1,916 NPI-registered dental providers across Arkansas. 158 DSO-affiliated. The 34th largest dental workforce in the United States.
On local DSO competition, demographics, provider scarcity, and retirement-driven supply, Arkansas positions average against the public national benchmark for general dental practices (2.5-5x EBITDA, 65-85% of collections).
Market-attractiveness positioning vs the public national benchmark, derived from local competition, demographics, and consolidation. Not a transaction comp and not a practice-specific valuation. Apply to the practice's own normalized financials. Benchmark ranges are public (Levin, FOCUS, BizBuySell).
Largest dental support organizations ranked by provider count across Arkansas locations. Canonicalized across legal- entity variations so franchise rollups display as one brand.
| Rank | DSO brand | Providers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Arkansas Dentistry and Braces | 43 |
| 2 | Heartland Dental | 24 |
| 3 | Aspen Dental | 13 |
| 4 | Lumio Dental | 11 |
| 5 | MB2 Dental | 7 |
| 6 | Higginbotham Dental Group | 7 |
| 7 | Smiles of Arkansas Dental | 7 |
| 8 | Affordable Dentures | 7 |
Highest-density dental markets in Arkansas. Pin-drop each metro on the map in the dashboard to scope by 25-mile radius or specialty mix.
Top dental specialties practicing in Arkansas by provider count.
Arkansas dental practices grouped by size bucket. Solo practitioners are typically the highest acquisition value for brokers and DSO biz dev teams; large groups carry the highest-volume supply-rep accounts.
Structural context for the 1,916 providers above: DSO landscape, regulatory baseline, Medicaid reimbursement, workforce outlook, trigger-event detail, and the data refresh cadence behind every count on this page.
Arkansas is the thirty-third-most-populous state. The 1,916 dental providers tracked on this page concentrate in two main metro anchors: the Little Rock-North Little Rock metropolitan area in central Arkansas and the Northwest Arkansas region (Fayetteville- Springdale-Rogers-Bentonville), which has grown rapidly due to the corporate-headquarters cluster around Walmart, J.B. Hunt, and Tyson Foods. Fort Smith and Jonesboro serve as secondary markets.
DSO penetration in Arkansas runs at approximately 8.2%, in the middle range of our data set. Arkansas Dentistry and Braces leads with 43 providers, followed by Heartland Dental at 24. What makes Arkansas distinctive is that the leading chain is Arkansas-native rather than a national DSO, with Heartland Dental holding a secondary position.
Arkansas dental licensing is administered by the Arkansas State Board of Dental Examiners. ProviderSignal pulls Arkansas license data from the board's public license verification portal on a weekly cadence, with a separate monthly detail-page refresh that captures expiration dates and license issue dates. The dataset includes license number, current status, license issue date, address, and disciplinary action history.
Arkansas Medicaid dental is administered through the Arkansas Department of Human Services Division of Medical Services. The fee schedule we ingest covers 109 D-codes split across two age-based localities: AR Medicaid Dental FFS Adult and AR Medicaid Dental FFS Child. Adult coverage is more limited than pediatric.
The fee schedule refreshes on a roughly quarterly cadence. Our pipeline re-checks the Arkansas Medicaid source every 90 days.
Retirement risk in Arkansas is computed against the License First Issued date published by the Arkansas Board. The 393 providers flagged on this page are those whose license tenure places them in the cohort statistically most likely to retire or sell their practice within the next 5 years.
Arkansas's only ADA-accredited dental school is the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) College of Health Professions dental hygiene program. The state does not have an in-state DDS dental school, so Arkansas dentists train primarily at out-of-state programs (UT Memphis, LSU, Texas A&M) and return to Arkansas for associateships.
The dashboard's trigger feed for Arkansas concentrates on the Little Rock and Northwest Arkansas regions. Northwest Arkansas in particular shows higher new-associate landing rates than the state average, driven by the corporate-headquarters-cluster population inflow.
The Arkansas data on this page is built from five sources, each refreshed on its own cadence:
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