Your state's dentists by age, sex and race: reading HPI's Dentist Demographics Dashboard

What it says#

The Dentist Demographics Dashboard is an interactive Tableau view on ADA.org that, in the institute's own words, lets you "Visualize your state's dental workforce by age, gender, race and ethnicity, and more." The page states plainly that "The dashboard data cover the years 2001 to 2023," and that you use the drop-down menus on the right to filter by state and data year. Those are the only two filters.

The default screen is national and comes in four quadrants: dentist age in the upper left, dentists per 100,000 population in the upper right, dentist race and ethnicity in the lower left, and dentist gender in the lower right. Each quadrant has a zoom icon that opens it full width, a legend you can hide, and a tooltip that appears on hover with the state, the data year and the percentage breakdown for that mark. The lower status bar carries back, return, reset, share, download and full screen; download produces a PDF, a PowerPoint slide or an image of the current view.

The numbers behind the dashboard are published separately as Supply of Dentists in the U.S., an Excel file linked from the same page. For 2023, that file reports 202,304 dentists working in dentistry, up from 163,409 in 2001, and 60.4 dentists per 100,000 people, up from 57.34 in 2001 after peaking at 61.06 in 2017. The gender split in 2023 was 37.7% female, 61.2% male and 1.1% unknown, against 16.02% female in 2001. The age split in 2023 was 17.4% under 35, 25.5% aged 35 to 44, 22.4% aged 45 to 54, 18.9% aged 55 to 64 and 15.8% aged 65 or older; in 2001 the 65-and-older share was 8.72% and the 45-to-54 share was 31.92%. Women skew young in this data: 23.6% of female dentists were under 35 in 2023 and only 6.3% were 65 or older, while 21.9% of male dentists were 65 or older.

Per-capita supply is where the state filter earns its keep. In 2023 the file's Table 3 runs from 41.2 dentists per 100,000 in Arkansas, 41.7 in Alabama and 43.1 in Mississippi at one end to 79.5 in Alaska, 80.2 in Massachusetts and 109.4 in the District of Columbia at the other. The national 60.4 is a midpoint between markets that look nothing alike.

The help guide is candid about the tool's limits. You can make a state-to-national comparison on the age and gender graphs from the default screen, but for state-to-state work you have to download PDFs and compare the images, or open the dashboard in two browser windows. Only the age quadrant animates year to year, using a play control above the graph; the per-capita quadrant already plots the full series; race and gender change only when you switch the data year in the filter panel.

Who it applies to#

The data describe professionally active dentists as the ADA masterfile defines them: licensed, not retired, and with a primary occupation of private practice full or part time, dental school or faculty staff, armed forces, other federal service such as the VA or Public Health Service, state or local government, hospital staff dentist, graduate student, intern or resident, or other health or dental organization staff member. The masterfile is described as a database of all dentists in the country, updated by reconciliation against state licensure databases, death records, and ADA surveys and censuses. Population denominators come from Census Bureau estimates and the American Community Survey.

Two boundary notes matter if you quote a number. The help guide describes the dashboard population as dentists working in the 50 states, the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico; the appendix of the 2023 Excel file describes its population as the 50 states or DC and says it excludes U.S. territories. Both exclude dentists in U.S. armed forces overseas. Separately, the file reports a dentist by business location where one is available, so a dentist is counted where the practice is, not where the dentist sleeps.

This is a supply and demographics tool and nothing else. It carries no income, hours, ownership, practice size or DSO data, and no hygienist or assistant data. For an owner it answers two questions well, how crowded your state is and how old the dentists in it are, and it answers nothing about what any of them earn.

What changed#

The dashboard's own coverage moved from 2001 to 2022 to 2001 to 2023. The help guide on the page is copyright 2023 and describes the tool as illustrating "2001 to 2022 demographic trends," while the page text and the current data file both run through 2023, so the guide is one refresh behind the tool. HPI has since published Supply of Dentists in the U.S., 2001-2024, and the state-level hub now points at that file and at the 2025 workforce report rather than at the dashboard's 2023 vintage, so the dashboard trails the spreadsheets by a year or more. The entry on HPI's 2025 workforce report in this directory carries the newer national counts.

The longer trend the dashboard exists to show has not changed direction. Between 2001 and 2023 the female share went from 16.02% to 37.7%, the 65-and-older share from 8.72% to 15.8%, and per-capita supply from 57.34 to 60.4 after peaking in 2017.

Where the source is#

The dashboard lives on ADA.org at the HPI dentist demographics page and is free, with no login. The page links a five-page help guide, Dentist Demographics Dashboard: Instructions and Sources (PDF), which documents the layout, the download settings, the FAQs and the sources, and it links the Supply of Dentists in the U.S. Excel file that holds the underlying counts. HPI's suggested citation is "American Dental Association. Dentist Demographics Dashboard. Health Policy Institute. 2023." The dashboard is served through Tableau Public, so it needs a browser that will load an embedded viz. State-level data beyond what the tool shows, including dentist age, gender and race or ethnicity cuts, are described on HPI's state-level hub as available on request from hpi@ada.org. Everything here is copyright the American Dental Association.