There is a state-by-state answer to this question and it is a public record, but it does not come from a table like this one — it comes from your own state's Medicaid programme, which sets its dental fees and publishes them. What a measurement across practices can add is the payer-level number: what a Medicaid benefit manager actually allowed on adjudicated claims. Across the practices Kaylie serves, in the twelve months to 10 September 2026, 19 Medicaid and Medicaid-managed-care payers produced 78,194 adjudicated claim lines, 33,200 of them carrying a stated allowed amount on twenty common codes. Eleven of those numbers clear the bar for publication and ten are printed below. None of them is a per-state rate, and no state in this measurement has enough independent practices behind it to produce one.
What we measured
DentaQuest's government plans are the one Medicaid payer here billed by enough separate practices to publish. Median allowed amount per code, pooled across every state contract these practices bill under:
| Code | Procedure | Median allowed | Range | Lines | Practices | Offices | States pooled |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| D0120 | Periodic exam | $29.40 | $18.40–$51.42 | 462 | 7 | 23 | 8 |
| D0150 | Comprehensive exam | $34.64 | $17.00–$83.63 | 255 | 5 | 21 | 6 |
| D0210 | Full-mouth series | $86.54 | $12.10–$131.35 | 115 | 5 | 20 | 6 |
| D0274 | Four bitewings | $27.26 | $2.25–$61.36 | 238 | 6 | 18 | 7 |
| D1110 | Adult prophylaxis | $63.80 | $30.00–$159.00 | 280 | 7 | 19 | 8 |
| D2391 | Posterior composite — 1 surface | $107.82 | $30.57–$146.47 | 183 | 5 | 10 | 6 |
| D2392 | Posterior composite — 2 surfaces | $84.00 | $52.00–$204.91 | 241 | 6 | 12 | 7 |
| D4341 | Scaling and root planing per quadrant | $220.70 | $34.50–$226.30 | 61 | 5 | 10 | 6 |
| D7140 | Simple extraction | $106.89 | $45.00–$144.00 | 298 | 5 | 14 | 6 |
| D7210 | Surgical extraction | $143.40 | $67.32–$242.32 | 414 | 7 | 24 | 8 |
Adjudicated claim lines with a stated allowed amount above zero, date of service 1 September 2025 to 9 September 2026, measured 10 September 2026. Denied lines are excluded — a denial records no allowance, and counting one as a zero drags a median toward the floor. A porcelain crown row (D2740) cleared the practice count and is withheld: its median sits far enough out of line with the rest that it may have been priced as a percentage of the practice's own fee rather than off a fee schedule, and that has not been established.
Read one thing in that table before anything else: the two-surface posterior composite allows a lower median than the one-surface composite. No single fee schedule prices a larger filling below a smaller one. That inversion is the pooling — six or seven separate state contracts sitting inside one column — and it is the reason none of these numbers is a rate you can hold a payer to.
Why there is no state column
State is knowable here. The state a practice bills from is recorded for 414 of 449 offices and on 99.92% of these claim lines, and it separates the payers cleanly: DentaQuest's government plans reach nine states, Envolve three, LIBERTY four. Attribution is not the problem. Sample concentration is.
| Grain | Combinations | Backed by 5+ independent practices | Backed by exactly 1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Payer × code | 238 | 11 | 174 |
| Payer × code × state | 378 | 0 | 375 |
The best state-level cell in the whole measurement rests on three practices. Twelve of the 19 Medicaid payers are a single practice organization's entire book of business, including the largest by volume — 12,425 priced lines, all from a single office. Five of the state programmes an office would most want here produce no lines at all: MO HealthNet, North Carolina, Medi-Cal, MassHealth and Montana. Vermont, Wisconsin and Alabama each produce lines from exactly one practice, so their prices are withheld rather than shown.
The trap that would have faked a fifty-state table
Counting offices instead of practices passes 95 state-level cells. That is where a plausible state-by-state Medicaid table comes from, and it is fabricated. Fifteen offices of one practice group bill under one contract at one price: that is one observation printed fifteen times, not fifteen practices agreeing. The tell is visible in the submitted fees. The same submitted-fee medians recur, to the cent, under three unrelated Medicaid payer names — one practice's own fee book showing through three payer columns. Those figures are not published here, for the same reason the state rates are not: they belong to one practice.
Where the real number for your state is
Medicaid dental fees are set by the state and published by it. That is the structural difference from commercial dentistry: a commercial carrier's contracted fee schedule is confidential under the provider agreement and no honest page will show you one, while a state Medicaid schedule is a public record you are entitled to read in full, code by code, with its effective date on it. Get it from your state's Medicaid dental programme or from the benefit manager administering it, and read the effective date before you use it.
This page deliberately prints no state figure. A Medicaid rate copied out of a third-party table is how an office ends up estimating against a schedule that was superseded, and a superseded rate looks exactly like a current one.
What to do
- Work from your state's published schedule, not from a national table. It is the only document that binds the programme, and it is free.
- Check the effective date, then check it again next year. State schedules are revised by the state, on the state's timetable.
- Treat a benefit manager's name as a contract, not a price. DentaQuest, LIBERTY, Envolve, Scion and UnitedHealthcare Community Plan administer separate contracts in separate states. The same payer name allowed $2.25 and $61.36 for four bitewings inside this one measurement.
- Verify your own carrier mapping. In this measurement, 62 of 68 lines filed under one state-named Medicaid plan came from offices in a different state — a mapping error in the practice's software, not a cross-border payment. A wrong plan name on the ledger produces a wrong expected fee on every claim under it.
- Do not use another office's allowed amounts as your expected rate. They are that office's contract.
Numbers last refreshed September 2026.