How to Verify a Dental License in Colorado Before You Hire

Under C.R.S. § 12-220-104, the board that licenses dentists, dental therapists and dental hygienists in Colorado is the Colorado Dental Board.

It was created in 1889 as the State Board of Dental Examiners, took its current name in 2013, and sits within Colorado's Division of Professions and Occupations (DPO).

DPO matters to your hiring workflow because Colorado's online license verification is a DPO system.

This page is the Colorado instalment of our guide to how to verify a dental license.

Two Colorado specifics shape what verification means here.

First, how someone earns a Colorado license is a separate question, owned by our guide to dentist licensure requirements in Colorado; this page is about confirming the license or permit a candidate actually holds.

Second, Colorado defines dental assistants in the Dental Practice Act but creates no assistant license, so the assistant section below works differently from the dentist and hygienist ones.

Colorado's online verification is DPO's "Verify a Colorado Professional or Business License" tool.

The site is intended for individual searches only, as it states outright, so run one search per credential.

Pull the record yourself rather than relying on a screenshot or photocopy they supplied.

DPO says the licensee data behind the verification site is updated nightly, so what you see is close to current.

Save a dated copy of what the record shows anyway; it is what your file needs if a credential question surfaces later.

Match the credential type to the job you are hiring for.

DPO's downloadable roster lists Dentist, Dental Therapist and Academic Dentist as credential types, alongside temporary dentist permits, so a candidate on a temporary credential holds a different credential type from a fully licensed one.

If your new associate will cover sedation cases, catch it here: Deep Sedation/General Anesthesia, Local Anesthesia, Minimal Sedation and Moderate Sedation all appear on the roster as credential types in their own right.

Verify the permit as its own record rather than assuming the dentist license carries it.

Hygienists run through the same tool.

Dental Hygienist is its own credential type on the roster, alongside temporary hygienist permits, and the permit logic from the dentist section carries over: Local Anesthesia and the sedation permits are listed as credential types in their own right.

Treat a hygienist's claimed anesthesia or sedation privilege as a separate verification, not as part of the license.

What a verified Colorado hygienist may do chairside, and what each duty requires, is scope detail our guide to dental hygienist requirements in Colorado keeps current.

Confirm the credential here; confirm the duties you schedule there.

Start with the negative: Colorado does not license or register dental assistants.

The Dental Practice Act defines a dental assistant as any person, other than a licensed dentist, dental therapist or dental hygienist, who may be assigned dental tasks, and it creates no assistant license.

The state's credential roster agrees from the other side: no dental assistant credential type appears on it.

A resume line claiming a "Colorado dental assistant license" is worth a polite question.

What the state does instead is set boundaries.

Under C.R.S. § 12-220-501(3)(a), a Colorado dental assistant may not diagnose, plan treatment, give local anesthesia, scale, root plane, perform soft tissue curettage or do periodontal probing, among the duties the statute lists.

What an assistant may do includes administering and monitoring nitrous oxide under a licensed dentist's direct supervision and following Board rules (C.R.S. § 12-220-501(3)(c)).

Verification therefore works differently for this role.

A national credential such as DANB's CDA can be confirmed on DANB's own Verify Credentials tool, which confirms DANB credentials only, not a Colorado authorization.

X-ray training is the open question: who sets radiography training rules for Colorado assistants was not verifiable from a primary source when this page was researched, so confirm any radiography certificate directly with the Colorado Dental Board before you rely on it.

The fuller picture of the role, including what assistants may do and how Colorado practices structure the work, is on our guide to dental assistant requirements in Colorado.

For discipline, the detail lives in DPO's downloadable rosters.

DPO says those lists include disciplinary information for licensees with a public action on their record: the case number, the public action description, the effective date and the end date.

If a candidate's record shows a public action, those are the details to ask about.

Board discipline also follows the dentist.

State dental boards must report to the National Practitioner Data Bank any action based on professional competence or conduct that revokes, suspends or restricts a dentist's license, censures, reprimands or places the dentist on probation, or accepts a license surrender, and the NPDB's rules expressly count a state Board of Dentistry among its reporters.

Whether your practice can query the NPDB directly is its own eligibility question; our guide to NPDB queries covers who qualifies and how a candidate's self-query works.

For a candidate who has practiced in other states, run each issuing board's own lookup: the Colorado tool verifies Colorado credentials, and each out-of-state license is verified the same way on the board that issued it.

Know what to capture: California's DCA license search, for example, shows whether a license is current, expired, or has been subject to discipline such as suspension or revocation — the status and discipline information worth recording from any issuing board.

Save what you ran, not just what you concluded.

A dated screenshot or PDF of each lookup result, the credential types you matched against the role, and the name of whoever ran the check is enough to reconstruct it later.

The state tool is meant for individual searches, so run the checks one at a time and document each.

Anchor the re-check to the record rather than to a calendar habit: once you know a credential's expiration, re-run the lookup ahead of it and whenever the person's role changes.

A license check is also only one screen; our guide to OIG exclusion checks covers a second one — whether a candidate is excluded from federal health care programs — and when it applies.

And before the contract that follows the offer: if the associate you are hiring is leaving another practice, read our guide to non-competes in Colorado before you draft anything.