An oral and maxillofacial radiologist is a dentist who specializes in producing and interpreting images — X-rays, cone-beam CT and other scans — of the mouth, face and jaw, using them to diagnose and manage diseases and conditions of that region.
It is one of the 12 dental specialties the ADA's National Commission currently recognizes.
The path runs through dental school, a state dental license and a CODA-accredited residency of at least 24 months, and some of the work — reading scans for other offices — happens remotely.
What an oral and maxillofacial radiologist does
The ADA's National Commission on Recognition of Dental Specialties and Certifying Boards — the body that recognizes dental specialties — defines oral and maxillofacial radiology as the specialty concerned with the production and interpretation of images and data produced by all modalities of radiant energy that are used for the diagnosis and management of diseases, disorders and conditions of the oral and maxillofacial region.
Plainly: this is the dental specialty that reads imaging.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics describes the work the same way in its Occupational Outlook Handbook — oral and maxillofacial radiologists diagnose diseases in the head and neck through the use of imaging technologies.
A general dentist uses imaging in the course of diagnosing and treating the case in the chair; the specialist's defined job is the interpretation itself, across all the modalities the definition names rather than one machine.
The work splits in two.
A practice acquires the images — a panoramic series, a cone-beam CT scan, whatever the case calls for — and sends them to the radiologist, who produces an interpretation the treating dentist uses for diagnosis and treatment planning.
The report is the radiologist's product; in this arrangement the dental treatment itself stays with the treating clinician.
That division is also why a radiologist can serve a practice without ever working in it.
Oral and maxillofacial radiology is one of the 12 dental specialties the National Commission currently recognizes, and the ADA's Code of Ethics names it among the 12 — alongside endodontics, oral and maxillofacial surgery, orthodontics, pediatric dentistry and the rest.
Cosmetic dentistry is not among them.
For what each of the 12 treats and how they compare, see our guide to the dental specialties.
How remote CBCT reading works
Nothing in the specialty's definition ties the reading to one building.
A practice acquires the scan, exports it, and a specialist somewhere else interprets it and sends back a report — the image moves, the interpretation comes back.
That is the shape of remote CBCT reading, and it is the arrangement that lets a practice get specialist-level reads without a specialist on site.
State law is where this gets concrete.
South Carolina's teledentistry law (2026 Act No. 210, effective May 19, 2026) defines teledentistry to include the asynchronous transmission — store-and-forward — of a patient's dental information from an originating site to a licensee at a distant site.
That is the technical shape of a remote scan read: images sent now, interpreted later, report returned.
The same law attaches a condition worth knowing: before providing teledentistry services in South Carolina, a licensee must confirm that the patient is located in a jurisdiction where the provider is licensed or otherwise authorized to practice, and document the patient's location in the record.
Read it closely, though — the statute is written around care delivered to a patient, and how a state applies it to a read rendered for a referring dentist is not spelled out in it.
That is exactly the kind of question to put to the board rather than assume.
Beyond South Carolina, we found no multi-state source that settles how states treat cross-border reads, so treat the licensing question as one to confirm directly with each state dental board involved.
On money: no published source we found gives per-scan or per-read fees for remote CBCT interpretation, so we have no benchmark figure to quote — pricing is a private contract term between a practice and its reader.
Remote-reading rules are state law
Where oral radiologists work
This is a small specialty, and its size frames every setting it works in.
ADA's Health Policy Institute counted 225 professionally active dentists holding a certificate or degree in oral and maxillofacial radiology in 2025, up from 190 in 2022.
Note how HPI counts: a dentist appears under every specialty credential they hold, so someone with two specialty credentials is counted in both.
Dental schools and residency programs.
Eight CODA-accredited oral and maxillofacial radiology programs operated in 2025-26, with 24 first-year residents, 58 residents enrolled in total, and 17 graduates in 2025.
A residency cannot run without faculty to teach and supervise its residents, so academia is a structural part of a field this size.
Hospital-based imaging.
The specialty's own training standard points at the hospital: CODA requires OMR residents to spend at least three months, or the part-time equivalent, in an active, hospital-based radiology department or other similar facility.
