table? The complete dataset behind this report is available on request: pete@dentalist.ai.
Take the next step
In one of the gap zones? Let Dee do the digging.
Our matching engine reads verified specialty registrations across 208,892 practice addresses and matches you to the one that fits.