How to Verify a Dental License in Minnesota Before You Hire

The Minnesota Board of Dentistry licenses the state's dental professionals — dentists, dental therapists, dental hygienists and licensed dental assistants — and runs the online license verification portal every check starts on.

The portal is also the whole verification: as of January 2017 the board no longer offers written affidavit or verification letters and directs everyone to the online search.

There is no letter to request — the result you pull yourself is what you rely on.

This page is the Minnesota chapter — the national process, and the order to pull records in, is in our guide to how to verify a dental license.

Ask the dentist for their Minnesota license number, then enter only that number — letter prefix included — in the search: the board's instruction is to put the license number, including the letter, in the second-to-last field.

The board links to the search portal from its Verify a License page; the portal itself runs on GL Suite software at mnbodv7prod.glsuite.us.

A result shows the professional's license, any disciplinary or corrective action, and practice status.

Save what it shows the day you run it — your record is the search you ran, not the printout the candidate sends.

If the associate will sedate patients, the certificate is a separate credential: a Minnesota dentist needs a board certificate to administer general anesthesia/deep sedation or moderate sedation, and a separate pediatric endorsement for patients eight or younger (Minnesota Rules, part 3100.3600).

Whether the portal lists those certificates could not be confirmed when we researched this page — the search app blocks automated reads — so ask the finalist for the certificate itself and confirm anything the search does not surface with the board.

How a dentist earns a Minnesota license is the candidate's side — our guide to dentist licensure requirements in Minnesota covers that.

Hygienists verify in the same place: the Minnesota Board of Dentistry's portal covers every dental professional, so the same search applies — license number in, license, practice status and any disciplinary or corrective action out.

The sedation line matters here too: under Minnesota Rules, part 3100.3600, a dental therapist, dental hygienist or licensed dental assistant must not administer general anesthesia, deep sedation, moderate sedation or minimal sedation — the board's sedation certificates are dentist credentials, and none of those three licenses is one.

What Minnesota requires to become a hygienist, and the duties the license covers, is on our dental hygienist requirements in Minnesota page.

Start with the license: Minnesota licenses dental assistants — a person who graduated from a CODA-accredited dental assisting program and passed the required exams may apply for licensure (Minnesota Statutes section 150A.06, subdivision 2a).

That makes the assistant check the same shape as the dentist check: ask for the license number and run the portal.

X-rays are the second credential.

Minnesota issues a limited radiology registration that lets a dental assistant take radiographs under a dentist's general supervision; it requires a board-approved CODA-school radiology course, a national radiation exam and the board's jurisprudence exam (Minnesota Rules, part 3100.1320).

For an assistant who is not a licensed dental assistant, that registration is the credential to ask for; if yours is a licensed dental assistant, ask which credential covers their radiographs.

The same uncertainty applies: our research could not confirm whether the portal displays limited radiology registrations as their own records.

Get a copy for your file, and confirm the credential with the board before the assistant's first radiograph if you want certainty.

If the role includes duties beyond chairside assisting, ask the candidate which board-issued credential covers each duty and verify it the same way.

The full duty list for Minnesota assistants is on our dental assistant requirements in Minnesota page.

Treat discipline as its own step, not as an assumption from a clean license search.

The portal result includes any disciplinary or corrective action, and the board publishes public disciplinary orders on its website under Public Actions — for the details of a public corrective action, the board directs you to request them by email.

One Minnesota quirk matters before you read a clean Public Actions search as a full history: Agreements for Corrective Action are non-disciplinary and are not published on the board's website, though they are public information available on request.

If you want the complete picture on a senior hire, ask the candidate and request the agreement from the board.

Board discipline also has a federal shadow.

When a state dental board acts on a dentist's professional competence or conduct — revoking, suspending or restricting a license, censuring, reprimanding, placing the dentist on probation, or accepting a license surrender — it must report the action to the National Practitioner Data Bank (45 CFR 60.8), whose regulations count a state Board of Dentistry among its reporters (45 CFR 60.3).

A practice that cannot query the data bank directly still has a route: any practitioner can run a self-query at any time, the NPDB sends the response only to the practitioner, and they may share it with whomever they choose — so ask your dentist finalist for one.

Our guide to NPDB queries covers eligibility and the self-query in depth.

And for a candidate who has practiced outside Minnesota: the Minnesota portal verifies Minnesota credentials.

Licenses are issued and verified state by state — our research found no national dental license lookup — so run the other state's board lookup the same way.

A verification is only worth what you can prove.

For each credential, save the date you ran the search, the tool you used, the name and license number (letter included), and a screenshot or PDF of what the record showed — plus the copies you collected: sedation certificate, pediatric endorsement, limited radiology registration.

Run the check close to the start date rather than at first contact, and run it again before you renew an employment agreement — last year's printout says nothing about today's practice status.

Fold the license file into the rest of the screen: references, your other background checks, and the federal exclusion list where it applies — our guide to OIG exclusion checks covers when and how.

Contract terms get set around the same stage: if your associate is coming from another Minnesota practice, check what the state allows before you draft — our guide to non-competes in Minnesota covers how the state treats them.