US DentalCompassHow we build this directory
Every listing here comes from public records. This page says which ones, how they are joined, how often they are refreshed, and where the result is weaker than it looks. Last rebuilt 2026-08-28.
What is included
The directory lists 16,377 clinic sites and 14,958 named dentists. A clinic is included only if it sits on a recognised affordability pathway:
| Kind of clinic | Sites | Why it is affordable |
|---|---|---|
| Community health centre (FQHC or look-alike) | 16,127 | Required by federal rules to offer a sliding fee scale and to serve patients regardless of ability to pay |
| Dental school clinic | 143 | Care by supervised students, usually at reduced fees |
| Public health clinic | 92 | Run by a state or county health department |
| Rural health clinic | 15 | Federally designated to serve an underserved rural area |
Private practices are left out entirely, including those that advertise discounts. That is the editorial decision the whole site rests on: a reader who cannot afford a private dentist should not have to sift through them.
Where the data comes from
- HRSA Health Center Service Delivery and Look-Alike Sites. The federal roster of every community health centre site, with its address, setting and hours. This is what defines most of the directory.
- HRSA Uniform Data System (UDS). Each health centre organisation's annual report: dental visits, dental staff. These are reported per organisation, not per site, and the pages label them that way.
- NPPES, the National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (CMS). Every dentist with a National Provider Identifier, their specialty taxonomy, licence and practice address. Dentists are linked to a clinic when the address they registered matches it.
- CMS Doctors and Clinicians file. Dental school and graduation year, and Medicare enrolment, for the dentists who appear in it. Most dentists do not, so most pages have no education section.
- Dental schools. Teaching clinics are identified from the registered organisation names of accredited US dental schools in NPPES, which follow a regular pattern, and tested against known schools.
- CareQuest Institute for Oral Health, adult Medicaid dental benefits by state, as of 2024-12-31. Each state is scored service by service; we report 12 states with extensive adult coverage, 37 limited and 2 with emergency-only or no coverage.
- State Medicaid fee schedules, where a state publishes them in a usable form.
- Location. Address points from OpenStreetMap and the Overture Maps Foundation, the US Census geocoder, and postcode centroids from GeoNames. 15,952 clinics sit on a surveyed address point; the rest are placed by postcode and are shown as an area with no distance.
- A community directory overlay adds evidence of dental services at a few hundred addresses. It is recorded separately from the federal evidence and never replaces it.
How the pieces are joined
No single source says what a reader needs to know. HRSA says a site is a health centre with a sliding fee scale; NPPES says a children's dentist is registered at that address; neither says both. The directory is built by matching addresses across sources after normalising them — street suffixes, unit numbers, postcode formats — and merging duplicates into one record per building.
Dental care is confirmed at the address itself for 4,964 sites. For the rest, the operator runs a dental programme somewhere but no public record ties it to that address, and the listing says so rather than implying more. A health centre often registers all its dentists at its head office, which is the main reason for the gap.
What we do not publish
- Prices you will pay. No source publishes them; a sliding fee depends on your income and household size and is set by the clinic.
- Reviews or rankings. Lists are ordered by completeness of the record, by name or by distance — never by quality.
- Anything we had to guess. A blank field means we could not confirm it, not that the answer is no.
How often it is updated
The sources are published on their own schedules — NPPES monthly, the HRSA site roster continuously, Medicaid benefit surveys about once a year. The site is rebuilt from fresh copies of them periodically, and the date at the top of this page is the last rebuild. Each rebuild re-runs the same checks: that every page in the sitemap exists, that no coordinate is published more precisely than it is known, and that no organisation-wide figure is presented as one clinic's.
Records still go stale between releases. If you find one, the contact page says what helps us correct it.
Who runs the site
US DentalCompass is independent. It is not affiliated with any government agency or clinic, takes no payment from clinics, and is supported by advertising. See the about page and the privacy policy.