Hiring a Dental Therapist

Hiring a dental therapist starts with two gates that no recruiting effort can move: whether your state authorizes dental therapy at all, and whether your practice's setting fits whatever limits its statute attaches.

A count published by the National Partnership for Dental Therapy and reported by Stateline in July 2024 listed 14 states authorizing dental therapists in at least some settings — Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.

No newer count has been verified for this guide, so treat that list as a starting point and confirm where your state stands with your state dental board before you plan the hire.

If your state is on the list, the settings rules decide the second gate — and in several states they decide it before anything else.

Minnesota limits dental therapists to primarily practicing in settings that serve low-income, uninsured and underserved patients or in a dental health professional shortage area.

Arizona restricts therapists to settings such as federally qualified health centers and look-alikes, community health centers, nonprofit practices serving low-income patients, and private practices treating referred community-health-center patients.

Connecticut requires practice in a public health facility.

Nevada permits only listed settings — hospitals, rural health clinics and FQHC-type facilities among them — under a written practice agreement.

Wisconsin requires a dental health shortage area, or a setting where at least 50 percent of the therapist's patient base consists of Medical Assistance, uninsured or other listed patients.

Audit your payer mix and location against your state's own list before you write a job ad.

If you clear both gates, look for a candidate whose experience matches what the role is for: adding restorative capacity on top of preventive care.

Maine's statute shows the shape — a dental therapist there may perform listed procedures, including simple cavity preparations and restorations and simple extractions, in limited practice settings under a written practice agreement and the general supervision of a Maine-licensed dentist.

The strongest signals are restorative hand skills, experience in community-health or public-health settings, and comfort working inside a written supervising agreement — because that is the structure the job runs on.

For what the role looks like from the clinician's side — training, day-to-day duties, how it compares with hygiene work — our dental therapist career guide covers it.

This page stays on your hiring decisions.

Require a state-issued dental therapist license, and verify it with the board that issued it — never take the résumé's word.

The habit matters enough that Nevada made it a conduct rule: under NAC 631.230(1)(p), it is unprofessional conduct for a dentist who owns a practice to fail to verify the license of a dentist, dental therapist, dental hygienist or expanded function dental assistant before offering employment or contracting for services.

In the authorizing states we checked, a state licensing body maintains the credential, so the lookup is routine once you know which one.

Vermont's Board of Dental Examiners licenses dental therapists.

The Oregon Board of Dentistry licenses them alongside dentists and hygienists and runs an online verification system.

Michigan's LARA license lookup lists Dental Therapist as a license type.

Colorado's licensing roster carries a Dental Therapist credential.

Maine's Board of Dental Practice licenses dental therapists, Washington DOH keeps a separate dental therapist credential page, and Wisconsin credentials them through the Department of Safety and Professional Services under the Dentistry Examining Board.

Nevada's board licenses and disciplines dental therapists, and Idaho's dental rules (IDAPA 24.31.01) apply to dental therapists alongside dentists, dental specialists and hygienists.

Check the education behind the license too.

CODA's Accreditation Standards for Dental Therapy Education Programs, adopted February 6, 2015, require at least three academic years of full-time postsecondary instruction or its equivalent.

Arizona makes it explicit: licensure requires graduating from a dental therapy program accredited by — or holding initial accreditation from — the ADA's Commission on Dental Accreditation.

Oregon goes further from January 1, 2025: the education program must be CODA-accredited and Board-approved, a rule we read in an unofficial mirror of the Oregon Revised Statutes, so confirm it on the Oregon Legislature's site before relying on it.

And the route into the license varies — Connecticut defines a dental therapist as a licensed dental hygienist authorized to practice dental therapy under a collaborative agreement — so ask candidates how their state's route worked, not what you assume it to be.

The credential is young — CODA's dental therapy education standards date to February 2015 — and the pool of programs behind it is thin: per the Oral Health Workforce Research Center, as of March 2025 established dental therapy education programs existed in Alaska, Minnesota and Washington, while Oregon, Michigan, Wisconsin and Vermont were developing them.

Those seven are the only program states the research behind this guide names, so unless you are hiring in or near one of them, expect to recruit therapists who trained somewhere else.

Source instead from community-health clinics and tribal programs in authorizing states, from licensed therapists in other authorizing states (who will still have to satisfy your state's licensure route), and from hygienists who hold or are completing the therapy authorization where your state's route builds on a hygiene license.

This guide found no published pay benchmark to budget from: no Bureau of Labor Statistics occupation series for dental therapists and no reliable published pay data for the role turned up in our research — so this page states no range, and we could not verify any national dental therapist salary figure we met along the way.

