Dental School Acceptance Rates by GPA & DAT — 2026-27

Dental School Acceptance Rates by GPA and DAT (2026-27, New Scale)

Every premed has Table A-23. Pre-dental students have nothing like it.

If you apply to MD programs, the AAMC hands you a famous grid — the one that crosses GPA against MCAT and prints an acceptance rate in every box, so a 3.6/510 applicant can find their exact cell and read their odds. Pre-dental applicants have no equivalent. ADEA — the body that runs the dental application — publishes no crossed GPA × DAT acceptance grid anywhere. The one authoritative per-school product (the ADEA Official Guide / Dental School Explorer) sits behind a paywall. So the free internet is a scatter of listicles, and almost every one of them has the same problem: they still report the DAT on the retired 1-30 scale, even though the ADA switched to a 200-600 scale on March 1, 2025. An applicant who just got a 460 has no idea where they stand against a table that says "22.4 DAT."

This article fixes that. Below is a free, transparently sourced table of dental school acceptance rates, mean GPA, and mean DAT — reported on the new 200-600 scale (old scale in parentheses) — compiled from each school's published entering-class statistics, ADEA aggregate data, and the ADA's official DAT score-reporting guidance. We lead with the new scale, make in-state vs out-of-state the organizing story (because it quietly decides the "easiest school" question), and we are scrupulously honest about what the data is — and what it is not.

Independent reproduction of public figures. This table is compiled from each school's own published entering-class statistics, ADA/ADEA national data, and the ADA's official DAT concordance. It is not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by ADEA or the ADA. Figures reflect the most recent published cohort (largely 2024 and 2025 entering classes); per-cycle numbers wobble, and you should verify any cell against the cited source before relying on it. See Where the data comes from.

The three national numbers everyone confuses

Before a single school number, set expectations — because three very different figures get blurred together as "the dental school acceptance rate," and conflating them is how people end up panicking or, worse, complacent.

There are 78 accredited US dental schools. For the Fall 2024 entering class, 12,491 people applied and 6,719 enrolled as first-year students, per the ADA's Health Policy Institute. That gives you three distinct numbers:

1. Per-school acceptance rate — offers ÷ applicants at one school. This is what the table below reports, and it is typically low because each applicant applies to many schools. The widely repeated "~16% (about 1 in 6)" figure is a per-school offer rate, not a system-wide one.
2. Your chance of getting in somewhere — roughly 6,719 ÷ 12,491 ≈ 54% of applicants enrolled at some dental school. This is far higher than any single school's rate, because applying to 8-12 schools stacks your odds.
3. Yield — the share of admitted students who actually enroll. This is an institutional metric, not your odds, and it is the one most likely to mislead a reader who sees a high percentage.

ADEA's April 2026 data release noted the applicant pool is at its highest level in a decade and that "applicant growth is beginning to outpace available seats." Translation: the per-school numbers below are, if anything, getting tighter, not looser.

For reference, the national means for a recent entering cohort land around a 3.55-3.62 cumulative GPA, a ~3.54 science GPA, and a DAT Academic Average near 400-420 on the new scale (≈19-21 on the old). Hold those in your head as the center of gravity. Now, the scale.

First, the DAT just changed: 200-600, not 1-30

This is the single thing almost every other table on the internet still gets wrong, so it goes first.

As of March 1, 2025, the ADA reports DAT scores on a 200-600 scale in 10-point increments. Per the ADA's official guidance: 200 is the floor, 600 is the ceiling, and 400 is the national average. Every score that reaches AADSAS now appears on this scale, and older scores are psychometrically converted to it. The old two-digit number (1-30) lives on only inside the testing hub. So when a 2025-or-later applicant talks about their "460," they mean the new scale — and a table reporting "22.4" is speaking a language that no longer matches the score report in front of them.

The conversion is approximate, not a clean formula. The ADA built it from a concordance table using 30,000+ DAT attempts over a recent two-year window, matching relative positions in each distribution. Anyone implying a tidy 1:1 swap is overstating the precision. Here is the ADA's official Academic Average (AA) concordance, captured verbatim — the canonical mapping we use for every "new (old)" cell in the table:

ADA DAT Academic Average concordance — old (1-30) to new (200-600)

Source: ADA, Understanding the New Dental Admission Test (DAT) Score Reporting Scale (effective 3/1/2025). The full table runs from 1 upward; the AA column is the one applicants quote. The conversion is concordance-based and approximate.

