The 10 Most Popular Dental CE Courses Right Now

We have been providing home study dental continuing education since 2000. That gives us an unusually direct answer to a question we get asked constantly: what CE is everybody else actually taking?

Below are the ten courses our customers enrolled in most over the past year — 3,714 course enrollments in total. The list is worth reading not because popularity is a measure of quality, but because of what it reveals about how CE actually gets bought.

The list

What this list is really telling you

Mandated subjects lead, and it is not close. Medical errors, laws and rules, controlled substances, domestic violence, infection control — the top seven are almost entirely courses somebody is required to take, by a state board or by OSHA. That is not because dental professionals lack curiosity. It is because CE hours and CE budgets get spent on the compulsory list first, and whatever is left over goes to electives. If you are planning your own renewal, the practical lesson is to clear the mandatory subjects early in the cycle rather than discovering a missing requirement three weeks before your license expires.

Five of the top nine are laboratory courses. This surprises people outside the industry, and it is the single most striking thing in the data. Laws and rules, laboratory medical errors, laboratory infection control, dental materials and occlusion together outsell almost everything written for the operatory. Registered dental laboratories and Certified Dental Technicians have their own CE obligations, their own laws-and-rules requirements, and far fewer providers writing material for them. If you work in a lab, see our guide to dental lab technician CE.

Infection control appears twice — once for the general dental setting and once in a version written specifically for the laboratory. Boards treat infection control as non-negotiable, and several require it every single renewal cycle rather than once. The two are genuinely different subjects; a course written for chairside practice does not cover disinfecting impressions and appliances moving between operatory and bench.

Two clinical electives made the list on merit. Concepts of Occlusion and Periodontal Disease and Diagnosis are not required by anyone. They are there because people chose them, which makes them the most interesting entries here — the only two where the ranking reflects genuine professional interest rather than a board mandate.

What most people actually buy

The pattern we see across tens of thousands of orders is that people buy in one of two ways. Either they buy a single course because they have discovered one specific gap, or they clear an entire renewal cycle in one order and take the volume discount. The second group spends less per credit and, in our experience, spends far less time worrying about it.

If you are in the second camp, the Personalized Course Builder will assemble a package for your state and license type and apply the volume pricing automatically. If you would rather browse, the full catalog is here.

Common questions