US dental groups and DSOs, mapped
Heartland leads, Aspen follows. The top 10 dental groups in the US hold 17% of group practice locations. The 9,400 operators below that line are what most vendor databases haven't mapped.
Updated June 8, 2026
For PMS, imaging, supply, billing, staffing, and marketing teams selling into dental. The DSO logo is rarely the buyer. The regional director or the owner-dentist on the lease is.
DSO-affiliated practice locations mapped
iTotal US dental practices (Orbital-tracked)
iUS dentists affiliated with a DSO or large group
The top 10 dental groups
The ten largest US dental groups, by supported-office count.
Ranked by US supported-office count, not by affiliation. One PE firm sometimes backs multiple DSO brands, and the practice owner is almost never the corporation. MB2 Dental ranks 8th here by office count but ranks higher by affiliation; the full parent-and-brand detail is in Brand-by-brand below.
Who buys this data
PMS vendors, dental supply reps, imaging OEMs, and DSO marketing teams selling into the group market.
This page is for the teams selling into dental practices, not the practices themselves. The dental buyer rarely sits where the corporate logo sits. The PMS decision is at the DSO regional director. The intraoral scanner decision is at the chairside doctor. The consumables reorder sits with the office manager. The dataset is built to give you the right named person for each.
PMS and scheduling
Dental practice management software
Dentrix, Eaglesoft, Open Dental, Curve Dental, Denticon, and the next wave of cloud PMS vendors selling the upgrade off a server-based install. The buyer is the regional director at a DSO or the owner-dentist at an independent group.
Get the sampleImaging and CAD-CAM
Dental imaging and CAD-CAM
Cone-beam CT, intraoral scanners, same-day crown systems, panoramic upgrades. The conversation is with the doctor on the chair and the practice owner on the capital expense.
Get the sampleSupply and distribution
Dental supply distributors
Henry Schein, Patterson Dental, Benco Dental, Darby Dental rep teams looking for the next 500 multi-location accounts. The decision sits with the office manager on consumables and the doctor on capital.
Get the sampleBilling and RCM
Dental billing and revenue cycle
Insurance verification, claims management, AR follow-up, eligibility checks. The buyer is the practice administrator or the DSO billing lead, not the doctor.
Get the sampleStaffing platforms
Dental staffing platforms
Hygienist and assistant temp platforms like Cloud Dentistry and TempMee. The decision-maker is the office manager who has a chair empty Thursday morning. Speed of contact wins.
Get the sampleMarketing and growth
Dental marketing and SEO
Practice growth agencies, patient acquisition platforms, local SEO and review management vendors. The buyer is the owner-dentist at independent groups and the marketing director at PE-backed networks.
Get the sampleAdjacent universes built the same way: the broader by-industry email lists, the full dental practice directory, and the Orbital data hub.
The long version
Detail, on demand.
The public DSO rankings ship once a year. Workforce surveys ship every 18 to 24 months. Those are static lists of brand names with office counts, not maps of who actually picks up the phone at each office. The Orbital map refreshes monthly and resolves down to the decision-maker. For the underlying universe, see the full dental practice directory at /data/dental/.
How the group-practice count is built
- Start with the Orbital dental practice universe. We pull every active US dental practice from the Orbital data team's dental universe, then filter for multi-location groups and DSO-affiliated offices. Solo private practices are counted separately in our broader dental dataset.
- Reconcile against the wider universe. The group count is set against the broader universe of 161,817 total US dental practices and roughly 202,536 professionally active US dentists, of which about 13 percent sit inside a DSO or large group.
- Resolve each office to a parent. A Heartland-supported office is owned by the doctor on paper, but the buyer for PMS, imaging, and supply usually sits at the DSO regional level. We map both the office and the parent, and we keep them linked.
- Find the named decision-maker. Regional director at a DSO, office manager at an independent group, owner-dentist at a partner-owned group. We pull a verified email and direct dial for each one. Most of these people have no LinkedIn profile to scrape.
- Drop the closed pins. DSO consolidation moves fast. MB2 alone added more than 100 affiliations in the past 18 months. Published lists carry stale brands for a year. We refresh monthly.
If you want the source breakdown for a specific parent DSO or state, ask. We do not hide the working.
