Data Corrections Log

October 11, 2026 — Adult Medicaid dental dollar limits in eight states

Severity: high for Colorado, medium for the others. Affected the Colorado city pages (English and Spanish), the Missoula page, the Mississippi city and implant pages (English and Spanish), the state summaries on our free dental care directory and its open file us-free-dental-programs-by-state-2026.csv, the state guides, and the national table on Medicaid dental coverage by state.

What was wrong

• Colorado. We wrote that Health First Colorado has no annual limit on adult dental benefits. Since July 1, 2026, adults have a $3,000 yearly limit (July 1 to June 30); emergency services and dentures do not count toward it.
• Montana. Our Missoula page gave a $1,125 cap. The state cap on adult dental treatment is $1,205 a year, as our other Montana pages already said.
• West Virginia. One state summary described the $2,000 limit as annual. The law sets it at $2,000 per two-year budget period.
• South Carolina. The $1,000 limit was right, but we wrote that some preventive services are exempt. The state manual exempts diagnostic and adjunctive services, and counts the limit per state fiscal year.
• Mississippi. We wrote that the adult annual benefit maximum rose from $500 to $1,000 in September 2025. We found no source for that figure. The state administrative code covers adults for emergency care and for dental care linked to a medical or surgical treatment, and limits dental expenditures, orthodontia excluded, to $2,500 per beneficiary per state fiscal year.
• Connecticut, Iowa and New Hampshire. Our summaries and national table did not give the dollar limit: $1,000 a calendar year in Connecticut (can be exceeded for medical or dental necessity), $1,000 per fiscal year in Iowa's Dental Wellness Plan, $1,500 a year in New Hampshire.

How we found it

A cross-check of every adult cap we publish against the CareQuest Institute 2026 Medicaid Adult Dental Coverage Checker flagged the differences. We then corrected only what a state document confirms, read on October 11, 2026:

• Colorado: HCPF dental benefits page and HCPF provider bulletin B2600539 (June 2026).
• Montana: DPHHS Montana Healthcare Programs, dental.
• West Virginia: House Bill 4933 (2024), W. Va. Code §9-5-12a.
• South Carolina: SCDHHS dental provider manual.
• Connecticut: CTDHP adult benefit maximum FAQ and DSS provider bulletin 2022-55.
• Iowa: Iowa HHS Dental Wellness Plan member document.
• New Hampshire: NH DHHS, NH Smiles.
• Mississippi: Mississippi Administrative Code, Title 23, Part 204, Rule 1.1 and Rule 1.5 (reproduction by the Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School).

What changed

• The figures above now appear on the affected pages, in the directory file and in the national table. South Dakota ($2,000 a year), Massachusetts ($1,750 a year since August 1, 2026) and Nevada ($1,000 a calendar year since July 1, 2026) were checked against state documents and needed no change.

Still open

• The archived dataset us-dental-insurance-acceptance-by-state-2026.csv (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20666358) still carries the previous cap column (Montana $1,125, South Dakota $1,000, West Virginia $2,000 shown as yearly, no value for Colorado, Connecticut, Iowa, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Nevada and Mississippi). It will be corrected in version 1.1; until then, treat that column as superseded by this log.

October 2026 — Recall exam fees for British Columbia, Ontario and New Brunswick (Canada)

Severity: high. Affected the recall exam figure on our British Columbia, Ontario and New Brunswick pages, on the Canadian checkup, CDCP and province comparison pages (English and French), in the CDCP calculators, and in the Canadian open dataset canada-dental-cost-index-by-province-2026.csv (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20744781).

What was wrong

• British Columbia. We published a recall exam of $62.60 "under the BCDA 2026 Suggested Fee Guide". In that guide, $62.60 is code 01204 (Specific Examination). The recall exam, code 01202, is $42.90.
• Ontario. We published a recall exam of $96–$182. Both figures come from Toronto practices that relay the ODA guide, and both are new-patient or complete exams (code 01103), not recall exams. No public source we can cite gives the ODA recall fee (01202). The $139 midpoint was also used as the national maximum on several comparison pages.
• New Brunswick. We published a recall exam of $82, marked as an estimate, and wrote that the 2026 exam code was not published. The NBDS 2026 abbreviated guide lists code 01202 at $71.29. The $81.91 we had used was code 01101 from 2025.

How we found it

A page-by-page quality audit on October 2 read each provincial fee guide line by line (code, fee and label) against every recall exam figure we publish.

