Orthodontist job description
128 verified openings in Dentists & Specialists
Braces, retainers, and arch wires are the orthodontist's tools, and the job is moving teeth and jaws into position and keeping them there. BLS counted 6,210 orthodontists in May 2025, with a median of $289,140, or $139.01 an hour. Pay spreads widely, from $99,850 at the tenth percentile to $416,000 at the ninetieth. Nearly all of them, 5,990, worked in offices of dentists.
Core Duties and Responsibilities
Diagnosis and examination share the top of O*NET's list: assessing jaw development, tooth position, and the rest of the face's structure for abnormalities. The orthodontist studies the records, including dental histories, plaster models, facial photographs, and x-rays, to build a treatment plan, then presents that plan to the patient with a cost estimate. Fitting appliances and adjusting them over the course of treatment is the clinical core. Orthodontists also coach patients to stay with the plan, keep treatment records, coordinate with the patient's other dental and medical care, and teach orthodontic technique to the assistants who work beside them. Some design and fabricate space maintainers, retainers, and lingual arch wires themselves.
Common Skills and Technologies
O*NET rates listening, speaking, critical thinking, monitoring, and complex problem solving equally at the top, which fits a job built on long courses of treatment. Coordination and social perceptiveness rank high as well. Postings name little technology, just Microsoft Office and Facebook, and graphics and photo imaging software appears among O*NET's categories for the job.
Education, Training, and Career Path
Orthodontics is one of the 12 specialties on the list kept by the National Commission on Recognition of Dental Specialties and Certifying Boards. The path is dental school and a DDS or DMD, then a specialty residency the Handbook puts at two to four years, then a specialty license where the state requires one. Post-doctoral training was the requirement 68.9 percent of O*NET's respondents chose. The Handbook projects 6 percent growth, from 7,100 jobs in 2025 to 7,500 in 2035.
Sources: O*NET 30.0, 29-1023.00 Orthodontists, https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/29-1023.00. BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, 29-1023, https://www.bls.gov/oes/tables.htm. BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, Dentists, https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/dentists.htm. National Commission on Recognition of Dental Specialties and Certifying Boards, https://ncrdscb.ada.org/recognized-dental-specialties.