Ranked by US supported-office count. One PE firm sometimes backs multiple DSO brands. The practice owner is almost never the corporate parent. MB2 Dental ranks 8th here by office count; by affiliation count it ranks higher because of its doctor-partner equity model.
| # | Group | US offices | Parent / note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Heartland Dental | ~1,800 | PE-backed (KKR, since 2018). Effingham, IL. Largest US DSO by supported-office count. Doctor-led ownership model, with Heartland providing back-office support across more than 38 states. |
| 2 | Aspen Dental | ~1,100 | PE-backed (Leonard Green, since 2015). Syracuse, NY. Branded retail-style model focused on edentulous and underserved markets. Sister brands include WellNow Urgent Care and ClearChoice. |
| 3 | Pacific Dental Services | ~950 | Privately held. Irvine, CA. Modern Dentistry brand. Aggressive Sun Belt expansion. Pioneered same-day crown CEREC integration at scale. |
| 4 | Western Dental and Orthodontics | ~370 | PE-backed (New Mountain Capital). Concentrated in California, Arizona, Nevada, and Texas. Heavy Medicaid and underserved-market exposure. |
| 5 | Smile Brands | ~430 | PE-backed (TSG Consumer Partners, since 2019). Irvine, CA. Operates under multiple regional brands including Bright Now Dental and Castle Dental. |
| 6 | Affordable Care | ~430 | PE-backed (Berkshire Partners). Morrisville, NC. Affordable Dentures and Implants brand. Specialty focus on dentures and full-arch implants. |
| 7 | Dental Care Alliance | ~390 | PE-backed (Mubadala, since 2021). Sarasota, FL. One of the oldest US DSOs (founded 1991). Multi-brand portfolio. |
| 8 | MB2 Dental | ~700 | PE-backed (Charlesbank). Carrollton, TX. Doctor-partner equity model. Fastest-growing top-10 DSO by affiliation count in 2024-2025. Ranks 8th here by supported-office methodology; higher by affiliation count. |
| 9 | North American Dental Group | ~280 | PE-backed (Jacobs Holding). New Kensington, PA. Multi-brand portfolio including Refresh Dental, Dental365, and Riccobene Associates. |
| 10 | Mortenson Dental Partners | ~140 | PE-backed (Charlesbank, alongside MB2). Louisville, KY. Concentrated in Kentucky, Indiana, Tennessee, and Ohio. |
Counts marked “~” are approximate. The parent PE owner is the cap-table owner; the operating company often keeps the founding doctor in a leadership role for several years after the sale. The buyer for your PMS, imaging, supply, or marketing software is rarely the corporate logo. It is the regional director or office manager who runs a cluster of offices for that parent. Source: Orbital data team, June 2026 snapshot.
California, Texas, Florida, and New York carry roughly 38 percent of US group-practice offices between them. The Sun Belt has been the fastest-growing region for DSO expansion, driven by patient migration and looser corporate-practice-of-dentistry rules than in the Northeast. Arizona overindexes because Pacific Dental Services pushed hard into the Phoenix metro early.
| # | State | Group offices | Per 100k residents |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | California | 1,520 | 3.9 |
| 2 | Texas | 1,140 | 3.7 |
| 3 | Florida | 880 | 3.8 |
| 4 | New York | 760 | 3.9 |
| 5 | Pennsylvania | 510 | 3.9 |
| 6 | Ohio | 470 | 4.0 |
| 7 | Illinois | 450 | 3.6 |
| 8 | Georgia | 430 | 3.8 |
| 9 | North Carolina | 410 | 3.8 |
| 10 | Arizona | 390 | 5.2 |
| 11 | Michigan | 340 | 3.4 |
| 12 | Virginia | 320 | 3.6 |
| 13 | New Jersey | 300 | 3.2 |
| 14 | Tennessee | 290 | 4.0 |
| 15 | Washington | 270 | 3.4 |
Counts rounded to the nearest ten for display. The dataset itself resolves to the practice address. Source: Orbital data team, June 2026 snapshot.
We believe
If you sell into dental groups and you only target the top three DSOs, you are walking past 9,400 buyers.
The pitch deck story for the last decade has been DSO consolidation. PE rolls up dental, the top names get bigger, the independents disappear. The math does not support it. Roughly 13 percent of US dentists sit inside a DSO today. Ten years ago it was 7 percent. That is doubling, in absolute terms, off a small base, while solo and small-group practices still hold the other 87 percent of the workforce. The top 10 DSOs run about 17 percent of group practice locations. The other 9,400 group operators sit with two, three, ten, sometimes thirty practices each, and almost none of them show up in the published DSO rankings.
One of those operators reached out to us last quarter. He runs nine offices across three states under a doctor-partner model, no PE involvement, growing two offices a year. His PMS vendor had not called him in two years. His imaging supplier was still selling him into one office at a time as if he were a solo. His marketing agency thought he was a single location. Every meeting his team booked, he had to source himself. The vendors were not lazy. They were searching for Heartland and Aspen in their CRM, and his name simply was not in the list.
Do not buy this if any of the following are true.
You only sell at the corporate level into the top three DSOs. If your motion is one annual contract with Heartland, one with Aspen, and one with Pacific Dental Services, you do not need a practice-by-practice map. You need three account executives. Save your budget.
You are looking for solo private-practice dentists. This is the multi-location group and DSO universe. The broader population of professionally active US dentists, including solo practices, is a different dataset. Ask and we will route you to the right one.
You need clinical outcomes or claims data. Patient cohorts, treatment outcomes, payer mix at the claim level. That lives with the carriers and with a handful of clinical-data vendors. We map the practice and the buyer, not the chart and the claim.