Set pay from your own market instead.

The practical anchors: what you already pay hygienists locally for the preventive base of the work, the added restorative scope the license authorizes in your state, and what nearby FQHCs and community clinics — the employers most likely to hold the same license in the same setting — actually offer.

Ask candidates their current compensation; the research behind this guide found no reliable posted ranges for the role, so direct conversations carry the information.

Settle billing before you settle pay.

Arizona bars dental therapists from independently billing any individual or third-party payor, and Medicaid billing rules for dental therapists were not verifiable state by state for this guide — so confirm with your state Medicaid program and your payers how a therapist's services are reimbursed before you build a production model on them.

What a therapist can add to collections bounds what you can afford to pay.

Finally, the statutory caps bound how many of these seats one practice can support.

A Connecticut dentist may hold collaborative agreements with no more than two dental therapists at once; Arizona caps a dentist at four written collaborative practice agreements; Wisconsin at four collaborative management agreements; Minnesota at five dental therapists or advanced dental therapists.

The caps bind the supervising dentist, so count openings per dentist, not per practice.

For how these roles fit the wider team, the dental hiring hub collects our employer guides role by role.

Lead with the two things candidates filter on: the license and the setting.

Name the state license required in the first lines, and describe the setting honestly — FQHC, community health center, nonprofit practice, shortage-area practice, whichever fits your state's list.

These settings rules are the statutes therapists already work under, so a posting that hides which setting it is reads as vague on purpose.

List duties inside what your state actually authorizes — the restorative procedures your statute names, plus the preventive care — and state the supervision structure plainly: the named supervising dentist, the written agreement your state requires, and the supervised-hours schedule a new hire can expect.

Do not imply a requirement your state does not have, and do not promise scope your state has not written into law.

Screen against the statute's numbers.

Ask how many supervised clinical hours the candidate has accrued — the ladders differ by state, and the answer changes what they can do in your first year.

Ask them to walk through a restorative case they handled end to end, and a scope-boundary scenario: what they do when a patient needs work outside their authorized list.

A candidate who can name their own state's limits — Minnesota's bars on narcotics and on sedation, Arizona's ban on independent billing, the supervised-hours thresholds — is telling you they have worked inside an agreement structure before.

Run the rest of the loop like any clinical hire: structured interviews, license and reference checks before an offer, a written offer letter.

Our dental hiring process guide walks the full sequence step by step.

Get the agreement signed before the first patient.

Minnesota requires a dental therapist to sign a written collaborative management agreement with a Minnesota-licensed dentist before providing services.

Nevada requires a written practice agreement with an authorizing dentist.

Vermont's collaborative agreement must be reviewed, updated and submitted to the Board annually and whenever it changes — diarize that filing at hire.

In Arizona, the written collaborative practice agreement comes only after the therapist completes 1,000 hours of clinical practice under the direct supervision of an Arizona-licensed dentist, so a therapist who has not yet logged those 1,000 hours starts in a direct-supervision phase by law; ask experienced candidates to document theirs.

Build the schedule around the supervised-hours ladder, because in the states that set one, a new therapist's first months run on a supervision plan, not a solo column on the roster.

Nevada keeps a therapist under the authorizing dentist's direct supervision until 500, 1,000 or 1,500 clinical hours, depending on prior licensure and hygiene experience.

Wisconsin opens general supervision only after at least 2,000 hours under direct or indirect supervision.

Decide now which dentist covers those hours and how the chair schedule absorbs it.

Structure the team the statute allows.

In Maine, a dentist may delegate supervision of up to 2 dental hygienists and 3 unlicensed persons per practice setting to a dental therapist through the written practice agreement.

Michigan caps a therapist at supervising no more than 3 dental assistants and 2 dental hygienists in any one practice setting.

If your staffing plan hangs assistants or hygienists off the therapist, check your state's numbers first.

Write the scope boundaries into your protocols, not just the agreement.

Minnesota bars dental therapists from dispensing or administering narcotic drugs, and its rule also bars them from administering general anesthesia or deep, moderate or minimal sedation.

Arizona bars narcotics and adds the independent-billing prohibition.

In Connecticut, the collaborating dentist is professionally responsible and legally liable for the therapist's authorized services — one more reason your internal protocols should match the agreement exactly.

This guide's research turned up no retention data specific to dental therapists — but the structure of the seat makes the practical advice simple: keep the agreement current, keep the supervised hours progressing, and let the restorative work you hired them for actually fill their column.