What changed

• British Columbia: $42.90 (code 01202) on the pages, in the calculators and in the dataset.
• New Brunswick: $71.29 (code 01202), now marked official, on the pages, in the calculators and in the dataset.
• Ontario: the recall exam figure is removed from the pages and comparisons. National ranges now run from $41 (Prince Edward Island) to $114 (top of Quebec's published range). In the dataset and the CDCP calculators, the Ontario row keeps $96–$182 only as an upper-bound estimate, now flagged is_estimate: true.

Still open

• The archived dataset under the DOI still carries the previous values for these three rows. They will be corrected in version 1.1 of the Canadian dataset; until then, treat them as superseded by this log.
• The national recall exam average ($58) is under review with the other Canadian national averages.

October 1, 2026 — Affordability Score description, CDCP calculators, Spanish Medicaid page and seven smaller fixes

Severity: high. Affected how we described our Affordability Score (methodology and home page, in English and Spanish, and one sentence on every state page), the CDCP calculators on 92 Canadian pages, and the Spanish Medicaid coverage page. It also records the reclassification of the adult Medicaid dental tier of seven states. No patient price figure in our datasets was changed. Separately, it records the Connecticut and Arizona Medicaid fee schedule rates that took effect on October 1, 2026.

What was wrong

Affordability Score. Our methodology page published a formula, (National_Avg / State_Avg × 70) + (Insurance_Coverage_Rate × 30), and said a score above 100 meant better value than the national average. That formula does not produce the scores we display. The displayed scores run from 10 to 73, so no state could ever exceed 100. Colour thresholds built for the wrong scale showed all 51 markets in red on the home page and labelled every state "Expensive" on its own page, including the states with the lowest prices. The third input was called an insurance coverage rate. It is a three-level tier, not a measured rate, and state pages printed it as "a coverage rate of 25%" (or 45%, or 75%).

CDCP calculators (Canada). The calculators computed the plan's payment as its share of the provincial fee guide. The CDCP pays its share of its own established fee, which is usually lower. At the 100% tier the calculators therefore showed "Your estimated cost $0" in cases where a patient billed at the provincial guide would owe a balance. For the 24 province-and-procedure pairs we can check against the CDCP Dental Benefit Grids we hold, 22 understated that balance, by about $4 to $1,150 (a ceramic crown in Ontario: about $555). Fifteen of the 90 pages carrying the main calculator had no warning about this.

Spanish Medicaid page. The state lists on /es/seguros/medicaid-dental/ did not match our English state table: Tennessee was listed as emergency-only, Nevada had not been moved after the September 27 correction, and the state counts were approximations. The page also carried two percentages with no source (the share of programs that treat implants as cosmetic, and the share of denials overturned on appeal).

Medicaid tier of seven states. Our national table (/en/medicaid-dental-coverage-by-state/) and the state-level data behind our state pages gave different adult Medicaid dental tiers to Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma and South Dakota. The national table showed Georgia and Missouri as emergency-only, Kentucky as limited and South Dakota as extensive. The state pages of Indiana, Kansas and Oklahoma, their Medicaid FAQ answers, their /en/full-coverage-dental-insurance/ pages and their API records called the adult benefit extensive, which overstated the coverage: Indiana and Oklahoma do not pay for adult root canals, Kansas does not for most adults, and Oklahoma does not pay for adult crowns. The national table also credited its four tier names to CareQuest Institute. They are the American Dental Association's 2008 categories; CareQuest's rubric defines only the "extensive" threshold.

Smaller errors.

• /en/dental-school-cost/ named "ADA survey data" as a source for private-practice averages. We do not use an ADA fee survey, as our methodology page states.
• The payment calculator replaced a 0% APR with 14.9%, so a 0% plan was shown with interest.
• The savings-plan check on /en/dental-savings-plans/ read an amount typed with a thousands separator ("1,200") as 1 and returned the wrong verdict.
• The home page said the three cheapest states were "17% below the national average" and the three most expensive "27% above". Each figure is true only for the first state of its group.
• State pages listed four questions in their FAQ structured data and displayed three.
• The calculator on the Spanish Medicare implants page opened on "insurance pays 50%", on a page that explains Original Medicare does not pay for implants.
• Our public sources registry (/data/sources_registry.json) contained garbled characters in place of §, — and ≠.

How we found it

A page-by-page quality audit started on September 29: the 61 most visited and template pages, and every calculator on the site. We recomputed each published formula from the underlying data file and replayed each calculator with test values. The CDCP comparison uses the grids we hold: Alberta and British Columbia 2025, Ontario 2024, general practitioner fees. For the seven Medicaid tiers, we read each state's own texts on September 30 (provider manuals, fee schedules, state plan pages, administrative rules and member benefit pages) in two passes, the second one set up to contradict the first.