Medical-radiology exposure is built into how the specialty trains.
Practices and remote reading services.
The referral model described above — scans acquired in one office, interpreted somewhere else — works whether the reader sits in a university, a group, or a home office reading exported CBCT studies.
What our sources don't count is how many oral radiologists work in each of these settings, so treat these as the models that exist, not a ranking of which is biggest.
How to become an oral and maxillofacial radiologist
The path runs through dentistry's standard route and then branches.
Steps one and two are the dentist's own: by the National Commission's definition, an educationally qualified specialist has completed dental school and the advanced residency and been licensed by a state dental board to practice dentistry.
The dental degree (a DDS or DMD) and the state license are the foundation covered in our dentist career guide; the mechanics of residencies and boards are covered in dental residency & board certification.
Step three is the specialty residency.
CODA requires an oral and maxillofacial radiology program to run at least 24 months full-time or its equivalent — an accreditation floor, not a typical length: the average accredited program ran 28.7 months in the 2025-26 survey year.
Inside the residency, CODA requires at least three months, or the part-time equivalent, in an active, hospital-based radiology department or other similar facility, so the medical-imaging rotation is a requirement, not an elective.
The intake is small, and so is the money side.
The 2025-26 CODA/ADA HPI survey counted 8 accredited programs, 24 first-year residents, 58 residents enrolled in total, and 17 graduates in 2025 — and HPI's application counts tally an applicant once per program applied to, so they cannot be read as numbers of applicants and no acceptance rate can be computed from them.
On cost: across the programs charging them, first-year tuition and fees averaged $19,992, and first-year stipends averaged $35,392 across the programs that pay them.
The individual accredited programs are listed in the oral and maxillofacial radiology program directory.
Certification is the unusual part: this is a recognized specialty with no National Commission-recognized certifying board.
The Commission recognizes 11 national specialty certifying boards, accepts no more than one board per specialty, and oral and maxillofacial radiology has none among them.
That may change — ADA News reported on September 30, 2026 that the American Certifying Board of Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology had applied to be recognized as the specialty's national certifying board, with public comments due by 5 p.m. CST November 13, 2026.
Until a recognition decision lands, nobody is a National Commission-recognized, board-certified oral and maxillofacial radiologist, so treat any certification claim you encounter accordingly.
One more, state-level wrinkle: specialist titling itself can carry a state requirement.
In South Carolina, a dentist needs a special license from the Board of Dentistry (S.C. Code § 40-15-220) before holding out as a specialist in, limiting practice to, or giving special attention to an ADA-recognized specialty area.
How your own state handles specialist titling may differ — confirm with your state dental board.
Oral radiologist pay and jobs
Start with what does not exist: no federal wage series tracks oral and maxillofacial radiologists on their own.
BLS publishes separate dentist wage series only for general dentists, oral and maxillofacial surgeons, orthodontists and prosthodontists; every other dental specialty — this one included — falls into the residual group "Dentists, all other specialists" (code 29-1029), which O*NET defines as all dentists not listed separately.
That group's median annual wage was $224,990 in May 2025.
Use it as context, never as a quote: the same group covers endodontists, periodontists, pediatric dentists, oral pathologists and the other specialties without a series of their own, so it is a proxy group, not an oral radiologist salary.
For orientation from the same May 2025 table, oral and maxillofacial surgeons had a median of $352,220 and general dentists $170,950.
Two reading notes: BLS's OEWS wage estimates leave out the self-employed and owners and partners in unincorporated firms, so practice owners in any specialty sit outside these figures, and the grouped median says nothing about how remote-reading work is priced — our research found no published benchmark for per-read fees.
Which dental specialty pays the most explains the grouping and ranks the series BLS does track side by side.
The jobs market is sized to the field: 225 credential-holders counted nationally in 2025 and 17 residency graduates that same year.
A market that small is worth searching around, not just within — read specialist listings for imaging-heavy roles, check academic postings from the eight residency programs, and use residency and professional networks, rather than searching only for the specialty name.
When you are ready to look, browse dentist jobs.