How to Verify a Dental License in Virginia Before You Hire

The Virginia Board of Dentistry — an agency inside the Virginia Department of Health Professions (DHP) — regulates dentists, dental hygienists, Dental Assistants II, oral and maxillofacial surgeons, mobile dental facilities and cosmetic procedure certification, and it issues Moderate Sedation and Deep Sedation/General Anesthesia permits.

That list is your checklist — confirm each credential before a hire.

Searches run on DHP's License Lookup, which DHP describes as a free public information service so individuals, agencies or employers can review the status of health care professionals in the Commonwealth.

This page is the Virginia chapter — the national order of records to pull is in our guide to how to verify a dental license.

The lookup takes a license number on its own, a last name with the last four digits of the Social Security number, or a broader search by occupation, name, state, zip and status — match your candidate's application license number to the record and read the status it shows.

The lookup page displays a "Current as of" date and time — note it when you save your result.

Sedation permits are the easy step to miss.

The board issues dentists separate permits to administer moderate sedation and deep sedation/general anesthesia — a permit is a credential on top of the license, not a line inside it.

The lookup's occupation list includes Enteral Conscious/Moderate Sedation and Deep Sedation/General Anesthesia as their own searchable types (Cosmetic Procedure Certification is listed separately too), so search the permit type your candidate will hold, not just Dentist.

One limit to plan around: DHP says verifying multiple licenses without a paid Health Professional Data Services subscription runs into limits, and an error appears once the limit is reached.

The subscription is the tool for a multi-office credentialing sweep.

How a dentist earns a Virginia license in the first place is the candidate's side of the desk — our guide to dentist licensure requirements in Virginia covers that.

Hygienists verify in the same place: the board regulates them, so their record sits in the same DHP lookup — search the dental hygienist occupation, match the license number, and read the status as you did for the dentist.

Which expanded-duty credentials attach to a Virginia hygiene license was not settled in our research for this page.

If the role includes duties beyond standard hygiene, ask what credential the candidate holds for each duty and confirm with the board that it recognizes it.

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

Assistants are where Virginia's system departs from the lookup-first habit.

The board's list of regulated credentials names Dental Assistant II — a DA II is verifiable in the same DHP lookup as a dentist or hygienist.

Dental Assistant I is not a credential the board lists, so there is no DA I record to find — an empty result is not a red flag by itself.

X-ray authority you verify by paper, not by lookup.

Under 18VAC60-30-80, no Dental Assistant I or II may place or expose dental radiographs unless the assistant has one of the following: a CODA-program radiation safety course and exam, ARRT certification, or DANB's Radiation Health and Safety course and exam.

The rule sets a training requirement rather than a separate board registration, so there is no radiography credential to search — get the course completion or DANB RHS certificate and keep a copy in the hire's file.

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

Discipline is part of the same check.

The board's site describes its lookup page as the place to look up or verify a license and review case decisions, and it also keeps a Disciplinary Proceedings page.

For a finalist, read past the active status to the case decisions before you extend an offer.

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, and the NPDB's regulations count a state Board of Dentistry among its reporters.

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

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

For a candidate who has practiced outside Virginia, licenses are issued and verified state by state — our research found no national dental license lookup — so run the other state's board lookup as well and save the last-updated date, because boards update at different speeds.

A verification is only worth what you can prove.

For each item — license, sedation permit, DA II record, radiation certificate — save the date you ran the search, the name or license number you entered, the "Current as of" stamp the page showed, and a screenshot or PDF of the result, plus the copies you collected.

Run the check close to the start date rather than at first contact, and re-run it before you renew an employment agreement — an old printout says nothing about the license today.

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

Restrictive covenants come up at the same stage: before you draft an associate agreement, check what Virginia allows — our guide to non-competes in Virginia covers how the state treats them.