What changed

• Affordability Score. The formula and the "above 100" statements are removed. The methodology now describes the score as it is: a legacy composite on a 0 to 100 scale, with 2026 values from 10 to 73, combining the observed implant price in the state, its cost-of-living index and a three-level coverage tier. Colours and labels use that scale. The "coverage rate" sentence is removed from the state pages. The score values themselves are unchanged in the CSV, the API and the archived dataset.
• CDCP calculators. Where we hold the CDCP grid (Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario; eight procedures), the plan's payment is now computed on the grid fee, labelled with the year of the grid, with a note when laboratory fees are extra. Everywhere else the estimate is unchanged, and the warning that a balance may be owed is now displayed inside the calculator on every page.
• Spanish Medicaid page. The state lists are rebuilt from the English table (35 extensive, 11 limited, 4 emergency-only, Alabama listed separately, after the reclassification below) and the two unsourced percentages are removed.
• Medicaid tier of seven states. Each state is now classified by the definition printed on the national table, in both places. In the national table, Georgia moves from emergency-only to extensive (benefit expanded on July 1, 2024; molar root canals are not covered), Kentucky from limited to extensive (benefit in effect since January 1, 2023, set by regulation since January 2, 2024; adult fluoride is not covered), Missouri from emergency-only to limited, and South Dakota from extensive to limited ($2,000 yearly maximum; root canals on front teeth only). In the state-level data, Indiana, Kansas and Oklahoma move from extensive to limited: their state pages and Medicaid FAQ answers (English and Spanish), their /en/full-coverage-dental-insurance/ pages, their /api/v1/state/ records (in.json, ks.json, ok.json) and the county atlas lookup now say limited. The state counts on the national table, /en/does-medicaid-cover-dental/, /en/cheapest-states-for-dentures/, /en/free-dental-care-by-state/ and the Spanish page follow. Georgia and Kentucky meet our printed definition but each misses one further measure of CareQuest's full rubric, and the table says so. The tier attribution is corrected, and "limited" is no longer described as usually carrying an annual cap: four of these five limited states have none.
• The smaller errors are corrected as described above.
• Medicaid fee schedules in force on October 1, 2026. Connecticut: the adult fee schedule is updated from Provider Bulletin 2026-46 (revised), effective October 1, 2026. The porcelain/ceramic crown (D2740) is now listed at $523.25 for adults, so Connecticut now appears in the crown ranking of the State Medicaid Dental Fee Index 2026; the median adult fee for that code moves from $554.80 across 33 jurisdictions to $552.40 across 34. Adult root canal rates are unchanged. Codes the bulletin pays only for children, and codes it lists as manually priced, are not shown as adult fees. Arizona: 8 codes previously paid "By Report" now carry a fixed rate from October 1, 2026, taken from the AHCCCS FY27 workbook as republished on September 24, 2026. Our fee index page had reported that the state notice and the first version of that workbook disagreed on 3 codes; the republished workbook matches the notice.

Still open

• We cannot fully document how the 51 Affordability Score values were originally calculated. The score is under review; we will record here whether it is kept, rebuilt or retired.
• Ontario's grid is the 2024 edition and the provincial guide is 2026, so the Ontario balance shown is slightly overstated. The label states the year.
• The archived dataset us-dental-insurance-acceptance-by-state-2026.csv is published under a permanent DOI and still carries the previous tier for Indiana, Kansas, Oklahoma and Nevada. The four rows will be corrected in version 1.1 of the dataset; until then, treat them as superseded by this log and by the /api/v1/state/ records.
• The downloadable fact sheets for Indiana, Kansas and Oklahoma (/reports/state/) and the national report PDF were generated before this correction and still print the previous tier.
• The Indiana, Kansas and Oklahoma rows of us-dental-deserts-atlas-2026.csv, which the site regenerates, now carry the corrected tier ahead of any new version of the archived dataset.
• The legacy Affordability Score still uses, for Georgia and South Dakota, a coverage level that does not match their corrected tier. We have left the score values untouched until the review above is settled.

September 29, 2026 — Medicare implants page and hard-coded statistics on two guides

Severity: medium. Affected /en/medicare-dental-implants/, /en/cheapest-dental-implants-usa/, their Spanish versions, and one score on the editorial policy page.

