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How This List Works

Outside California

Each state's dental offices are grouped so one practice with six dentists appears once, with the dentists named on its page. Health centers are marked only when the listing's phone number, or its street address and name, matches an active site in the federal Health Resources and Services Administration list. Health centers have to offer a sliding fee to people on low incomes, which is why they come first on every town page.

What Medicaid covers for adults comes from the American Dental Association's survey of state Medicaid programs, and each state page names it. Children are covered for dental care in every state under the federal EPSDT rule.

An office gets a page of its own when there is more to say than a phone number: a health center, or an office with its own website, published hours and at least ten reviews. The rest are listed on their town page with their phone number.

What We Check

Every name on this site is checked against the list of enrolled Denti-Cal providers that the state publishes itself. An office that passes carries a confirmed tag. An office that does not passes nothing off as confirmed, and its page says so. Nothing here is bought, and nothing here is guessed.

What a record cannot tell you is the part you actually care about. It does not say what a visit costs, what treatment the office does in house, or whether anyone can see you this month. So we pick up the phone.

What We Check by Phone

We call these offices. Not a robot and not a web form. A person on our team rings the front desk and asks the three things a record cannot tell you.

• What will this cost me? What you pay with Medi-Cal, and what you pay without it, including whether they charge by what you earn.
• What do you actually do here? Cleanings, fillings, root canals, dentures, pulling teeth, children, emergencies. Plenty of offices send half of that somewhere else and it is better to know before you go.
• When could you see someone? Whether they are taking new Denti-Cal patients, and roughly how long the wait is.

It is the slow part, and it is the part that makes the difference between a phone number and a real appointment.

Offices change though. Staff leave, books fill, a practice stops taking the coverage in March and nobody updates anything. So call before you travel, and if you would rather we did it, ask below and we will call for you and ring you back with the answer.

How the Confirmed Tag Is Earned

The state publishes a list of dentists enrolled in the Denti-Cal fee for service program. We match our records to that list by provider number, never by name, because names repeat and addresses move. A match gets the green tag and the year the dentist joined the program. No match means no tag.

That is why the number is 18182 and not 18460. It would be easy to tag every office and easier still to say every dentist here takes the coverage. Both would be wrong on hundreds of pages, and the person finding out would be someone sitting in a waiting room being turned away.

What We Leave Out on Purpose

Some of the addresses in the source records are homes, not offices. Where an address looks residential we publish the city and hold back the street. If your address is wrong or you want it gone, say so and it goes.

We do not publish ratings or reviews. We have no way to collect them honestly at this size, and an invented one is worse than none.

How Current It Is

The state list was checked on 2026-10-24. Dental offices join and leave the program all year, so a tag tells you what was true on that date. Calling tells you what is true today.

How To Check Us

The short answer. Free Dentist Office is an independent list of free and low cost dentists. It is not run by any state agency. It is supported by EHR1, which makes records and compliance software for practices. No office pays to be listed or to rank higher, and there is nothing to buy here.

How Offices Are Ordered

California city, county, language and care pages sort like this.

1. Dentists confirmed on the state Denti-Cal provider list come first.
2. General dentists come before specialists.
3. Then last name, A to Z.

Town pages in every other state sort like this.

1. Health centers come first, because they have to offer a sliding fee to people on low incomes.
2. Then offices with the strongest public review record. The score weighs the star rating against how many reviews stand behind it, so a 4.9 from 300 reviews sits above a 5.0 from two.
3. Then name, A to Z.

Does Anyone Pay to Rank?

No. There is no paid placement and no sponsored spot. An office can claim its page for free, and claiming it does not move it up.

What the Tags Mean

• Denti-Cal confirmed. The dentist's provider number matched the state's list of enrolled Denti-Cal providers on the date we checked.
• Call to confirm. No match on that list. The office may still take Denti-Cal, so call and ask.
• Health center, sliding fee. The office matches an active federally funded health center site.
• Temporarily closed. The office's own listing says it is closed for now.

How to Report a Wrong Listing

Call us at (213) 325-3418, or use the page for offices to fix an entry, add a missing office or take one off the list. Tell us the office name, the city and what is wrong. Corrections go in at the next build, and a removal needs no reason.

Ask Us to Call an Office for You

Tell us which office and what you need to know. We call, then we call you back. It is free and we do not pass your details to anyone.