How to Find Out Who Owns Your Dentist
You’re probably here because you care who owns a dental practice near you. There’s a way to find out who owns your dentist's office. It involves a federal database, your state's business registry, and a careful read of the privacy notice on the clipboard. But it shouldn’t require any of that.
You can start with the National Provider Identifier registry. This is a free public database run by Medicare. Every dental office that bills insurance has an organizational NPI. The record lists the practice's legal entity name separately from the name on the sign. Search "Aspen Dental" there and the first result comes back as 32 DENTAL, LLC, doing business as Aspen Dental, with an authorized official whose job title is "Provider Relations."
That's three useful facts in one free record: 1) the legal owner isn't named after the practice; 2) the familiar brand is a registered trade name; and 3) the person who certified the filing works in a corporate function rather than at a chair.
Keep scrolling and you'll also find entries where the authorized official is a named dentist listed as "Owner." Which is exactly why one record is a starting point and not an answer.
The next layer is your state, and this is where it gets uneven. Roughly a dozen states keep something genuinely useful. California requires any dentist practicing under a brand name to hold a fictitious name permit. That public record ties the brand to a named, licensed owner. Texas requires dental support organizations to register with the Secretary of State and disclose anyone holding 10% or more. Nevada requires practice management companies to list every office they manage. Most states skip steps like these because their dental boards license people, not businesses.
Then there's the clipboard. Federal privacy rules only let legally separate practices share a single HIPAA notice when those practices are under common ownership or control. So if the privacy notice you sign names other offices, or says it applies to "us and our affiliates," the practice has told you in writing that it belongs to something larger. It's the most legally solid ownership signal a patient can get without filing a records request.
It's worth knowing what doesn't work, too. Medicare's PECOS enrollment system doesn't publish ownership data for dentists. You can’t cross-reference the tax ID on your billing statement, since those are masked in the public registry. The DSO trade association's member directory is also locked out of public sight.
Add it up and that's a tedious afternoon spent answering a question that should take one sentence at the front desk. Almost nobody is going to do it. Which is precisely how ownership stays invisible.
So we did it, and we keep doing it. IndependentDentists.net currently lists hundreds of practices across the United States. We checked each one against what the practice says on its own website. Every listing shows you the evidence we used to verify ownership.
When a site states plainly that a named dentist bought or founded the practice, we mark it high confidence. When a site only says "locally owned" without naming anyone, we say so and mark it lower. We would rather hand you a thin answer honestly than a confident one we can't back up.
We're nowhere near finished. Even our best-covered states hold far more independent practices than we've catalogued. There is no public master list of independently owned dental practices in this country. That absence is the whole problem, and filling it is slow, manual work that only scales if people pitch in.
If you own an independent practice, add it. If your dentist is independent and isn't here, tell us. And if we've gotten something wrong (a practice that has since sold, an owner who retired, a classification that no longer fits) tell us that too. We'll correct it.
Ownership changes constantly. A directory nobody corrects is a directory that slowly turns into fiction.
The disclosure norm is starting to shift on its own. In May 2026, California's attorney general settled with Aspen Dental Management and required the company to clearly identify the actual practice owner in its advertising. That's one company, in one state. Until it's every company in every state, this is what we have: a list built by hand, kept honest by the people who use it.