Two quick anchors that make the scale intuitive: 400 = national average, and the old rule-of-thumb "competitive" score of 20-21 AA now reads as roughly 420-440. A "strong" 23-24 is about 470-490. Keep those in mind as you read the table — and notice immediately how different "460" feels once you know 400 is dead average.

The table: acceptance rate, mean GPA, mean DAT (new + old) by school

Here is the flagship. One row per school, with the acceptance rate, mean cumulative GPA, mean DAT AA on the new 200-600 scale (old 1-30 in parentheses), and a residency read — because, as the next section shows, that column often matters more than the GPA and DAT combined. Figures are the most recent published cohort (2024 or 2025 entering class) cross-checked against each school's own admissions or entering-class page where one exists; otherwise against ADEA aggregate data. DAT figures are converted with the ADA concordance above unless a school already publishes on the new scale.

A "—" means we could not source a defensible number to a primary or recent figure and have suppressed it rather than publish noise. "Public — strong in-state skew" flags schools where the headline rate is largely or entirely an in-state rate (read the residency section before you misread these as "easy").

Source: compiled by GradPilot from each school's published entering-class statistics (UF, OHSU, Stony Brook, and others publish these directly), ADA Health Policy Institute aggregate data, ADEA applicant/enrollee releases, and the ADA DAT concordance. Acceptance-rate ranges are per-school offers ÷ applicants for the most recent published cohort and are deliberately shown as ranges because they wobble year to year. Verify any cell against the cited school page before relying on it.

A few honest notes on reading this:

• Acceptance-rate ranges, not point estimates. Per-school rates swing meaningfully cycle to cycle (a few percentage points either way), so a range communicates the truth better than a false-precision single number. Where a school publishes an exact recent rate, use that.
• Where a number is school-published, it is exact. UF's 3.82 GPA / 460 DAT, OHSU's 3.8 / 440, and Stony Brook's 3.82 / 470 come straight off the schools' own entering-class pages. The "~" figures are triangulated against ADEA aggregates and converted with the concordance.
• This is a per-school table, not a crossed grid. It tells you where your stats land relative to a school's mean — a positioning signal for your school list. It does not tell you "your odds at a 3.5/440," because no public crossed GPA × DAT grid exists for dentistry (more on that in the caveats).

How to read your row — and the residency trap

Here is the lesson that the "easiest dental schools to get into" listicles bury: for public schools, the acceptance rate is mostly a residency question, not a difficulty question.

Look at Mississippi (UMMC). Its headline acceptance rate — around 29% — is the highest on the table, and the GPA (~3.54) and DAT (~410, i.e. ~19 old) are near the national average. Read naively, that screams "easiest school in America." But the university's own admissions policy says it gives "preference to residents of the State of Mississippi" and that "in recent years, nonresidents have not been admitted" — out-of-state applicants are considered only if seats remain after every qualified Mississippi resident. So that 29% is effectively an in-state-only rate. For an out-of-state applicant, the real number rounds to zero. "Easiest school" was the wrong frame; the right question is "easiest for whom."

Now look at Florida (UFCD) from the other direction. UF is a selective school — a 3.82 GPA and a 460 (22) DAT — yet its overall odds hide a brutal residency split. The Class of 2029 drew 2,153 applicants: 799 in-state and 1,354 out-of-state, and enrolled 93 students, ~90% of them Florida residents. Do the arithmetic: roughly 1,354 out-of-state applicants competed for about 9 seats. That is low-single-digit out-of-state odds at a school whose overall rate looks merely "selective." The in-state picture, against the same ~799 applicants for the bulk of 93 seats, is far healthier. One school, two completely different applications depending on where you pay taxes.

This is the same dynamic that dominates Texas dental and medical admissions, where statute reserves the overwhelming majority of public seats for residents. We mapped the medical version of this exact phenomenon in our TMDSAS out-of-state acceptance rate breakdown, and you can see the same residency swing inside a GPA × MCAT grid in our Texas medical school acceptance rate by GPA and MCAT — where identical stats can mean a ~71% resident chance and a ~23% non-resident chance. Dental works the same way: before you read any public school's GPA and DAT, ask whether you are in-state. If you are not, mentally move that school down your list regardless of how friendly its means look.

