How We Review and Rate Dental Insurance Companies (2024)

State Availability

We collected data on how many states each company offers a PPO plan in, as well as Washington, D.C., from company websites, through partnerships, and from media contacts. We scored state availability on a continuous scale, awarding companies a 1 when their PPO plan was available in all states, plus D.C., and less than 1 for those with less than full availability.

State availability was scored a little differently for our articles on implants, braces, no waiting periods, and no annual maximums. We looked at the state availability for each company’s most affordable plan that covered those procedures or offered that benefit, favoring PPOs where those were available.

Customer Satisfaction

We scored customer satisfaction on a continuous scale using NAIC Complaint Index data averaged over three years, and results from the 2023 U.S. Dental Plan Satisfaction Study. Scores for both NAIC and J.D. Power data ranged from 0 (lowest) to 1 (highest). The lower the NAIC Complaint Index value, the higher our score (fewer complaints are a good thing).

For J.D. Power, the more points a company got from J.D. Power, the higher the score we gave it. J.D. Power does not rank all of the companies we researched, so we didn’t score companies not included and we didn’t assign a weight to this criteria. But we did use it to inform our overall view of companies that J.D. Power included.

We began our NAIC data gathering by first identifying the underwriter for each dental insurance company and then searching that underwriter on the NAIC website. Once found, we clicked on the trends page and then collected information about the premium amount underwritten, as well as the Complaint Indexes from 2020 to 2022. Next, we calculated an average of the underwriter’s Complaint Indices across the three-year range. If a company had multiple underwriters, we created a weighted average in which the companies that underwrite a higher amount of premiums received proportionally more weight.

Types and Prevalence of Plans Offered

We looked at which types of dental plans were offered, and then how many of each type were offered:

• Number of PPO plans
• Number of HMO plans
• Number of plans with implant coverage
• Number of plans with adult orthodontic coverage
• Number of plans with no waiting period
• Number of plans with no annual maximum
• Number of plans with specific coverage for seniors
• Number of plans for veterans

We scored the availability of each plan type first on a continuous scale from 0 to 1, with 1 being awarded to the companies with the most plan types (the most recorded was eight out of nine plans), and 0 being awarded to companies with the fewest (the fewest recorded was two). No one company in our rubric offered all nine types of plans.

Cost-to-Value

To evaluate and score the costs for each company, we collected data on the following criteria:

• Monthly premium
• Deductible
• Annual maximum benefit
• Lifetime orthodontia benefit
• Lifetime implant benefit

We gathered quotes for each company’s lowest-premium PPO plan that covered three levels of coverage (preventative, basic, and major) across two ZIP codes: 90011 (Los Angeles County, California) and 79936 (El Paso County, Texas). If a plan was not offered in one or both of those areas, we used 30369 (Atlanta, Georgia), 60654 (Chicago, Illinois), or 19019 (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania).

We scored premiums and deductibles separately, scoring each on a continuous scale from 0 to 1, where 1 was awarded to companies with the lowest premium or deductible, and 0 to the ones with the highest. We then calculated the average premium and deductible scores for each company across both ZIP codes.

We did the same with three coverage criteria—annual maximum benefit, lifetime orthodontia benefit, and lifetime implant benefit. Once this was done, we came up with an overall cost-to-value score, which averages a plan’s premium, deductible, and annual maximum benefit (substituting lifetime orthodontia benefit for our braces article and lifetime implants benefit for our implants article). This score takes into effect the fact that low premiums may go with high premiums and/or low coverage maxiums, so it presents a more balanced representation of how much you might end up spending for a plan.

Coverage

We looked at a total of 23 criteria to score various coverage limits for in- and out-of-network care across a variety of procedures and benefits, from preventative, basic, and major care, to orthodontics, implants, and dentures. The number of weighted criteria varies per article because we aimed to focus on the most important criteria for each article. For example, for our article on the best insurance companies for braces, we focused on orthodontics coverage but not implants coverage.

Each criterion was scored on a continuous scale of 0 to 1, where companies that offered the most coverage received a 1 and those with less coverage scored lower than 1.

Customer Service

We looked at whether each dental insurance company offered the following types of customer service:

• Online quote
• Mobile app
• Live chat
• Phone
• Online portal

This data was scored on a binary scale where companies received a score of 1 for each customer service option offered, and 0 for each not offered.

Articles That Use Our Methodology

We have many articles about the best dental insurance companies to meet your needs. The data collected for this methodology have been used to compile the following list of recommended companies:

• Best Dental Insurance Companies
• Best Dental Insurance for Braces
• Best Dental Insurance for Implants
• Best Dental Insurance Providers for Older Adults
• Best Dental Insurance Plans With No Annual Maximum
• Best Dental Insurance Plans With No Waiting Period

The order of providers may be based on additional product-specific criteria plus subjective insights from our editors and industry experts.

Meet the Team