What was wrong

The Medicare implants page never displayed its own content: a shared template replaced it with a generic implant guide. Two statistics were hard-coded for every procedure on these guides, "Success Rate 98% — Clinically Proven" and "Recovery 3-5 Days". We are a pricing and market research team and make no clinical claims. When we restored the Medicare page we found its dormant text was out of date: it gave the 2024 Medicare Part B premium ($174.70) and said "97% of plans" include dental, and it carried cost ranges with no source.

How we found it

The same audit: the page title and the visible text did not match.

What changed

The Medicare page now shows its own content, with the 2026 Part B premium ($202.90 a month, CMS) and the 2026 figure for dental in Medicare Advantage (about 98% of enrollees in individual plans are in a plan that offers some dental coverage, KFF). The unsourced ranges and the two hard-coded statistics are removed. Two scores we had displayed without any measurement behind them (95/100 and 100/100) are removed as well.

September 28, 2026 — Medicaid FAQ answer on the 51 state pages, English and Spanish

Severity: high. Affected one FAQ answer, and its FAQPage structured data, on every state page (50 states and DC, in English and Spanish). No price figure was affected.

What was wrong

The answer to "Does Medicaid cover dental work in [state]?" was the same sentence on every state page: Medicaid typically covers "emergency extractions for adults". Our own state tier table classifies 46 of the 51 markets as extensive or limited, so for those states the answer contradicted the rest of the page and understated what adult Medicaid members can get. That included Nevada, which we had corrected everywhere else the day before. The same FAQ block also said "Based on our 2026 survey, smaller cities and suburbs often offer prices 15-20% lower than major metro centers." No survey of ours supports that figure.

How we found it

Checking a MassHealth notice published on September 25, 2026 against our Massachusetts page. The body of the page was right (extensive adult coverage, $1,750 yearly limit since August 1, 2026, implants excluded), but the FAQ answer below it still described an emergency-only benefit. The sentence came from a template shared by all state pages.

What changed

The Medicaid answer is now generated from the same state tier table as the rest of the site, so it matches each state's tier (extensive, limited, emergency-only or none) and states the official yearly limit where one exists: $1,750 in Massachusetts since August 1, 2026 and $1,000 in Nevada since July 1, 2026. The unsupported survey figure has been removed and replaced with a general statement that carries no number.

September 27, 2026 — Nevada adult Medicaid dental coverage, nine pages and the state API record

Severity: high. Affected the adult Medicaid coverage tier for Nevada on nine pages, the /api/v1/state/nv.json record, the county atlas and the Nevada fact sheet. No price figure was affected.

What was wrong

Nevada was classified emergency-only for adult Medicaid dental. That tier had been correct for years, but it stopped being correct on July 1, 2026. Nine pages, the state API record, the county atlas layer and the Nevada state fact sheet all carried the stale tier, and one of them served it inside FAQPage structured data. Two Nevada city pages had already been written with the newer, broader benefit, so the site contradicted itself.

How we found it

A routine check of federal Medicaid State Plan Amendments against our state tier table. CMS approved Nevada SPA NV-26-0006 on May 14, 2026, effective July 1, 2026, expanding the adult (21+) dental benefit from emergency-only to diagnostic, preventive, periodontal and restorative care. The statutory basis is Nevada SB 385 (2023 session) and budget item E267 (2025 session); the Nevada Health Authority put the number of adults affected at more than 374,500.

What changed

Nevada now carries the limited tier, with the official annual maximum recorded as $1,000 per calendar year effective July 1, 2026. The covered list is exams (two routine per year, one comprehensive every three years), two cleanings per year, silver diamine fluoride, periodontal treatment, fillings and crowns. Emergency and palliative treatment, and dentures a dentist deems medically necessary, sit outside the annual cap. Endodontics — root canals — and non-emergency extractions remain excluded from the adult benefit, which is why the tier is limited and not extensive. Implants are still not covered. The separate fact that 21.9% of Nevada dentists accept Medicaid patients, the lowest share of the 51 markets we measure, is unchanged.

The downloadable Nevada fact sheet still carries the old tier

/reports/state/nevada-dental-fact-sheet-2026.pdf was generated before this correction and has not been regenerated, so treat its Medicaid line as superseded by this entry. The same applies to the Nevada rows of us-dental-deserts-atlas-2026.csv, which the site regenerates and which now carry the corrected tier ahead of any new dataset version.

The open dataset is not yet updated

us-dental-insurance-acceptance-by-state-2026.csv is published under a permanent DOI, so the file served here still matches the deposited version byte for byte and still shows Nevada as emergency-only. We do not silently edit a file that other people cite. The corrected row, together with the annual-cap column, will ship as version 1.1 of the dataset with its own DOI. Until then, treat the Nevada row of that CSV as superseded by this entry and by /api/v1/state/nv.json.