The practical takeaway for building a school list: private schools (NYU, BU, Tufts, USC, Case Western, Creighton, and others on the table) draw national pools and don't apply a residency penalty, so their means are an honest read for everyone. Public schools are read through the residency lens first, stats second.

What's competitive now, in new-scale terms

Because the scale changed mid-2025, the old "competitive" benchmarks need re-translating. Using the ADA concordance and the national center of gravity:

• Average dental applicant: roughly 3.55-3.6 GPA, ~400-420 DAT (19-20 old). 400 is, by definition, the national average DAT.
• Competitive (state schools, mid-tier privates): about 3.6-3.7 GPA, ~420-460 DAT (20-22 old). This is the band most of the table sits in.
• Highly competitive (top publics out-of-state, elite privates): about 3.8+ GPA, ~470-510 DAT (23-25 old). UF's 460/3.82, Stony Brook's 470/3.82, and the top privates live here.

If you tested before March 2025 and only know your old AA, run it through the concordance table above to see your new number — it is the one schools and these tables now speak. A clean mental model: a 440 is solidly competitive, a 460 is strong, a 490+ is a clear asset, and 400 is exactly average.

Honest caveats — read before you panic or celebrate

A table like this is useful precisely because it is concrete, which is also why it is easy to over-read. A few things it is not:

• Means are not cutoffs. A school's 3.7 mean GPA does not mean 3.69 is rejected. Half of every entering class is, by definition, below the mean on something. These are centers of a distribution, not bars to clear.
• There is no public crossed GPA × DAT grid for dentistry. Unlike the AAMC's Table A-23 for medicine — or our own Texas GPA × MCAT grid — ADEA does not publish an applicant-level grid that crosses GPA against DAT and shows an acceptance rate per cell. Per-school means are the most granular public data. Anyone presenting per-school means as if they answer "what are my odds at a 3.5/440" is quietly over-promising. We are not: this is a positioning table, not a chances calculator.
• The three numbers stay separate. The table's "acceptance rate" column is per-school offers ÷ applicants — not your chance of getting in somewhere (~54%), and not yield. Don't blend them.
• Per-cycle rates wobble. Class sizes are small (often 50-130 seats), so a single strong or weak applicant year moves a school's rate by points. The ranges reflect that.
• The DAT conversion is approximate. The concordance is a psychometric mapping built from 30,000+ attempts, not an exact formula. Treat the "new (old)" pairings as close, not surgical.
• "Easiest" is a residency word. As the Mississippi and UF cases show, the highest-rate schools are usually the most residency-restricted. There is rarely a genuinely "easy" school for an out-of-state applicant.

What to do if your stats are below a school's mean

Here is the genuinely useful part. The table sorts your application into fixed inputs and movable ones — and that distinction tells you exactly where to spend your effort.

GPA is largely fixed once you are late in the process; you cannot un-take a semester. If your GPA sits below your target schools' means, the move is not to despair but to contextualize and offset it — a strong upward trend, a post-bacc, and a DAT that over-delivers. The strategy is the same one premeds use, and we lay it out in how to explain a low GPA in your statement and the low-GPA upward-trend strategy. The applicant who shows momentum reads very differently from one who shows a flat low number.

The DAT is movable — it is the highest-leverage retake in your control, and the table shows why: moving from a 420 to a 460 can shift you from "below mean" to "at or above mean" at a whole tier of schools. If you are deciding whether a retake is worth it, the data-driven framework we built for the MCAT applies cleanly to the DAT too — when a standardized-test retake actually pays off.

And then there is everything the table cannot see — which is most of your application. Two applicants in the same GPA/DAT box are differentiated entirely by the parts the numbers ignore: how clearly your essay answers the new "oral health" prompt, how coherent your experiences read, whether your shadowing tells a real story. The AADSAS 2026-27 cycle opens May 12, 2026 (first submission June 2, 2026; deadline February 5, 2027), and this cycle the personal statement asks "What motivated you to pursue a career in oral health?" — a revised prompt, capped at 4,500 characters (~700-750 words), that trips up applicants who write last cycle's "why dentistry" essay. We decode it in the new AADSAS "oral health" personal statement prompt, explained, and you can see how strong essays actually open in our dental personal statement examples and opening-lines breakdown.

