Dentist licence (DDS/DMD)

How many people hold this

202,485 professionally active dentists in the United States — 2024, the last year in the ADA series, published 2025.

We are not turning that into a percentage. We hold a sound count of dentists and a sound count of employed dentists and we are not dividing one into the other, because federal employment data counts employees and most dentists are self-employed practice owners. The ratio would read as though a third of dentists were not working in dentistry, and what it would actually measure is how many of them own the practice rather than being paid by one. Both counts are sound on their own and both are published above and below. Dividing them would produce a figure that reads as “the share of holders working in the field” and would not be one, so we publish the two counts and let them stand.

What that count includes: People, from the ADA's masterfile, and already filtered to those whose primary occupation is dentistry — private practice, dental school faculty, armed forces and federal services, state and local government, hospital staff, residents and interns. It EXCLUDES retired dentists, dentists not in practice or waiting for boards, and anyone whose main job is something else. That filtering makes it a different kind of count from most on this site: it is closer to a workforce than to a registry, which is exactly why we do not divide employment into it.

The ADA count is also filtered differently from most credential registries on this site: it already excludes retired dentists and those not in practice, so it is closer to a workforce count than to a register of everyone who ever qualified. Two counts that are each right, measuring populations that do not line up, is precisely the case where publishing the pair and refusing the percentage is the honest answer.

American Dental Association Health Policy Institute, Supply of Dentists in the US: 2001–2024, Table 1 (Standing count of people holding the credential) · view

Four years after completing, from federal records

Of 7,918 people who completed Dentistry (DDS/DMD), first professional degree and were no longer studying four years later, 210 had no earnings on record at all — 2.7%. The ones who were working earned a median of $170,812, with the middle half between $110,187 and $239,976.

“No earnings on record” is not “unemployed”. The measure is the absence of any wage record and any positive self-employment income for the whole year. Nobody was asked whether they wanted work, so the count holds people who left the workforce by choice — raising children, caring, travelling, living on someone else's income, moving abroad — alongside everyone who wanted a job and had none. Nobody publishes the split and we will not guess it. What it does establish is how many people finished this training and were earning nothing from it or from anything else four years on, which is exactly what the pay figure above cannot tell you.

What that programme code covers: CIP 51.04 at first-professional level is the DDS and DMD. It does not include dental hygiene or dental assisting, which are CIP 51.06 and appear separately. Specialty residencies taken after the degree are also outside it.

Who is in the cohort: completers who received federal student aid — roughly half of US undergraduates, and the other half are not measured here. People who went on to further study are in neither column. The Department suppresses institutions with cohorts too small to publish and adds statistical noise to the rest, so this is a sum over the institutions large enough to report: 53 of them, recovering 98.6% of the Department's own national count for this programme. Dropping the smallest reporting programmes moves the rate by 0.0 percentage points.

Source: US Department of Education, College Scorecard, Field of Study data, 2026 — release of 10 June 2026; measured four years after completion · view · the same figure for every programme we can publish