Aurora is the hardest city in the Denver metro to rank a dental practice in, and the reason is arithmetic rather than dentistry. It is the third-largest city in Colorado, it covers more than 160 square miles, and it is one of the very few municipalities in the state whose boundary crosses three counties: Arapahoe, Adams and Douglas. Its postal delivery names run from 80010 on the old Colfax corridor out to 80016 on the Southlands prairie, and they do not stop where the city does. Directory sites, insurance finders and review aggregators all print the postal name, so a patient searching for a dentist in Aurora is handed a list in which some of the offices are not in Aurora at all.
That is not a theoretical complaint. Every candidate address on this page was run through the U.S. Census Bureau's geocoder, which returns the incorporated place and the county a street address actually sits inside rather than the city name on the envelope, and the screen removed real practices. An office publishing its own address as 18525 East Smoky Hill Road, Aurora, CO 80015 returned Centennial city. A second office on South Himalaya Street in the same 80015 postal area returned Centennial city as well. A third practice, reached through a domain built on the word Aurora, turned out to have moved and now publishes a South Parker Road address in Centennial on its own contact page. The seven practices below all returned Aurora city, and all seven returned Arapahoe County, which is itself worth knowing: for all the talk of a three-county city, the established dental corridors of Aurora sit south of Colfax in the Arapahoe portion, clustered along Peoria Street, Parker Road, Hampden Avenue and the Iliff and Vaughn Way office blocks near the eastern edge of the Denver Tech Center.
The second screen was the state register, and it does the work that a star rating cannot. Every dentist practising in Colorado holds a licence issued under the Dental Practice Act and administered by the Colorado Dental Board inside DORA's Division of Professions and Occupations, and the entire file is republished as open data. It carries the licence number, the first-issue date, the last renewal, the expiry date and a status word, and it carries separately a board case number, the action taken, and the dates that action began and ended. A licence can read Active and still carry a stipulation or a letter of admonition, because most board outcomes are conditions placed on continued practice rather than removals from it. We read those fields for every dentist named on every candidate practice's website. Two practices in the screening pool were set aside because a principal dentist's Active licence also carried a recorded board action. We describe that rule below without naming them, and we point you at the register so you can run the check yourself on any practice, listed here or not.
How We Screened Aurora Dental Practices
The Top 7 Dental Practices in Aurora
2026 Rankings · Aurora, Arapahoe County
Deeg and Deeg Dentistry
Deeg and Deeg Dentistry sits a block west of Hampden and Chambers, and it produced the cleanest pair of checks anywhere in this screen. The register lists Deborah Kaye Deeg, licence DEN.105234, first issued on 9 June 1982, and Miles Frederic Deeg, licence DEN.6593, first issued on 18 January 1989. Both are Active, both run to the current expiry of 29 February 2028, and neither record carries a board case number or a disciplinary action of any kind. Forty-four years of continuous Colorado licensure on the senior dentist, with a second dentist more than thirty-seven years into the same unbroken record, is the deepest verifiable file we found inside the Aurora city limits.
What lifts this to first place is not tenure alone but the fact that the practice's own account of itself survives contact with the primary record twice over. The site states that Dr. Deborah Deeg graduated from the University of Colorado School of Dentistry in 1982; her Colorado licence was first issued in June of that year, which is exactly where a new graduate's licence lands. It states that Dr. Miles Deeg graduated in 1988; his licence was first issued in January 1989, again precisely the interval a winter licensure cycle would produce. Two independent claims, two exact alignments. A surprising number of practice websites fail this check, and the ones that pass it are telling you something about how carefully the rest of the site was written.
Scope is comprehensive general and restorative dentistry: preventive care, digital dental imaging, cosmetic work, crowns, dentures, implant restorations, oral surgery, endodontics, teeth whitening and emergency care. The practice describes itself as focused on complex restorative and cosmetic dentistry, and it restores implants rather than presenting itself as a surgical implant centre, which is an accurate way to describe what a general practice of this kind does. Two points of language are worth attributing rather than repeating. The site lists membership of the American Dental Association, the Colorado Dental Association and the Metropolitan Denver Dental Society, along with two local study clubs. Those are organisations a dentist joins, not boards that examine and certify, and they confer no specialty status. The site also states that both dentists have been chosen for more than ten consecutive years as 5280 magazine top dentists. We have disregarded that, as we disregard every peer-nomination and directory listing on this page, because it measures reputation among colleagues and marketing reach rather than a clinical outcome a reader can check.
