Hiring a Pediatric Dentist

A pediatric dentist is a licensed dentist who completed a further residency focused on children — the license is what makes them legal to practice, and it is issued by your state's dental board the same as any other dentist's.

Board certification from the American Board of Pediatric Dentistry (ABPD) is a separate, voluntary credential on top of that license, not a substitute for it: a candidate can be a fully qualified pediatric dentist, having completed a residency, without holding ABPD Diplomate status.

Beyond the license, the practical differentiator for this role is behavior management — the training a pediatric residency adds on top of general dentistry, covering how to treat frightened, very young, or special-needs patients calmly and safely, including sedation where appropriate.

Ask candidates to walk through a recent difficult case rather than list techniques; the pediatric-specific career guide on what a pediatric dentist does covers the scope of that training in full, and this page does not repeat it.

Demand for this role is a genuine hiring tailwind: pediatric dentistry runs a higher job volume than most dental specialties and skews toward group and DSO practices, which is part of why it is one of the more accessible specialties to recruit into relative to, say, oral surgery.

That does not make sourcing free — see how competitive the residency itself is for why the pipeline behind that demand is still tight.

Verify the dental license directly with your state's dental board, by name and license number, before the first shift — there is no national license and no single registry, and this step is identical to hiring any other dentist.

A pediatric residency does not change which board issues or verifies the license.

ABPD board certification is a separate, voluntary check: confirm Diplomate status directly with the American Board of Pediatric Dentistry if it matters to the role, but do not treat it as a proxy for the license — plenty of well-trained, residency-completed pediatric dentists are not board certified, often because certification runs on a fixed calendar with a multi-year window after residency.

If the role involves sedation, confirm any state-specific sedation permit separately from both the license and ABPD status — permitting for in-office sedation is state-regulated and not something either credential automatically covers.

There is no BLS wage figure specific to pediatric dentistry — the federal government tracks it, along with endodontics and periodontics, under one grouped occupation, "Dentists, all other specialists" (SOC 29-1029), whose median is $224,990 (BLS OEWS, May 2025).

That number cannot be split back out by specialty; it is a floor for what the group as a whole earns, not a pediatric-dentist figure.

The general-dentist median (SOC 29-1021, $170,950, same release) sits underneath it.

See which dental specialty pays the most for the full BLS ranking and why the grouping happened.

Ownership moves the real number more than the BLS figure suggests: many pediatric dentists own or partner in a practice, so total earnings blend clinical pay with practice profit that a wage survey only partly captures.

An associate pediatric dentist, by contrast, is typically paid on a structure closer to any other associate dentist's — a percentage of production or collections, a daily-rate guarantee, or a DSO base-plus-bonus — see the full salary guide for the trade-offs between them.

DSO and group-practice demand for this specialty is strong, which affects budgeting as much as it affects sourcing: a candidate weighing your offer against a DSO base-plus-bonus structure is comparing against a real, common alternative, not a hypothetical one.

State plainly that the license required is a general dentist license plus completion of a CODA-accredited pediatric dentistry residency — and say whether ABPD board certification is required, preferred, or neither.

Conflating the two, or implying certification is mandatory when it is voluntary, filters out qualified candidates who are simply not yet certified or never plan to be.

Describe the patient population and case mix specifically — age range, share of special-needs patients, whether you offer in-office sedation or refer out, and how much of the day is preventive versus restorative.

These signal the actual day far more than a generic "gentle with kids" line.

Do not list duties or a supervision structure your state's dental practice act does not support.

As with any dentist hire, scope and delegation to hygienists and assistants are set by state law — link your state's rules rather than assume a template written elsewhere applies.

Confirm the license and, separately, any sedation permit are active before day one, and keep the verification record — the same step as any dentist hire, not a pediatric-specific one.

Introduce a new pediatric dentist to your behavior-management norms explicitly: how the practice handles a child who won't sit still, who makes the sedation call, and how parent communication is expected to run.

These are the friction points in month one, not clinical skill.

If the hire is an associate, be explicit up front about the comp structure — percentage of production or collections, daily-rate guarantee, or base-plus-bonus — and how it compares to what DSOs in your market are offering, since that comparison is the one a strong candidate is already making.