Dental Practices in the US: The NPI Registry, State by State

NPPES is the national index CMS keeps so that every healthcare provider has one number for billing and electronic records. A dental practice registers as an organization, gives a practice address and a phone number, and picks one or more taxonomy codes describing the work it does. That is the whole record. There is no price, no opening hours, no website field and no quality score, and CMS does not check any of it. 63.6% of the records here carry the general-dentistry codes; the rest register a specialty, and 6,952 carry more than one.

The value of it is coverage. Every practice that bills insurance has to be in here, so a state or metro count is close to a census of dental supply rather than a sample of whoever paid for a listing. The weakness is age: 68,157 records (50.9%) have not been touched since before 2020. Treat a phone number with an old update date as a lead, not a fact.

U.S. Virgin Islands (18), Guam (11) and Northern Mariana Islands (6) have no Census metro area with at least 5 registered practices, so they have no state page in this directory. Their records are still counted in the totals above.

1. Check the update date on the row before you dial. A record last touched in 2012 is a coin flip.
2. Ask for the price by D-code, not by description: D1110 for a routine adult cleaning, D4341 or D4342 for scaling and root planing per quadrant, D4346 for gingivitis treatment.
3. Ask whether the quoted price includes the exam and X-rays, which are billed separately and often double the first-visit total.
4. Check the license with your state dental board. The NPI proves the practice exists in a federal index; it proves nothing about licensing or discipline.
5. Compare two or three practices in the same metro. The spread inside one city is usually wider than the spread between states.