Aspenwood Dental Associates
The longest clean dental licence we found anywhere in Aurora belongs to the founder of this practice on South Peoria Street. The register lists Ronald Michael Yaros, licence DEN.478 — a three-digit number, which is itself a marker of how early it was issued — first granted on 28 January 1973 and Active without interruption for fifty-three years, current through 29 February 2028, with no board case number and no disciplinary action recorded across the entire span. Two colleagues match him for cleanliness if not for length: Lisa Michelle Augustine, licence DEN.7439, first issued on 29 June 1996, and Daniel Jay Zeppelin, licence DEN.8552, first issued on 9 October 2002. All three are Active, all three are clean, and between them they represent ninety-nine years of Colorado practice without a single recorded board action.
One caveat keeps this practice second rather than first, and we would rather state it plainly than bury it. The site names a fourth dentist, Dr. Aaron Sun, DDS, and we could not match that name to any Colorado dental licence record. There is no Active DEN record in the state file for a dentist named Aaron Sun. The most likely explanation is mundane: the register lists licensees under their legal names, and a dentist who practises under a preferred or Anglicised first name will not be found by searching the name printed on a practice website. That is a records problem rather than evidence of anything, and it is not a finding against the dentist. But our method is to match every named dentist to a number, and here we could not, so we are reporting the gap instead of guessing at a match. If you are booking with Dr. Sun specifically, ask the office for the licence number and check it yourself; a practice with nothing to hide will give it to you in a sentence.
The practice trades as Aspenwood Dental Associates and Colorado Dental Implant Center, and its published scope is unusually wide for a general office: general dentistry including children's dentistry, cleanings, sealants, fluoride, extractions, wisdom teeth removal, TMJ therapy and oral cancer screening; restorative work including crowns, bridges, dentures, gum grafting, bone grafting, root canals, mini implants, full-mouth reconstruction and an in-house crown and bridge laboratory; cosmetic work including veneers, bonding, inlays and onlays, gum contouring and clear aligners; and sedation ranging from nitrous oxide through oral and intravenous sedation to general anaesthesia. Sedation depth is the item to ask about directly, because the permissions attached to it are regulated separately from the dental licence itself. On credentials, the site describes Dr. Yaros as holding a fellowship with the International College of Oral Implantology and associate fellowship with the American Academy of Implant Dentistry, and as a faculty member at the University of Colorado School of Dental Medicine. Those are the practice's claims and we report them as such: implantology fellowships are awarded by membership academies and are not among the recognised dental specialties. Repeated 5280 top-dentist listings for three of the four dentists were disregarded on the same basis as elsewhere.
Dental Associates of Aurora
A mile and a half north of Aspenwood on the same street, Dental Associates of Aurora is the only practice in this screen that pairs a general and restorative office with a genuinely board-certified surgical specialist under one roof. The register lists the founder as Seung Hun Lee, licence DEN.7478, first issued on 16 October 1996, Active through 29 February 2028, with no board case number and no disciplinary action recorded across thirty years. It lists Kayvan Fathimani, licence DEN.204716, first issued on 26 May 2021 and recorded with a Doctor of Dental Surgery degree, likewise Active and clean. A third dentist the practice publishes as Dr. Mariana Lukic matches a single record under the spelling Marijana Lukic, licence DEN.205447, first issued on 21 December 2022, Active and clean; her biography page on the site was still marked as forthcoming when we read it, so there is less to check there than on the other two.
The specialty question is where this practice earns its placement, and it is also where the language needs care. Dr. Fathimani's page states that he is a Diplomate of the American Board of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, trained through an oral and maxillofacial surgery residency at Montefiore Medical Center at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, with a facial cosmetic surgery fellowship at Louisiana State University. Oral and maxillofacial surgery is one of the twelve dental specialties recognised through the National Commission, and the American Board of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery is its recognised certifying board, so that is a specialty claim of the kind this publication treats as meaningful rather than decorative. The page also lists diplomate status with the National Dental Board of Anesthesiology and the American Academy of Aesthetic Medicine, and four separate fellowships. Those we report as the practice's claims: they are conferred by bodies outside the recognised dental specialty structure, and a reader scanning a row of post-nominals deserves to know which one of them is the recognised board certification and which are not.
