How to Verify a Dental License in Georgia Before You Hire

The Georgia Board of Dentistry licenses Georgia's dentists and dental hygienists.

Its “Verify a License” link goes to the board's online verification search, which is where a Georgia license check starts.

The board licenses people, not businesses: it does not license dental service organizations, clinics, offices or any other non-person entity.

If you're hiring into a group practice or a DSO-backed office, that means each clinician gets verified individually — there's no entity-level license to lean on.

The search's license-type list covers the licenses you'll check and the board's permits: Dentist, Dental Hygienist, Conscious Sedation Permit, Enteral/Inhalation Conscious Sedation, General Anesthesia Permit and Provisional Conscious Sedation Permit.

Permits are searchable records in their own right, not paper certificates you take on faith.

Licensure — what a candidate had to do to earn these credentials — is a different question, covered in our guide to dentist licensure requirements in Georgia.

And if you hire across state lines, the full walkthrough of how to verify a dental license is the place to start.

Get the candidate's full name and license number before you start.

Georgia's search runs three ways — by last name, by last and first name, or by license number — and it supports asterisk wildcards.

The license number is the cleanest input when the name is a common one; a wildcard like Smi* catches spelling variants when all you have is a name.

Run the search under the license type that matches the person — Dentist for an associate — and confirm the result before the start date, not after the working interview.

The same search covers the sedation and anesthesia permit types: if your associate will administer sedation under your protocol, verify the specific permit your protocol relies on rather than assuming the license includes it.

One quirk to know before you build a spreadsheet: the search page states it is intended for individual verification only.

Verify one candidate at a time, and save a result for each person you check.

Hygienists verify on the same search.

The Georgia Board of Dentistry licenses dental hygienists, and Dental Hygienist is one of the license types the search covers — so the same name or license-number check you run for an associate applies, ideally during screening and again before the first day on the schedule.

The detail to pin down is anything beyond the license.

The sedation and anesthesia permit types above are the permit records in the search we verified; if a hygienist candidate tells you they hold a permit or certificate on top of the license — anything your schedule depends on — get its exact name and verify it the same way, or confirm it with the board if the search doesn't surface it.

What the license itself requires, and what a Georgia hygienist may do under it, is scope rather than verification: see dental hygienist requirements in Georgia.

Georgia has no dental assistant license to look up.

The verification search's license-type list has no dental assistant type, and the state's expanded duty dental assistant credential is a certificate issued by the sponsor of the accredited course — not a Board license (Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. 150-9-.02).

That makes assistant verification a paperwork step.

Ask every expanded-duty candidate for the course certificate(s), and check the sponsor and dates against what they told you before you extend the offer.

The record-keeping is on you once they're hired: the employer of an expanded duty dental assistant must keep a copy of the assistant's course certificate(s) readily available in the dental office (Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. 150-9-.02(3)).

File them where you can produce them on request, not in a scanner backlog.

X-ray duty is the other credential to document.

A Georgia dental assistant may place and expose radiographs after completing the training required by Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. 111-8-90-.04 (Rule 150-9-.01).

Under that rule, the x-ray registrant — your practice — must give each operator at least six hours of radiation instruction, beginning within 30 days of employment and finishing within 90 days, and keep a training record for each operator.

So the assistant checklist is short: collect the certificates on day one, file them where they're readily available, and calendar the x-ray instruction so it starts inside 30 days and ends inside 90.

What an assistant may do once trained is scope, not verification — our dental assistant requirements in Georgia page owns it.

A clean search result isn't the whole discipline picture.

The board publishes its public actions separately, as monthly Public Board Orders lists in PDF, alongside a list of unlicensed-practice cease and desist orders.

Search the current list for your candidate's name — and for a candidate you're serious about, work back through prior months — the board posts the lists month by month, so an action from an earlier month may sit in that month's list rather than the newest one.

Out-of-state discipline is a separate check.

Each state's board keeps its own records, so a Georgia search tells you nothing about a license a candidate holds or held in another state — run that state's board lookup too.

Board actions also feed the National Practitioner Data Bank: state dental boards must report actions based on professional competence or conduct that revoke, suspend or restrict a dentist's license, censures, reprimands or place a dentist on probation, or accept a license surrender — and boards of dentistry count as NPDB reporters under the federal rules.

Whether a practice can query the NPDB directly depends on narrow eligibility rules; our guide to NPDB queries covers who qualifies and how a candidate's self-query works.

A license check isn't a federal exclusion screen either — that's its own step.

See OIG exclusion checks for when it matters for a dental practice.

Verification only counts if you can show what you checked.

For each clinical hire, keep:

• The dated search result. Screenshot or print the record you matched and note the day you ran it. If the page shows a “last updated” date, capture that too.
• Permit details for sedation roles — the permit type you verified and the name you matched it to.
• Expanded duty course certificate(s) for assistants — Georgia requires these to be readily available in the office while the person works for you.
• The x-ray training record for each assistant operator — six hours of instruction, inside the 30- and 90-day windows.
• Notes from the public orders check — which monthly list you searched, and when.

Re-run the check when the job changes, not just at hire: adding sedation or new assistant duties creates a new credential to verify.

And keep verification separate from contracting — a clean license doesn't tell you what your agreement can restrict.

When you get to the offer for an associate, our page on non-competes in Georgia covers what restrictive covenants Georgia lets a practice enforce.