How to Verify a Dental License in Michigan Before You Hire

Dentistry in Michigan is regulated by the Michigan Board of Dentistry together with the Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs (LARA), under the Public Health Code and the Dentistry General Rules.

For verification purposes, the practical door is LARA's Bureau of Professional Licensing, whose free online license search is the tool this page walks through.

The search's license-type list doubles as a map of the Michigan dental credentials you can verify there: Dentist, Dental Hygienist, Dental Assistant and Dental Therapist, alongside clinical-academic, nonclinical-academic and educational limited licenses.

What is not a license in Michigan matters most when you hire assistants — one assistant category is unlicensed by rule, as the assistant section below explains.

This page is the Michigan part of our guide to how to verify a dental license.

How someone earns a Michigan license in the first place is a separate question, owned by our guide to dentist licensure requirements in Michigan; this page is about confirming the license or credential a candidate actually holds.

Michigan's free online license search — the Bureau of Professional Licensing's "Search for Licensee" page, served through LARA's Accela portal — shows whether someone is licensed, the license issue date and expiration date, and any disciplinary action.

Run it yourself rather than accepting a screenshot the candidate supplied, and save a dated copy of what it returns.

Match the license type to the job before you rely on it: the dentist records include clinical-academic, nonclinical-academic and educational limited licenses, which are different credentials from a dentist's regular license.

Read the status line closely, too — the lookup notes that some licenses with a "Temporary Foreign Waiver" or "Temporary Emergency" status were issued during the COVID-19 emergency and become void despite the expiration date shown.

Sedation is the qualification the license alone won't settle.

Michigan's dentistry rules (R 338.11601-11602) bar a general dentist who does not hold a dental anesthesiology or oral surgery specialty license from administering general anesthesia or deep, moderate or minimal sedation in the office unless the dentist meets the rules' training and competency requirements — and no separate sedation-permit license type appears on the search's license-type list.

Michigan may issue a specialty license in dental anesthesiology; whether the search returns specialty licenses as their own records we could not confirm, so ask the dentist for the training documentation before you schedule sedation cases.

Prescribing or dispensing controlled substances adds one more record: Michigan requires a state controlled substances license for anyone who prescribes or dispenses a controlled substance in the state, renewed together with the professional license (MCL 333.7303).

Confirm it is current rather than assuming the dental license carries it, and check with LARA if the paperwork is unclear.

Hygienists verify in the same search: Dental Hygienist is one of the license types on the lookup, and the record shows the same fields — licensure status, issue and expiration dates, and any disciplinary action.

Treat any claimed authorization beyond the license as its own verification.

Our research confirmed the hygienist license itself but did not surface a separate Michigan list of hygienist permits, so if a candidate says they hold a permit or certificate for a particular duty, ask which document shows it and confirm anything unclear with the Board of Dentistry before you schedule around it.

What a verified hygienist may do chairside is scope detail our guide to dental hygienist requirements in Michigan keeps current.

Confirm the credential here; schedule the duties against the scope there.

Michigan licenses registered dental assistants (RDAs): the Board of Dentistry's licensing guide says the RDA license type allows the holder to engage in the practice of dental assisting.

An RDA candidate should therefore appear in the lookup under the Dental Assistant license type — verify it like any other license.

An assistant who doesn't appear may well be legitimate: Michigan's dentistry rules define the unregistered dental auxiliary (UDA) as unlicensed, so a UDA has no record in the state lookup.

Establish which person you have — RDA or UDA — and verify accordingly, instead of treating an empty result as a red flag on its own.

There is no separate state x-ray permit to check for assistants either: under the rules (R 338.11411, Table 1), a UDA must successfully complete a board-approved dental radiography course before operating dental radiographic equipment.

Course completion is not a state-issued credential and will not show in the lookup, so ask for the course certificate and keep a copy in the employee's file.

What each assistant category may do once verified is scope detail — our guide to dental assistant requirements in Michigan owns it.

Discipline is part of the record, not a separate hunt: the search shows any disciplinary action alongside status and dates.

For the wider picture, the Bureau of Professional Licensing also publishes health license disciplinary action reports by fiscal year.

Discipline in one state can also leave a federal record.

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 count state boards of dentistry among its reporters.

Whether your practice can query it 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 licensed in another state, run that state's own board lookup — the Michigan search verifies Michigan credentials only.

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.

Save what you ran, not just what you concluded: a dated screenshot or PDF of each result, the license type you matched against the role, and who ran the search.

When you need a formal document for a credentialing file or a payer enrollment, the Bureau of Professional Licensing sells a certified license verification for $15 per license, ordered through MiPLUS.

Keep the supporting paperwork with the record: a UDA's board-approved radiography course certificate, and the training documentation a sedation-providing dentist hands you.

Anchor the re-check to the record — re-run the search before the expiration date shown, and whenever the person's role changes.

A license check is one screen among several: our guide to OIG exclusion checks covers 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 Michigan before you draft anything.