Dr. Lee's own biography states a Doctor of Dental Surgery from New York University College of Dentistry, a postgraduate prosthodontics residency at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, six years as a clinical-track assistant professor at the University of Colorado School of Dental Medicine, and the founding of this practice in 2002. His licence, first issued in 1996, is consistent with a mid-1990s dental degree followed by residency. Note the distinction the site itself blurs: completing a prosthodontics residency is postgraduate training in the specialty, and it is not the same thing as certification by the American Board of Prosthodontics, which the page does not claim. Scope across the practice is broad, covering dental implants including full-arch and zirconia fixed bridge work, family and cosmetic dentistry, porcelain veneers, Invisalign, whitening, same-day crowns and bridges, dentures and partials, root canals, gum grafting, laser dentistry, oral surgery, sedation and emergency care, supported by an in-house dental laboratory. One structural caveat: this is a two-location practice, with a second office in Westminster, so confirm which dentist is scheduled at the Peoria Street address on the day you book.
H&M Family Dentistry
H&M Family Dentistry is a two-dentist, owner-operated office on South Parker Road, and it publishes more verifiable detail about its clinicians' training than any other practice in the lower half of this ranking. The register lists Hua Gao, licence DEN.10359, first issued on 21 January 2011 and recorded with a Doctor of Dental Surgery degree, and Xiaomei Sui, licence DEN.10650, first issued on 27 January 2012, also recorded as a DDS. Both are Active through 29 February 2028 and neither record carries a board case number or a disciplinary action. Both licences list an Englewood address of record, which is the mailing address DORA holds for correspondence rather than the place either dentist works, so a reader repeating this check should search the register by name rather than by city.
The training account behind those two records is specific enough to be worth restating, and specificity is a virtue in a category where most biographies say very little. The practice describes a husband-and-wife team who founded the office in 2014. Dr. Gao is stated to have completed a dental degree and a master's in oral surgery at Beijing University, then a doctorate in molecular biology and a DDS at the University of Colorado. Dr. Sui is stated to have completed a dental degree and endodontics training at Beijing University, followed by a DDS at the University of Colorado Dental School. The Colorado first-issue dates of January 2011 and January 2012 sit exactly where two graduates of the same American programme finishing a year apart would land. Note what those histories are and are not: prior graduate training in oral surgery or endodontics obtained abroad is real education, and it is not certification by a recognised American specialty board. The practice does not claim otherwise, which is the correct way to present it.
Scope is general and family dentistry running deliberately wide: preventive and restorative care, crowns, bridges, dentures and fillings, root canal treatment, periodontal treatment, implants with bone grafting, wisdom tooth removal, cosmetic work including veneers, whitening and gum contouring, clear aligner treatment, and emergency care, supported by CEREC same-day crowns milled in the office rather than sent to an outside laboratory, laser dentistry and three-dimensional imaging. Chairside milling matters in a practical way that has nothing to do with prestige: it turns a crown from a two-appointment procedure with a temporary in between into a single visit. Two scheduling facts are published on the practice's own site and are worth knowing before you call rather than after: the office runs Monday to Thursday from eight to five, closes at one on Friday, and does not open at weekends. In a two-dentist practice that is a narrower emergency window than a larger group can offer.
Mauck & Ricci, DDS
Mauck & Ricci occupies a fourth-floor suite in the Vaughn Way office cluster at Aurora's western edge, and it passed the licence screen cleanly on both of its named dentists. The register lists Matthew Ryan Mauck, licence DEN.10477, first issued on 20 June 2011 and recorded with a Doctor of Dental Surgery degree, and Andrew Lloyd Ricci, licence DEN.202507, first issued on 5 May 2015, also recorded as a DDS. Both are Active through 29 February 2028, and neither record carries a board case number or a disciplinary action. Fifteen and eleven years of unbroken Colorado record respectively is a solid file, shorter than the four practices above and entirely without blemish.
