Yes.
Demand for dentists is projected to grow: BLS projects dentist employment to grow 6 percent from 2025 to 2035, faster than the 3 percent average for all occupations, with about 4,800 openings a year.
Demand is not evenly spread — HRSA data counts about 7,200 designated dental shortage areas, and the five largest employers posted 57.4% of dentist listings in DentistryHires' October 22, 2026 snapshot.
Here is what the numbers say, and where the demand sits.
The short answer: what BLS projects for dentists
The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment of dentists to grow 6 percent from 2025 to 2035 — faster than the 3 percent average it projects across all occupations.
On top of that growth, BLS projects about 4,800 openings for dentists each year, on average, over the decade, many of them to replace workers who change occupations or retire.
The base is large.
BLS counted about 161,400 dentist jobs in 2025: 141,900 general dentists, 7,100 orthodontists, 5,800 dentists in its “all other specialists” grouping, 5,600 oral and maxillofacial surgeons and 1,000 prosthodontists.
The general dentist line — the profession's core — is projected to rise from 141,900 to 150,000 by 2035, an increase of 8,100 jobs.
Where the work happens: by BLS's 2025 breakdown, 78% of dentist jobs were in offices of dentists and 12% were self-employed workers; government (excluding state and local education and hospitals), outpatient care centers and offices of physicians each accounted for 2%.
On pay: BLS reports a median annual wage of $176,110 for all dentists as of May 2025, a figure covering the five detailed dentist occupations combined.
One caveat before quoting it: the survey behind BLS's wage estimates excludes the self-employed — owners and partners in unincorporated firms — which matters in dentistry, where self-employed workers are 12% of dentist jobs.
The dentist salary page carries the full wage data.
If you're mapping the career itself rather than the market for it, the dentist careers hub covers the role and the path into it.
What's driving demand for dentists
BLS attributes the projected demand partly to demography: larger numbers of older people require dental services, and each generation keeps more of its natural teeth than the one before it.
An older population that still has its teeth is a patient population that needs care for longer — the demand case here is structural, not a one-time treatment wave.
The second driver is replacement.
Dentists who retired in 2024 did so at an average age of 68.7 years — four years later than retirees in 2001, according to ADA HPI.
Dentists are working longer than they used to, but with HPI counting more than 200,000 dentists in the U.S., the profession carries enough retirement churn to keep replacing people.
Supply is the counterweight.
HPI says the workforce is near the end of a retirement surge among baby boomer dentists, and projects that dentist supply will increase through 2040, driven partly by new dental schools; growth in the dentist count has stabilized as that temporary surge plays out.
Read alongside BLS's projection, the picture is a profession growing steadily on both sides — demand and supply — rather than one with an empty chair in every market.
These forces show up employer-side too.
The dental staffing shortage (employers) guide covers what the same market looks like from the hiring side of the chair.
Shortage areas vs. saturated markets: where demand is real
Aggregate growth says nothing about geography, and geography is where this market gets uneven.
HRSA's shortage-area data, as fetched in October 2026, counts about 7,200 designated dental health professional shortage areas — a calculated count that deduplicates HPSA IDs with “Designated” status — including 1,347 FQHC designations, 932 IHS, tribal and urban Indian designations, 480 correctional facilities and 1,900 rural health clinics.
Supply ratios tell the same story from the other end.
ADA HPI put the national ratio at 59.5 dentists per 100,000 people in 2024, ranging from 40.2 in Arkansas to 103.2 in the District of Columbia.
Day-to-day competition looks very different at the top of that range than at the bottom — which is why “is there demand for dentists” is a state-level and even town-level question, not a national one.
What the published data doesn't give is a saturation ranking.
The BLS projections and HPI's state ratios presented here don't identify oversaturated metros; that judgment takes local evidence — how many practices are advertising in the area, what active-license counts show, and how listings compete on pay.
Treat any city-level “oversaturated” list you run across as someone's opinion unless it shows a methodology.
Many of the designated-shortage settings are safety-net employers — community health centers, tribal and IHS facilities, correctional systems and rural clinics.
The public health dentists guide covers those settings and the loan-repayment programs tied to serving shortage areas.
DSO hiring: who is employing dentists
The structural shift in who hires dentists with the clearest numbers behind it is the rise of dental service organizations.
ADA HPI reports that the share of U.S. dentists affiliated with a DSO more than doubled since 2015, reaching 16.1% in 2024.
The shift concentrates at the start of careers.
In HPI's 2024 data, 27% of dentists less than 10 years out of dental school were affiliated with a DSO, versus 9% of those more than 25 years out.
Solo practice is the mirror image: 15% of the early-career group practiced solo, versus 48% of dentists at least 25 years out.
Put together, a dentist less than a decade out of school is nearly twice as likely to be DSO-affiliated as to practice solo.
Neither model is better; they're different trades.
Group employment brings structure, systems and scale, while solo ownership brings control and the ownership economics.
What HPI's split shows is where each model sits by career stage: solo practice is far more common among dentists at least 25 years out (48%) than among those less than 10 years out (15%), and in the early-career group DSO affiliation (27%) outruns solo practice (15%).
Outlook by specialty: where projected growth sits
The projection is built around general practice.
General dentists — 141,900 of about 161,400 dentist jobs in BLS's 2025 count — are projected to grow from 141,900 to 150,000 by 2035, an increase of 8,100 jobs, while the grouped “dentists, all other specialists” line is projected to grow only about 1%.
The 2025 job counts give the specialties their market sizes: 7,100 orthodontists, 5,600 oral and maxillofacial surgeons and 1,000 prosthodontists are counted separately, with the other specialties grouped in the 5,800-strong “all other specialists” line.
Set against 141,900 general dentists, the specialist occupations are small slices of the profession.
What the projections don't do is rank specialties.
At this level of detail, the published numbers say that general practice carries the decade's growth and the grouped specialist line stays close to flat; the sourced projections cover only those two lines and don't break growth out specialty by specialty.
A dentist weighing a specialty against general practice is weighing training length, referral flow and patient demand, not reading a specialty-by-specialty growth table.
Where the jobs are now: the live listings market
Projections describe a decade; listings describe this month.
On October 22, 2026, DentistryHires listed 1,350 open dentist jobs from 315 employers across 49 states and the District of Columbia.
The feed is current, not residual: 462 of those 1,350 listings — 34.2% — had been posted in the previous 30 days.
Concentration is the notable feature: the five largest employers posted 57.4% of dentist listings that day.
For a job seeker, that shape argues for watching the feed rather than reacting to it.
With a third of listings posted inside the previous month and a handful of employers accounting for most postings, the live dentist jobs feed is where the current market actually shows up.
Read every figure as a dated snapshot