Six weeks ago we published the US Dental Cost Index by State 2026, a 51-jurisdiction dataset of real dental prices. The most common question we got from readers was not about prices. It was: "fine, dental care is cheaper in Alabama — but will anyone there actually take my insurance?"
That is a different dataset. So we built it.
US Dental Insurance Acceptance by State 2026 — DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20666358 (CC BY 4.0, also on figshare)
What's in it
One row per state (50 + DC), combining five public sources that, as far as we know, had never been joined in one table:
- % of dentists enrolled as Medicaid/CHIP providers — ADA Health Policy Institute, 2024 data. National average: 41.2%. Range: 21.9% (Nevada) to 76.2% (Delaware).
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Adult Medicaid dental benefit level — the standard CareQuest/MACPAC classification (
none/emergency_only/limited/extensive), updated for the seven 2025 state expansions (GA, IN, KS, KY, OK, MO, UT). Current distribution: 1 none, 5 emergency-only, 7 limited, 38 extensive. - Annual dollar caps on the adult benefit where they exist (8 states, from $500 in Arkansas to $2,000 in West Virginia).
- % of adults with dental insurance (CareQuest State of Oral Health Equity 2024) and % with a past-year dental visit (CDC BRFSS 2024).
- ACA marketplace stand-alone dental plan availability, plan year 2026 (parsed from the CMS QHP landscape file for all healthcare.gov states).
These roll up into a transparent composite Insurance Acceptance Index (100 = national average), computed exactly like our Cost Index: ratios against the national mean, averaged, no hidden weights. Every input is in the CSV, so you can re-weight it however you want.
The finding that surprised us
We expected coverage to track prices at least loosely — richer states, higher prices, better benefits. The actual correlation between the Dental Cost Index and the Insurance Acceptance Index is r = -0.04. Essentially zero.
The quadrants are where it gets interesting:
- Alabama is the cheapest state for dental care in the country (Cost Index 76) and one of the five weakest coverage profiles (Acceptance Index 77) — it is the only state left with no general adult Medicaid dental benefit at all. Cheap care does not help you if nothing is covered and only a third of dentists take Medicaid.
- Nevada, Florida and Arizona sit at the bottom (Acceptance Index 63): emergency-only adult benefits and the country's lowest dentist participation rates.
- Iowa is the outlier in the good direction: prices 19% below the national average and the highest Acceptance Index (131) — 75.7% of its dentists are enrolled Medicaid providers.
If you are modeling out-of-pocket dental risk for US households, price and coverage need to be separate variables. Using one as a proxy for the other is, per this data, just noise.
Get the data
- Dataset + methodology + chart: zenodo.org/records/20666358
- Companion price dataset: US Dental Cost Index by State 2026
- Consumer-facing guides built on this data: dental insurance guides, what Medicaid covers in each state, and a free state-vs-state cost comparison tool with cash / PPO / savings-plan modes.
Known limitations are documented in the README (the ADA participation metric best represents child Medicaid/CHIP programs; the insured-adults share is a survey estimate; no state-level "skipped care because of cost" series exists anywhere — we checked).
Pricing and coverage market research, not medical advice. Questions about the methodology welcome in the comments.
