Dental Insurance Statistics - National

Information published by the Health Policy Institute showed that 21 percent of adults between the ages of 19 and 64 lacked dental insurance in 2021. Likewise, 2023 polling from the CareQuest Institute estimated that over 68 million adults in the U.S. do not have dental insurance.

The data below is offered to researchers and consumers alike. If dental coverage is to increase, the market needs greater transparency around cost and benefit trends because affordability and adequacy are enmeshed in those measures. The information provided below is offered in the spirit of such transparency.

The below data was sampled and aggregated from every state and the District of Columbia. See the METHODOLOGY & DATA section below for more information on plans used for this study.

Visit the Dental Insurance Statistics home page to review statistics by state.

Premiums

The average dental insurance premium was slightly below $50 a month. However, given the different benefits and dentist restrictions, there was a wide range of premiums observed.

State & National Dental Insurance Premium Averages

Within the plans sampled, the lowest cost option was MetLife's TakeAlong Dental HMO-Managed Care 350 (Low) in New York. It had a monthly premium of $5.10. In other regions, this plan was more expensive. For example, the same plan cost $7.03 a month in Texas. This MetLife plan delivery dental services through an HMO network. Using out-of-network dentists with HMO coverage typically results in the patient paying 100 percent of the costs so restricting yourself to an in-network dentist is very important.

The most expensive dental coverage option among the sampled plans was the Dental for Everyone Immediate Coverage plan offered in California by Delta Dental. This plan was priced at $121.42 a month for our default customer profile of a 35-year-old female. This plan had no waiting periods (i.e. delays before benefits could be used) and would pay up to $3,000 a year for covered dental services.

Benefits

Dental benefits (i.e., the services for which the insurance will pay) are not standardized. In other words, what insurance covers can differ from one dental plan to another.

Preventive care and basic services like fillings were commonly covered by PPO, HMOs, and indemnity dental plans. More expensive services such as root canals, crowns, and implants was not as extensive among the plans examined. Some plans had waiting periods that delayed coverage of major dental services until the second year of continuous enrollment.

The below table illustrates the coverage of several major dental services during the first year of enrollment. There were many plans with waiting periods on major dental work that lasted 12 months, which meant there was not coverage in the first year of enrollment but coverage in the second year and thereafter. Note that there were some plans within the table below that had a service covered in the first year of enrollment but placed a waiting period on the service that was less than a year (e.g., six months). There were also plans, not included in the table data below, that did not provide major service coverage during the first year of enrollment but did provide major service coverage in subsequent years. The length of these waiting periods varied by plan. The shortest was 90 days, and the longest was 24 months (this particular waiting period was specific to implants).

Coverage of Major Dental Services among Sampled Plans

PPO plans have a limit on how much the insurance company issuing the plan will pay towards covered care each year. This limit is known as the plan's maximum benefit. The maximum benefit on some plans increases in the second and third year of continuous coverage. The table below summarizes the highlights regarding the maximum benefit information for the sampled PPO plans.

Out-of-Pocket Costs

Since 94 percent of the sampled dental plans were PPOs, out-of-pocket costs were in the form of coinsurance fees. A coinsurance fee is a percentage of the rate that an insurance company negotiates with a dental practice for a specific service. 90 percent of the PPO plans in this study did not charge out-of-pocket costs for annual teeth cleaning.

Out-of-pocket costs were highest for uncovered dental care. As mentioned in the previous section, dental benefits are not standardized.

PPO Out-of-Pocket Costs for Various Dental Services

METHODOLOGY & DATA

1,196 dental plans were sampled from every state and the District of Columbia for the national analysis of dental insurance. Individual state analyses represent subsets of this plan data. All plans were for the 2026 plan year. At the national level, the same plan offered in different states was treated as separate state-specific plan records because of differences in premiums and waiting periods as well as the possibility of state-specific benefit mandates. The plans utilized by this study are a sample of regional dental plans and do not constitute every dental plan available on the market.

The insurance carriers issuing the sampled plans in this research were:

• Ameritas
• Ameritas Life of NY
• Anthem BlueCross
• Anthem BlueCross BlueShield
• Best Life
• Blue Cross Blue Shield of Montana
• Careington
• Cigna
• Delta Dental
• Delta Dental of TN
• Dental Health Services
• DentaQuest
• Guardian
• Humana
• ManhattanLife
• MetLife
• NCD by MetLife
• Renaissance
• UnitedHealthcare

Of the 1,196 individual state records of dental plans, 1,019 were stand-alone PPO dental plans, 107 plans combined PPO dental benefits with vision benefits, 42 were dental discount cards, 23 were HMO plans, and 5 were indemnity plans.

Most plan records came from DentalInsurance.com's nationwide inventory of dental plans. Some additional public records of dental plans were included beyond this dataset.

Industry standard rounding rules were used for decimal values related to percentages and dollar amounts. Metrics applied to the first year of enrollment. Consequently, a benefit that had a 12-month waiting period was counted as absent for the purposes of this study even if this benefit would be available after the first year of enrollment.