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Original research
By Pete Johnson, founder of dentalist.ai · June 10, 2026
301,526 NPI-registered dental providers across 228,012 U.S. locations, 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.
301,526
NPI-registered providers
228,012
Unique practice locations
88.7
Providers per 100k people
17.3
Pediatric providers per 100k children
America has one pediatric dental provider for every 5,775 children. That sounds workable until you look at where those providers actually are.
In Washington, DC, there is one pediatric dental provider for every 2,653 kids. In Oklahoma, it is one for every 10,586. A child in Oklahoma has access to roughly a quarter of the pediatric dental coverage a child in DC has, 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.
Providers per 100,000 residents, by state. Mississippi has well under half the per-capita dental coverage of Alaska, and the Deep South holds four of the five worst spots.
| Rank | State | Per 100k |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Alaska | 156.5 |
| 2 | District of Columbia | 136 |
| 3 | Massachusetts | 127 |
| 4 | Hawaii | 114 |
| 5 | Colorado | 110.9 |
| Rank | State | Per 100k |
|---|---|---|
| 47 | Alabama | 67.5 |
| 48 | Delaware | 67.5 |
| 49 | Georgia | 65.1 |
| 50 | Louisiana | 64.7 |
| 51 | Mississippi | 64.4 |
This is the finding that surprised us most. We ranked every state by pediatric dental providers per 100,000 children, expecting the bottom of the table to look like a map of rural America. It does not. Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma: the pediatric dental gap is a Midwest problem.
Illinois is the stat we keep coming back to. It ranks 10th best in the country for overall dental access (103.9 providers per 100k) and 5th worst for kids (11 pediatric providers 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.
| Rank | State | Per 100k kids |
|---|---|---|
| 42 | South Dakota | 12.4 |
| 43 | Maine | 11.9 |
| 44 | New Mexico | 11.9 |
| 45 | Michigan | 11.1 |
| 46 | Wisconsin | 11.1 |
| 47 | Illinois | 11 |
| 48 | Kansas | 10 |
| 49 | Missouri | 9.7 |
| 50 | West Virginia | 9.5 |
| 51 | Oklahoma | 9.4 |
| Rank | State | Per 100k kids |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | District of Columbia | 37.7 |
| 2 | Connecticut | 31.5 |
| 3 | Hawaii | 30.7 |
| 4 | Alaska | 30.4 |
| 5 | Massachusetts | 28.2 |
State averages hide the local version of this problem, so we went city level: every city with at least 80 dental providers and not a single pediatric specialist in the registry.
| City | State | Providers | Pediatric |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vallejo | CA | 129 | 0 |
| El Monte | CA | 118 | 0 |
| Oak Park | IL | 100 | 0 |
| Beaufort | SC | 93 | 0 |
| South Gate | CA | 90 | 0 |
| Prairie Village | KS | 89 | 0 |
| St Louis | MO | 86 | 0 |
| Great Lakes | IL | 83 | 0 |
| Sioux City | IA | 83 | 0 |
| State College | PA | 83 | 0 |
| Monterey Park | CA | 80 | 0 |
Vallejo, a Bay Area city, has 129 dental providers and zero registered pediatric specialists. 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.
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.
Every state plus DC gets its own report card: access rank, pediatric score, specialty coverage, and the cities where its providers concentrate.
Provider counts come from the dentalist.ai data layer, built on the National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES, May 2026 vintage) and the NPI Registry API. Counts include both organizational and individual NPI registrations with dental taxonomy codes. Registry counts run higher than the professionally active dentist counts published by the ADA (roughly 61 per 100k), since NPI registrations can persist after retirement and organizations register separately from their providers. Rankings hold up regardless: the same counting rule applies to every state.
Specialties are derived from NPPES taxonomy codes, normalized across NPPES bulk-file and NPI-API label variants. A provider registered under both general and specialty taxonomies counts toward each specialty but only once in specialist totals.
Population denominators are U.S. Census Bureau ACS 2024 1-year estimates (table B01001). Child population means under 18.
Scope is the 50 states plus DC. 2,713 records from territories, military addresses, and foreign locations were excluded. Locations means unique street addresses: 301,526 provider records map to 228,012 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 228,012 practice locations and matches you to the one that fits.