Your experiences carry their own weight: AADSAS lets you flag exactly 6 "Most Important" experiences that surface first to the reviewer (with 600 characters per entry), and the application now splits shadowing into virtual vs. in-person across its experience categories. We cover both in the Rule of 6 "Most Important" experiences guide and the new virtual vs. in-person shadowing split. If you are coming from a medical-application mindset, the AADSAS vs. AMCAS personal statement differences post will save you from porting the wrong instincts over.

That essay is where a below-mean file overperforms its box. GradPilot's dental personal statement review scores your draft against the current "oral health" prompt and gives clause-level feedback — so whatever row you start in, the part of your application a table can't measure is the part that's working hardest for you.

Frequently asked questions

What GPA and DAT do I need for dental school? There is no hard cutoff, but the national center is about a 3.55-3.6 GPA and a ~400-420 DAT (19-20 old scale). Competitive applicants cluster around 3.6-3.7 and 420-460 (20-22 old), and the most selective schools sit at 3.8+ and 470-510 (23-25 old). These are means, not minimums — applicants get in above and below them.

What's a good DAT score now, on the new 200-600 scale? By the ADA's own definition, 400 is the national average. A 440 is solidly competitive, a 460 is strong, and 490+ is a clear asset at almost any school. If you only know your old 1-30 score, convert it with the ADA concordance table above.

What's the easiest dental school to get into? This is the wrong question — it is really a residency question. The highest published acceptance rates (like Mississippi's ~29%) belong to public schools that admit almost exclusively in-state residents, so they are "easy" only if you are a resident of that state. For out-of-state applicants, those same schools can be the hardest. Read the residency section above.

Is there an official GPA-by-DAT acceptance grid for dental school? No. Unlike the AAMC's Table A-23 for medicine, ADEA publishes no crossed GPA × DAT acceptance grid for dentistry. Per-school means (like the ones in our table) are the most granular public data. Treat any "grid" claiming per-cell dental odds with skepticism — the underlying data to build one honestly is not public.

Why doesn't my 460 match the DAT numbers in older tables? Because the scale changed. Through February 2025 the DAT reported on a 1-30 scale; since March 1, 2025 it reports 200-600. A 460 on the new scale corresponds to roughly a 22 on the old one. Most tables online still show the old scale, which is exactly the gap this article exists to close.

Is the dental school acceptance rate really ~16%? That ~16% (about 1 in 6) is a per-school offer rate. Your chance of getting in somewhere is much higher — roughly 54% of applicants enrolled at some US dental school in the most recent cohort (6,719 of 12,491). Applying to multiple schools is what closes that gap.

Where the data comes from, and how to verify it

We believe admissions data should be open. The numbers here already exist — they are just trapped behind a paywall (the ADEA Guide) or scattered across school pages and stale aggregators. This article exists to make them readable, current to the new DAT scale, and sourced.

• National figures: ADA Health Policy Institute — Dental Education statistics (78 schools; 12,491 applicants / 6,719 enrolled, Fall 2024) and the ADEA applicant/enrollee data releases.
• The DAT scale + concordance: the ADA's official Understanding the New DAT Score Reporting Scale (effective 3/1/2025) and the ADEA DAT FAQ.
• Per-school figures: each school's own entering-class page where one exists — e.g. UF College of Dentistry and OHSU School of Dentistry — cross-checked against ADEA aggregates. The University of Mississippi Medical Center residents-only policy is from its own admissions page.
• The medical analog we contrast against: the AAMC FACTS Table A-23, the crossed GPA × MCAT grid dentistry never got.

This is an independent reproduction of public aggregate figures, not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by ADEA or the ADA. Figures are the most recent published cohort and will be updated as ADEA releases new data; verify any number against the cited source before relying on it.

Keep reading

This piece sits at the top of the dental-application funnel — once you've placed yourself on the table, the application becomes about the parts a table can't measure.

• Start with the essay that moves your file: the new AADSAS "oral health" personal statement prompt, decoded, and dental personal statement examples.
• Below a school's mean? How to explain a low GPA and the upward-trend strategy.
• The Texas version of this story: Texas medical school acceptance rate by GPA and MCAT and TMDSAS out-of-state acceptance rate.
• The data-flagship sibling: the cash-cow master's programs investigation and student visa rejection rates by country.
• The umbrella: browse the full medical and dental school essays collection.