September 11, 2026 — North Carolina Medicaid adult dental coverage, five city pages

Severity: medium. Affected text on five North Carolina city pages (Charlotte, Durham, Greensboro, Raleigh, Wilmington). No price, dataset or download was affected.

What was wrong

Three of the five pages described adult NC Medicaid dental coverage as "essentially emergency-only" or "oriented to urgent care and extractions", and two of them said Blue Cross NC had administered "the dental benefit" since January 1, 2026. The two other pages said implants could be covered in some medically necessary cases. The five pages therefore contradicted each other, and all five contradicted the program's own policy.

How we found it

While building a county-level North Carolina page from NC OSBM LINC open data, we cross-checked every NC Medicaid statement on the site against NC Medicaid Clinical Coverage Policy 4A (Dental Services, amended December 15, 2023). The Blue Cross NC administration change that took effect January 1, 2026 concerns the dental benefits of the Healthy Blue + Medicare dual-eligible plan, not the NC Medicaid dental program.

What changed

All five pages now state what the policy states: adults are covered for exams, X-rays, a cleaning every six months, fillings, extractions, root canals on front teeth and complete or partial dentures; implants, lab-made crowns, bridges and inlays are listed as not covered, and premolar or molar root canals are limited to beneficiaries under 21. The Blue Cross NC sentence was removed. The pages' review date is now September 11, 2026.

July 13, 2026 — Per-state braces and veneer figures were derived, not observed

Severity: high. Affected our published dataset, four pages, and one downloadable report.

What was wrong

Our per-state figures for braces and veneers were not observed prices. They were computed from our implant series by a fixed multiplier — braces were exactly 0.80 × the state implant average, veneers exactly 0.25 × it, in all 51 markets. The same applied to the low/high bands (0.70× and 1.40× the average).

The practical effect: every procedure on this site shared the same state ranking. Whatever we published as "the cheapest states for veneers" was, mathematically, just the cheapest states for implants wearing a different label. Our "composite" Cost Index had the same flaw — because two of its three inputs were multiples of the third, it reduced algebraically to a function of the implant price alone.

This was not disclosed anywhere. Our methodology page described these as observed averages and named the ADA, FAIR Health and CMS as sources. That was inaccurate.

How we found it

An internal consistency check flagged that our published dataset (national braces average $3,606) contradicted our own article pages (~$5,000). Investigating which was right, we found the ratio between the braces and implant columns was constant to four decimal places across all 51 states — the signature of a derived column, not a measured one.

Why it matters — the data refutes the shortcut

We then compared five independently sourced state-level price series (implants, braces, veneers, crowns and dentures) across all 51 markets. Dental prices do not share a common geography. They fall into at least three regimes that barely correlate:

• Restorative work (implants, crowns, dentures) is tightly coupled: 0.93–0.96. A state cheap for one really is cheap for the others.
• Orthodontics is independent of everything else (0.04). It is a specialist market with its own economics.
• Cosmetic work is nearly independent too (~0.18). Veneer prices correlate with a state's cost of living at just r = 0.07, against r = 0.836 for implants.

So deriving braces from implants was not merely imprecise — it was structurally incapable of being right.

What was actually affected, and what was not

Our implant series turned out to be genuine. Validated against an independent source (ASQ360°/CareCredit), it agrees at a Spearman rank correlation of 0.945. Because restorative procedures cluster so tightly, the rankings we published for crowns and dentures — although derived — happen to land within 0.91 of the real thing.

What changed

• Removed the derived braces_avg_usd and veneer_avg_usd columns from the published dataset. The open dataset now contains only our own observed implant series.
• Renamed the composite index to the Restorative Cost Index, which is what it actually measures. It is no longer used to rank orthodontic or cosmetic procedures.
• Rebuilt the braces, veneers, crown and denture state figures on observed prices from the ASQ360° / CareCredit Average Procedural Cost Study, cited and linked wherever displayed.
• Rewrote the cheapest states for veneers page entirely — its ranking and its central explanation were both wrong.
• Corrected the methodology page, which had listed data sources we do not in fact use.
• Issued a corrected version of the dataset on Zenodo. The DOI is versioned; the original record remains citable, and the correction is documented in its changelog.

If you cited our data

If you cited the national braces average ($3,606) or any per-state braces or veneer figure from our dataset published before July 13, 2026, those figures were wrong and should not be used. The correct sourcing is set out on each page. We are sorry — and we would rather tell you than let it stand.

Questions or a correction to report: research@realdentalcosts.com.