Hiring an Orofacial Pain Specialist

Orofacial pain is one of the 12 dental specialties the ADA's National Commission on Recognition of Dental Specialties and Certifying Boards recognizes as of October 2026.

The National Commission defines it as the specialty of dentistry that encompasses the diagnosis, management and treatment of pain disorders of the jaw, mouth, face, head and neck, in a definition adopted in September 2020.

For an employer, the question underneath the definition is whether your schedule actually carries the caseload.

The signal to watch for is a steady stream of patients whose primary problem is pain rather than restorative work — referrals you keep sending out, patients cycling back without resolution — plus a clear idea of the seat's scope.

TMD and chronic facial pain diagnosis and management, and coordination with medical colleagues are the work a posting needs to spell out.

If you cannot yet describe that caseload in concrete terms, hold off on the hire: candidates are scarce (see below) and a mis-scoped seat is costly to redo.

Whatever the caseload, the baseline is the same.

You are hiring a dentist who has completed dental school plus an advanced education residency in orofacial pain — CODA's accreditation standards set the program floor at two consecutive academic years, a minimum of 24 months full-time or its equivalent.

Beyond that baseline, candidates sort into the three labels the National Commission uses: board certified, board eligible, and educationally qualified.

What each label is worth to you is covered under credential verification below.

Plan the search around a small pool.

ADA HPI counted 96 dentists in orofacial pain among professionally active U.S. dentists in 2025, up from 25 in 2021 — and HPI notes it only began tracking these specialists after the National Commission recognized the specialty, counts a dentist in every specialty they hold a certificate in, and asks readers to interpret its 2023-2025 figures with caution because of changes in data maintenance.

Two practical consequences: your search will likely be national rather than local, and our sources give no profile of where these specialists work — HPI's 2024 practice-modality data places orofacial pain in its "Other" grouping — so ask candidates directly about the settings they have practiced in rather than assuming a background.

Recruit from residency programs (CODA-approved full-time orofacial pain programs), the specialty's professional community, and a public job posting.

This page sits in the dental hiring hub alongside employer guides for the site's other dental roles.

Start with the license.

Every specialist is a dentist first, and the National Commission's own definition of an "educationally qualified" specialist includes a license granted by a state dental board.

What that license requires is set state by state: in Connecticut, for example, no person may engage in the practice of dentistry or dental medicine without first obtaining a license from the Department of Public Health (Connecticut General Statutes § 20-106).

Verify the license rather than accepting a photocopy of it.

Nevada makes the duty explicit: under NAC 631.230(1)(p), it is unprofessional conduct for a dentist who owns a dental 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.

Outside Nevada, primary-source verification through the state board before you make the offer is the habit worth copying — confirm the license is active and note anything attached to it.

Then check whether your state layers anything specialty-specific on top.

Some boards issue permits beyond the license, and they differ on what: the New Jersey State Board of Dentistry, for instance, issues enteral sedation, parenteral conscious sedation, general anesthesia and local anesthesia permits, plus specialty permits in the dental fields recognized by the ADA.

Whether your state issues a specialty permit covering orofacial pain — and whether your seat needs one — is a question for your state dental board, answered before you write the requirements line of your posting, not after.

Board certification is the third layer, and it is voluntary.

As of October 2026 the National Commission's list of recognized certifying boards runs to 11, and the American Board of Orofacial Pain is on it; the board cites a National Commission recognition letter dated March 28, 2022 naming it the only national certifying board for orofacial pain.

ABOP exam candidates must be enrolled in or have graduated from a CODA-approved full-time orofacial pain residency, and must pass a written and an oral exam.

Read a CV against the National Commission's three labels: board certified — completed dental school and the advanced education residency, passed the board certification examination, and completes continuing education to remain certified; board eligible — education and residency done, exam not yet passed; educationally qualified — education, residency and a state dental license, without certification.

A claimed certification can be confirmed with ABOP directly, and a board-eligible hire may well certify while employed by you.

We found no sourced pay figure for orofacial pain specialists as such.

The income tables in the ADA Health Policy Institute's Survey of Dental Practice do not cover orofacial pain specialists at all, so treat any dollar figure attached to the title specifically as unsourced.

What exists is the specialist aggregate — labeled carefully.

ADA HPI's 2026 Survey of Dental Practice puts the 2025 median net income of all specialists in private practice at $258,880, with a first quartile of $177,780 and a third quartile of $382,800 (179 responses).

The same institute's Survey of Dental Practice separately reported that average net income for dentists in private practice in 2025 was $215,320 for general dentists and $346,520 for specialists.

Both figures are net income in private practice — not a salary, and not orofacial-pain-specific.

They tell you the order of magnitude for specialist-level dentistry and nothing more precise than that.

The seat you are budgeting for is an employed one unless you structure it as a contractor arrangement, and for employed specialists the survey publishes no figure at all: ADA HPI could not report 2025 income for employed specialists because too few responded (19).

Budget from the candidate's own current compensation and expectations, the specialist market you actually compete in, and the caseload you can route to the chair — then pressure-test the pay structure with your accountant before you commit to it.

The posting has one job: make the seat concrete.

Name the caseload — TMD and chronic facial pain diagnosis and management, interdisciplinary referrals —the sessions you expect the chair to be open, and the setting the candidate is walking into.

State the credential line plainly: a current [state] dental license is required, and before you add anything about permits, confirm with your state dental board whether it issues a specialty permit your posting should name.

Require board certification only if you mean it — certification is voluntary and ADA HPI's 2025 count of dentists in orofacial pain was 96 nationwide — so ask for board certified or board eligible, which ties the requirement to completed training rather than to the voluntary exam.

Screening then runs on the same line items.

Verify the license with the state board, and the permit status too if your state issues specialty permits.

If the seat involves dispensing controlled substances, DEA registration is location-specific: 21 CFR 1301.12(a) requires a separate registration for each principal place of business or professional practice at one general physical location where controlled substances are dispensed, and a practitioner practicing in more than one state must hold a separate registration in each state, with state authority to handle controlled substances obtained first.

Ask candidates where their registrations currently sit rather than assuming they transfer.

For the background check, do not assume your practice can query the NPDB directly.

Query eligibility runs to hospitals and to health care entities operating a formal peer-review process — professional review conducted through formally adopted written procedures that provide for adequate notice and an opportunity for a hearing — and an individual practice qualifying is not a default yes.

The practitioner-side route always exists: any health care practitioner, including a dentist, may run an NPDB self-query at any time, the NPDB sends the response only to the practitioner, and the practitioner may share it with whomever they choose.

Ask for it as a standard step.

The dental hiring process guide covers the surrounding sequence — applications, screening, references — that these role-specific checks slot into.

Complete the verifications before the first day, not after: license confirmed with the state board, any state permit the seat needs confirmed in place, and ABOP status checked directly if certification or eligibility was part of the hire.

If controlled-substance work is part of the role, confirm the DEA registration covers this location before any dispensing happens — a registration is tied to a specific place of practice.

Then set the seat up to keep the person.

Board certification is maintained through continuing education, so a package that budgets CE time and costs protects the credential you hired for — and if your hire is board eligible, agreeing early on who funds and schedules the certification exams removes an obvious source of friction.

Give the caseload the autonomy it needs.

Set the seat's calendar up for the caseload you hired rather than a restorative template, and settle the interdisciplinary referral relationships the seat was built on — which practices and medical colleagues send patients in, and how reports flow back — in writing during the first weeks.

A specialist hired to build a service line but handed a restorative schedule instead is being set up to look elsewhere.