# US dentist supply, by state and town

Counts of registered dental practices in the United States, joined to Census
population estimates, with the distance from each Census place to the nearest
practice.

## Why this exists

The federal provider registry lists every dentist in the country but publishes
no counts, no per capita figures and no geography. Census publishes population
but not dentists. Putting the two together answers questions neither source
answers alone: which states are best and worst served, and how far an ordinary
American town is from dental care.

## Files

| File | Rows | What it holds |
| --- | --- | --- |
| `us-dentists-by-state.csv` | 52 | Dentists, population, dentists per 100,000, specialist share, share of women practitioners |
| `us-dentists-by-town.csv` | 11,685 | Dentists per town, and how many neighborhoods within it have listings |
| `towns-furthest-from-a-dentist.csv` | 15 | The towns furthest from any listed practice |

## Headline figures

- 411,517 dental practices, 119.9 per 100,000 people
- Best served: District of Columbia at 189.7 per 100,000
- Least served: Puerto Rico at 77.5 per 100,000
- Median distance from a town center to the nearest practice: 2.3 miles
- 1,122 towns are more than 20 miles from one

## Sources

- Dentists: NPPES, the National Provider Identifier registry, NPPES, August 2026 release. Public domain. Filtered to dental taxonomies (1223*, plus dental clinics), active registrations, US practice addresses.
- Population: US Census Bureau population estimates, 2024. Public domain.
- Coordinates: US Census geocoder for practice addresses, Census gazetteer for place centers.

## Method, and what these numbers are not

Distances are straight lines from the center of a Census place to the nearest
practice address. A registered dentist is not the same as a practice accepting
new patients, and one address can carry many registrations, a dental school
above all, so read this as the supply of registered dentists rather than as
available appointments.

## License

The sources are public domain. This derived dataset is published under
[CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/): use it anywhere,
including commercially, with attribution.

Attribution: Dent-OX, *How many dentists does America have, and where are they?*
https://dent-ox.com/research/how-many-dentists-in-america/

Regenerate with `python3 pipeline/research.py directory.db data/research.json`.