How to get a list of dentists

The six sources at a glance

Prices checked October 2026. Sources are listed at the end.

Dentists or practices?

Settle this before you look at any source, because it changes which one fits. The ADA counts 205,088 dentists working in the US. The Census Bureau counts 135,665 dental offices. A list of dentists has a row per person, so a group practice with six associates shows up six times. A list of practices has a row per office.

If you sell software, equipment, lab work or marketing, the office buys and one person signs, usually the owner. Mailing all six associates gets you five people who can't say yes. What you want is a practice list with the owner named. Recruiters, continuing-education providers and insurers are the opposite: they want every dentist, wherever they work.

1. The NPI registry (free)

Every dentist who bills insurance electronically needs a National Provider Identifier, and CMS publishes every one of them in the NPPES registry. It is the closest thing to a free national list of dentists. Each record has the dentist's name and credential, a specialty code, a practice address, a mailing address and a phone number. Practices that registered as organizations also list an "authorized official" with a title, and that title is often "Owner".

There is no email field. A handful of records list a Direct address, which is for sending clinical records between providers and not for sales mail. Of the 1,794 dentist records we pulled for the check below, 27 had one.

How to pull it

For a few hundred dentists, search npiregistry.cms.hhs.gov by state and taxonomy. The registry also has a free API, but it returns 200 records a call and stops at 1,200 for any one search, so a state like Texas has to be split by city or ZIP code. For the whole country, CMS posts a monthly file of every provider in the US. It is large, and most of it is not dentists, so filter on taxonomy codes that start with 1223:

How current it is

We pulled every active individual dentist record in three states small enough to fit under the 1,200 cap, and compared the counts with the ADA's count of dentists actually working there.

Source: NPI Registry API, October 31, 2026, active individual records with a dentist taxonomy and a practice address in the state; ADA Health Policy Institute, Supply of Dentists in the U.S., 2025.

The registry holds about 39% more active dentists than are working in these states. An NPI stays active until someone deactivates it, and a dentist who retires or moves away has little reason to. Seven in ten records hadn't been updated since 2020 or earlier, and a third hadn't changed since 2007, the year NPIs became mandatory. An old record isn't always a wrong one, since plenty of dentists have practiced at the same address for twenty years. But nobody is checking.

Use NPPES to check a name, find a license number, or seed a postal list you plan to clean. Don't expect to email from it.

2. State dental boards (free or close to it)

Every state licenses its dentists, and every board has a lookup tool. A few go further and publish the whole roster. The Texas State Board of Dental Examiners posts files of every dentist, hygienist, assistant and dental lab it licenses, refreshed every 24 hours, with address, county, practice type and license status. Florida's Department of Health has free licensure downloads too. In most other states you file a public records request, and the fee, the wait and the format vary by board. The ADA keeps a directory of every state board.

Board data is the most accurate on one point: whether a dentist is licensed right now. It is weaker on where they work. The address on file is the one the dentist gave the board, which can be their home. Boards are a good way to spot new licensees early, or to check another list against, but they rarely carry email.

3. Renting the ADA list

The ADA's masterfile is the most complete record of US dentists there is. The ADA's own researchers count the profession from it, and it includes non-members. You can't buy it, but you can rent postal addresses from it through licensed list brokers.

Hippo Direct, one of those brokers, lists 42,786 ADA dentists who have practiced 5 to 14 years at a $33 base rate per thousand names, plus a $19 ADA royalty per thousand, with a $200 minimum order before the royalty. That works out to $52 per thousand, or a little over $2,200 for those 42,786 names. You can select by specialty, practice type, ownership and gender.

It is a rental. You get the list for one mailing, it arrives as postal addresses only, and rented lists are seeded with decoy names so the owner can see if you mail it twice. This is the right source for a postcard or catalog drop to a precise segment. It is no help for email or phone.

4. Scraping Google Maps yourself

Most dental offices have a Google Business Profile, so a Maps scraper will find them, with a phone number, website, hours and rating. Outscraper charges nothing for the first 500 places, then $3 per thousand up to 100,000 and $1 per thousand after that. Its email finder, which visits each practice website, is priced the same way per domain. Scraping 150,000 places comes to about $350 before emails.

The money is the small part. A search for "dentist" in a city brings back dental labs, closed offices, chains that list every location under one website, and med spas that do whitening. Overlapping searches return the same office several times. The emails you find are mostly info@ and front-desk inboxes, and none of it tells you who owns the practice. Plan on a few weeks of cleaning for a national list, and on doing it again in a year, because offices open, close and change hands all the time.

Scraping makes sense for one metro area, or if you have someone who enjoys this kind of work.

5. Apollo and ZoomInfo

Sales databases are built from company websites and LinkedIn profiles, and they work well when the buyer works at a company with a sales team of its own. A dentist who owns a two-chair office often has no LinkedIn profile at all, and the office manager almost never does. You will find the DSOs and the big groups and miss many of the independents. If you already pay for a seat, it is worth a search to see what it returns in your territory. We compared them in detail in Apollo vs Hunter vs a dentist email list.

6. Buying from a dental list vendor

A dental list vendor has done steps one to four for you and joined them up: the practices, the dentists who work there, the emails and the phone numbers in one file. You buy it rather than rent it, so you can email, call and mail the same people as often as you like. Vendors differ widely. Some only quote over the phone, and some advertise more dentists than exist in the country. Our comparison of dental email list providers has the prices we could find.

Ours, for comparison: 122,147 US dental practices, 151,441 unique email addresses, 85,433 named dentists tied to the practice where they work, and 8,195 identified owners. It costs $1,699 for the country, or $149 to $399 for one state. Not every practice has an email: 58% of practice rows carry one. Each email is marked verified or catch-all, and practice and dentist emails carry the date they were checked.

What to check before you pay

Whoever you buy from, these checks take an afternoon and catch most bad lists.

• Do the counts add up? There are 205,088 working dentists and 135,665 dental offices in the US. A vendor selling 900,000 "verified dentists" is counting something else. We worked through one such claim in LakeB2B alternatives.
• Get a sample from your own territory. Ask for rows from a town you know, look ten of them up on Google and call three. You'll learn more in twenty minutes than from any accuracy claim.
• Ask when each email was verified. An overall "95% accurate" figure means little. A date on each row tells you how old the check is.
• Ask about catch-all addresses. Many dental offices use mail servers that accept everything, so a verifier can't confirm the mailbox exists. A good list labels these instead of calling them valid.
• Rent or own? Find out if you can mail the list more than once, and for how long.
• Who is named? "Contact name" can mean the owner, an associate or whoever answered the phone. Ask which.