NYC Open Data dental map: dental X-ray registrations vs Medicaid enrollees by community district

Datasets used, all from NYC Open Data and downloaded October 24, 2026: Radiation Producing Equipment (Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), i595-2byq), Cash Assistance, Medicaid, and SNAP - Borough/Community District Report (HRA, 5awp-wfkt) and Citywide HRA- Administered Medicaid Enrollees (HRA, 33db-aeds). File checksums, every transformation and the code are in How we built it.

Registrations and enrollees, borough by borough

The question this page asks of the data is a simple one: where is dental X-ray equipment registered, and where do Medicaid enrollees live? Grouped by the borough of each community district, September 2026:

Manhattan holds 1,340 of the 4,152 registrations matched to a district, for 195,362 resident enrollees; the Bronx holds 366 for 392,436. Across single districts the spread is wider still: Manhattan community district 5 (board 105) has 427 registrations for 6,058 enrollees, or 14.2 per registration, while Brooklyn community district 16 (board 316) has 6 for 31,336, or 5,222.7 per registration.

Read these ratios as a map of where equipment and enrollees sit, not as a measure of access. Enrollees are counted at home and equipment where it is used, so commercial districts with few residents show low ratios. The registry describes equipment, not dentists or their hours, and it holds no field on insurance or payment.

HRA Medicaid enrollment in NYC, 2007-2026

HRA-administered Medicaid enrollment peaked at 3,120,366 in January 2013. The latest month in the citywide file, August 2026, counts 1,401,037: 55.1% below the peak, and 163,618 people (10.46%) fewer than in August 2025, when the count was 1,564,655. The dataset measures enrollees administered by HRA, which is the figure shown here.

The district file is quarterly and already includes September 2026; the citywide file is monthly and runs to August 2026. Each figure on this page names the file and month it comes from.

What the registry measures

The Radiation Producing Equipment dataset is the Health Department's register of X-ray and other radiation equipment. Its latest edition on NYC Open Data is dated January 30, 2020, so the map shows equipment as registered at that date, a stable picture of where dental imaging is set up across the city.

• A registration is a piece of registered equipment, not an office. The 4,159 dental registrations sit at 3,944 distinct addresses; 86 addresses have both a standard dental X-ray and a cone-beam CT unit.
• Two dental facility types. "Dental X-Ray" (3,871 records) and "Dental CBCT X-Ray" (288 records).
• Equipment, not insurance. Whether an office takes Medicaid is answered by the official provider lists (see the FAQ below).

How we built it

1. Download. The three CSV files and their metadata were downloaded from the NYC Open Data (Socrata) API on October 24, 2026 and archived unchanged, each with its SHA-256 checksum:

2. Dental filter. A record is dental when its Facility Type field is exactly "Dental X-Ray" or "Dental CBCT X-Ray": 4,159 of 6,444 rows. The other 2,285 rows keep the facility type the source gives them: Non-Hospital X-Ray (1,294), Podiatric X-Ray (355), Radioactive Materials (284), Veterinary X-Ray (212), Hospital X-Ray (90), Linear Accelerator (50). 21 of those rows carry a dental office name, mostly under "Non-Hospital X-Ray"; we leave them as published, so the dental count is a floor.
3. Borough. The registry's BOROUGH field holds 61 distinct spellings, including neighborhood names such as FLUSHING or ASTORIA, and Manhattan appears as NEW YORK; 1,162 dental records carry a value other than the five borough names. We therefore read the borough from the first digit of the Community Board code (1 Manhattan, 2 Bronx, 3 Brooklyn, 4 Queens, 5 Staten Island) and checked it against the NTA code and the census-tract county: 4,150 records agree on all three, 4 differ and stay under their community board.
4. Records without a district. Missing values are written as the text NULL in the source. 5 dental records have no community board, census tract or NTA code (their postal names are Pipersville, Pelham, Great Neck and New Hyde Park), so they are not placed in any district. The Council District field is NULL for 19 dental records; we use community districts, the unit the Medicaid file is published in.
5. Join. Each community board code is matched to the district code of 5awp-wfkt (101 = M01, 201 = B01, 301 = K01, 401 = Q01, 501 = S01). All 59 districts have at least one registration; 4,152 records are matched and 2 sit on board codes with no district row (164 and 483).
6. Medicaid columns. Districts use the column "Borough Consultation Total Medicaid Enrollees" for September 2026. The chart uses the total column of 33db-aeds: in 235 of 236 months it equals cash assistance + SSI + medical assistance only, and the nursing home column is a separate count, so it is not added to the total.
7. Cross-check. Where both HRA files cover the same month, we compared the sum of the 59 districts with the citywide total (district sum vs citywide): December 2025: 1,493,861 vs 1,493,862; March 2026: 1,452,358 vs 1,452,358; June 2026: 1,403,317 vs 1,403,317.
8. Fields not used. Office names and street addresses (the page reports districts, not offices), latitude and longitude, BIN, BBL and the raw BOROUGH field; in 5awp-wfkt, the SNAP and cash assistance columns.
9. Code. The scripts that rebuild every number on this page from the archived files are public: github.com/tresor4k/realdentalcosts-opendata (nyc folder). The page reads one generated file; no figure is typed by hand.
10. AI assistance. AI coding tools helped write the scripts and draft this text. The dental filter, the join key and the exclusions above were chosen after inspecting the raw files, and each check listed here is reproducible from the scripts.

Frequently asked questions

The official provider search is the NYS Medicaid Enrolled Provider Lookup; benefits are described on health.ny.gov.

Related guides

• NYC Medicaid dental coverage: what is covered and the official routes to care
• Dental costs in New York City
• Dental costs in New York State
• US Dental Deserts Atlas, county by county