A maxillofacial prosthodontist is a prosthodontist who restores and replaces oral and facial structures with artificial substitutes — CODA's training standard frames the work around craniofacial defects from disease, trauma or congenital causes and around patients receiving surgical, radiation or drug therapies.
The standalone route adds a 12-month training step after an accredited prosthodontics program; an integrated route folds the training into the residency.
Pay is reported under the prosthodontist median — $311,180 in May 2025 — with no separate maxillofacial split.
What does a maxillofacial prosthodontist do?
Maxillofacial prosthetics is a branch of prosthodontics, not a separately recognized specialty.
The ADA's National Commission on Recognition of Dental Specialties and Certifying Boards defines prosthodontics as the specialty of diagnosis, treatment planning, rehabilitation and maintenance of patients with missing or deficient teeth and/or oral and maxillofacial tissues, using biocompatible substitutes.
CODA's accreditation standards then define the branch within it as "the restoration and/or replacement of stomatognathic and associated craniofacial structures by artificial substitutes."
Those two anatomical terms mark out the work.
Stomatognathic refers to the structures of the mouth and jaws; craniofacial to the skull and face.
A maxillofacial prosthodontist therefore builds replacements that sit inside the mouth and replacements that sit outside it — artificial substitutes for structures the patient is missing, whether intra-oral or extra-oral facial prostheses.
The definitions also carry the day-to-day.
CODA's required instruction covers defects of the craniofacial complex — structures missing or deficient because of disease, trauma or congenital development — and prosthetic care for patients receiving surgical, radiation or drug therapies.
For the specialty this branch sits inside — the training, the restorative work and the career — see the prosthodontist career guide.
The rest of this page stays on what the maxillofacial step adds to that career.
Where do maxillofacial prosthodontists work?
CODA's required instruction describes the patients before it describes any workplace.
The standards cover intra-oral and extra-oral prosthetic care for defects of the craniofacial complex resulting from disease, trauma and developmental or congenital processes, and for patients receiving surgical, radiation or drug therapies that impact the health of the craniofacial structures.
That patient list runs from developmental and congenital defects to patients receiving surgical, radiation or drug therapies.
What it does not give is an employment split — our research found no employer or practice-setting breakdown for this sub-specialty.
The federal wage series counts prosthodontists as one occupation, and the workforce counts below cover prosthodontics as a whole, so any page stating a hospital-versus-office share for this role is guessing.
What can be counted is the field's size at entry and in the workforce.
In 2025–26, 8 accredited maxillofacial prosthetics programs took 17 first-year residents, with 18 graduates counted in 2025, per the CODA/ADA HPI Survey of Advanced Dental Education.
Across the parent specialty, ADA HPI counted 3,568 professionally active dentists holding a prosthodontics certificate or degree in 2025, and NCRDSCB counted 1,081 active board-certified prosthodontics diplomates as of December 31, 2025 — neither series separates a maxillofacial-only count.
The territory shares a name with a surgical specialty, but the work the CODA standard describes is prosthetic care for patients receiving surgical, radiation or drug therapies — not surgery itself.
The surgical career is on the oral surgeon career guide.
Hospital credentials are set hospital by hospital
The fellowship step: a 12-month program after prosthodontics
The standalone route is sequential.
CODA requires a 12-month advanced dental education program in maxillofacial prosthetics to be preceded by successful completion of an accredited prosthodontics program — and a prosthodontics program itself has a CODA minimum of 34 months.
The integrated route folds the maxillofacial training into the specialty residency instead: a prosthodontics program with integrated maxillofacial training must encompass a minimum of 45 months, against the 34-month floor for prosthodontics alone.
A note on vocabulary: "fellowship" is the shorthand this page uses because readers search for it, but it is not CODA's word — the standards define a 12-month advanced dental education program in maxillofacial prosthetics.
Both labels describe the same step; the accreditation text is the authoritative one.
It is a small cohort.
In 2025–26 there were 8 programs, 17 first-year residents, 17 residents enrolled in total and 18 graduates in 2025, per the CODA/ADA HPI survey — against 48 prosthodontics programs, 165 first-year residents and 146 graduates the same year.
The survey's average program length for maxillofacial prosthetics was 12 months, the same length CODA's standards define.
Everything upstream of this step — dental school, licensure, matching a prosthodontics residency — is on the how to become a prosthodontist page.
For the programs themselves, DentistryHires keeps a maxillofacial prosthetics program directory; this page stays on the career.
What the training year costs — and what it pays
The prosthodontics residency years before the maxillofacial step are largely tuition-bearing: in 2025–26, the 33 of 48 prosthodontics programs that charged tuition averaged $52,527 in first-year tuition and fees, and the 26 that paid stipends averaged $37,190 for the first year (CODA/ADA HPI survey).
The maxillofacial year inverts that picture.
In the same survey, no maxillofacial prosthetics program charged tuition, and 6 of 9 paid a first-year stipend that averaged $78,188.
The two program counts on this page come from different survey tables: 8 in the program-count table, 9 in the tuition-and-stipend table.
Read the figures with the survey's own limits: the averages include only the programs that charge or pay, and the two steps' program sets differ — 26 paying prosthodontics programs against 6 paying maxillofacial ones — so individual programs vary widely.
Confirm terms — tuition, stipend, length — with each program rather than planning around an average.
Maxillofacial prosthodontist salary: what BLS reports
There is no maxillofacial split in the federal wage data this page draws on.
BLS reports prosthodontists' median annual wage as $311,180 (May 2025), and that specialty-wide figure is the closest federal number — the agency does not break prosthodontists' wages out by sub-specialty work, so a maxillofacial-focused prosthodontist's pay is not separately measured in BLS data.
Prosthodontists are one of only four dentist occupations with their own BLS wage series.
In the same release, oral and maxillofacial surgeons' median was $352,220, orthodontists' $289,140 and general dentists' $170,950.
Every specialty without its own series — endodontics, periodontics, pediatric dentistry and the rest — falls into the "dentists, all other specialists" group, median $224,990.
Ranked, that puts prosthodontists second of the four named series — above orthodontists and general dentists, below oral and maxillofacial surgeons.
What the sub-specialty step does to that number, up or down, is not published anywhere this page could verify.
For the specialty-wide picture — the figures in full and what the BLS series does and does not include — see the prosthodontist salary guide.
What isn't published about maxillofacial prosthetics careers
Four gaps matter if you are researching this career, and each is a place where other pages tend to invent numbers:
- No federal wage figure we found separates maxillofacial prosthetics from prosthodontics — the $311,180 median is specialty-wide.
- Neither workforce count cited here isolates the sub-specialty — the 3,568 HPI count and the 1,081 diplomate count both cover prosthodontics as a whole.
- Our research found no employer or practice-setting breakdown for the role, so hospital-and-cancer-center employment shares you see elsewhere are unverified.
- Program tuition and stipends are survey averages across a small number of programs, not fixed amounts.
Where a gap touches a real decision — a program's terms, a hospital role's requirements, an offer's structure — the reliable source is the program, the facility or the employer itself.
On the employer side the questions run the other way — how to read the credential, what the market context is, how to structure an offer.
See hiring a prosthodontist for that side of the desk.
This page is general career information, not clinical, legal or financial advice. Verify training requirements against current CODA and NCRDSCB sources, and program terms with each program.