Your product is for patients. Find-a-dentist directories, patient acquisition for consumers, insurance shopping tools. The data here is operator-side, not patient-side.
Search “largest dental groups in the US” and the top results split between two shapes. Annual brand-level rankings of the top 10 DSOs, and workforce datasets on the dentist headcount. Both are useful. Both are also static lists of brand names with office counts. They tell you Heartland has roughly 1,800 supported offices. They do not tell you who at Heartland decides which intraoral scanner the Phoenix region buys next quarter. They do not tell you the names of the 9,400 smaller group operators outside the top 10. They do not refresh between annual cycles, which is awkward when MB2 Dental adds 100 affiliations in a year and a competitor closes 40.
The workforce view sits at about 202,536 professionally active US dentists, roughly 13 percent affiliated with a DSO or large group. That is the universe-of-people angle. It is also indexed to the person, not the practice, which means it is the wrong shape if your software is sold per office or per chair.
This is the gap Orbital was built for. We map the universe of US small and mid-market businesses, find the named decision-maker at each one, and validate the contact before it reaches you. What is specific to dental is the layer on top: parent DSO affiliation, specialty mix, practice size band, and whether the office is doctor-owned or fully corporate-operated.
Public DSO rankings and workforce datasets publish annually or biennially. For a vendor doing outbound this quarter, the question is which practices are open this Monday, which regional director took the new role last month, and whether the parent DSO got acquired in February. That is the gap a practice-by-practice, decision-maker-by-decision-maker map closes, and it is the gap brand-level ranking lists cannot close by design.
Questions
Before you ask sales about dental groups data.
How many dental groups are there in the US?
Our June 2026 practice-by-practice map covers the multi-location dental group segment, set against a broader universe of 161,817 total US dental practices. Of the roughly 202,536 professionally active US dentists, about 13 percent work inside a DSO or large group, which is the segment this page maps. The full group map spans organizations from national DSOs with hundreds of locations down to regional partner groups with two or three practices.
Who owns the largest dental group in the US?
Heartland Dental, backed by KKR, operates the largest US footprint at roughly 1,800 supported offices across more than 38 states. Aspen Dental follows with around 1,100 branded offices. Pacific Dental Services rounds out the top three at about 950. Even combined, the top 10 dental groups support roughly 17 percent of US group-practice locations. The market remains structurally fragmented.
How is your dental groups count different from public DSO rankings?
Public workforce sources count individual licensed dentists. Annual DSO rankings list brand names by office count. None of those resolves the practice down to the regional director, office manager, or owner-dentist who actually makes a software or supply decision. Orbital builds the list from practice-level signals refreshed against the universe of US small businesses, with the decision-maker contact on every record.
What percentage of US dentists work for a DSO?
Roughly 13 percent of US dentists are affiliated with a DSO or large group practice. That share has roughly doubled over the past decade, driven by private equity acquisitions of regional groups and new graduates joining DSO networks instead of buying solo practices. The other 87 percent of dentists still work in solo practices or small partner groups, which is where most of the buying decisions for clinical software, imaging, and supply still sit.
Which states have the most dental groups?
California has the largest concentration of group practices and DSO offices, followed by Texas, Florida, and New York. The Sun Belt has been the fastest-growing region for DSO expansion over the past five years, driven by population migration and lower regulatory friction on corporate practice of dentistry than in states like New Jersey and Rhode Island. Pacific Dental Services and Western Dental anchor the West Coast; Heartland and Aspen dominate the Midwest and Southeast.
Who buys dental groups data?
Vendors selling into dental practices. Practice management software vendors like Dentrix, Eaglesoft, and Curve. Dental imaging and CAD-CAM vendors. Dental supply distributors and specialty suppliers. Dental billing and revenue cycle teams. Dental staffing platforms. Dental marketing and SEO agencies. The common thread is that they need the named decision-maker, the regional director at a DSO or the owner-dentist at an independent group, not a generic practice address.
Can I filter dental groups by state, parent DSO, or specialty?
Yes. The export includes state, parent DSO affiliation, specialty mix (general, ortho, pedo, oral surgery, endo, perio), and practice size band. You can pull just California Pacific Dental Services offices, or just MB2 Dental affiliated practices in Texas, or just the Heartland offices that added an oral surgery chair in the past year.
When is dental groups data the wrong fit?
If you only sell at the corporate level into the top three DSOs, you need three contracts, not a practice-by-practice map. If your product is for consumers searching for a dentist, this is operator-side data, not consumer-side. If you need clinical outcomes data or insurance claims data, that lives with the carriers, not here. We map the practice, the parent, and the buyer, not the patient and not the claim.
See the dental groups dataset before you pay for it.
Tell us the parent DSOs, states, or specialty mixes you want. We send a free sample of around 100 verified decision-maker records you can check against your own pipeline. No commitment, no email-list back-and-forth.
Get the sample