The practice places fifth on how little it publishes rather than on anything the register showed, and that is a limitation of our method as much as a judgement on the office. Neither dentist's page states a dental school, a graduation year, a residency or any postgraduate training, which leaves a reader with a name and a degree abbreviation and nothing to cross-check them against. Compare that with the practices above, where a stated graduation year could be tested against a first-issue date and either held or did not. Where a site gives you nothing to test, the honest thing to say is that there was nothing to test, not that the practice fell short.
One claim needs attributing precisely because it is the most eye-catching thing on the site. Dr. Ricci is presented as the official dentist of the Denver Broncos. That is a commercial or sponsorship relationship rather than a clinical credential, we could not verify it independently, and so we report it as the practice's claim and give it no weight in the ranking. The site also lists memberships of the American Dental Association, the Academy of General Dentistry, the Colorado Dental Association, the Metro Denver Dental Society and the Academy of Operative Dentistry. Those are subscription organisations, not certifying boards, and they confer no specialty status. Published scope is comprehensive general dentistry: cleanings, checkups, sealants and gum disease treatment on the preventive side; crowns, bridges, dentures, root canals and extractions on the restorative side; veneers, whitening, bonding and smile design on the cosmetic side; plus implants and implant-retained dentures, paediatric care, emergency dentistry, sedation and sleep apnoea therapy. Sleep apnoea appliance therapy is delivered by a dentist on referral from a physician who diagnoses the condition, and it is worth asking how that referral pathway works before starting treatment.
Iliff Family Dental
Iliff Family Dental works out of a Potomac Street office building just north of Iliff Avenue, and it is the second-newest pairing of licences on this page. The register lists Christopher Stephen Henes, licence DEN.202211, first issued on 12 May 2014 and recorded with a Doctor of Dental Surgery degree, and Crispin Herrick, licence DEN.204775, first issued on 11 June 2021, also recorded as a DDS. Both are Active through 29 February 2028, and neither record carries a board case number or a disciplinary action. Twelve years of clean Colorado record on the senior dentist and five on the second is a shorter file than the practices above it, and it is a file with nothing in it.
Placement here is a straightforward function of how much a reader can independently check, and there is less at this practice than at the five above. The site names two dentists, publishes an Aurora street address and a working telephone number on its own domain, and describes itself as a family dental practice. It does not publish dental schools, graduation years, residencies or postgraduate training for either dentist, and it publishes no aggregate rating or review count on its own domain that we could weigh. As elsewhere on this page, read that as an absence of evidence rather than as evidence of a problem. Two currently licensed dentists with entirely clean state records in a genuinely Aurora location is a real result, and it is what the sixth position on this list is for.
There is a practical argument for a practice of exactly this shape that the ranking position understates. Two dentists in one office is the minimum staffing at which an emergency appointment can be absorbed without pushing a scheduled patient into the following month, and it is a materially different proposition from a solo practice on that one axis. The generational spread between a 2014 licence and a 2021 licence also tends to mean an office is not about to close on a single retirement, which is a genuine consideration for a family choosing a dental home rather than a one-off treatment. Confirm the scope of care you need on the phone before booking, since the site's service descriptions are lighter than most, and ask which of the two dentists you will actually be seeing.
Southlands Dental
Southlands Dental is the only recommended practice on this page east of E-470, out on the Smoky Hill Road corridor in the 80016 postal area, and its inclusion required the geographic screen to work in both directions. Two other offices publishing Smoky Hill Road and Himalaya Street addresses under an Aurora postal name geocoded to Centennial city and were cut. This one, further east at 22970, returned Aurora city, Arapahoe County. That matters for anybody in the Southlands, Tallyn's Reach or Saddle Rock neighbourhoods who wants a dentist genuinely inside the city they pay taxes to, and it is not a distinction any directory listing will make for you.
The register lists the practice's dentist as Gunjan Kalra, licence DEN.8456, first issued on 14 June 2002, Active through 29 February 2028, with no board case number and no disciplinary action recorded across twenty-four years. That is a longer clean file than three of the practices ranked above it, which is worth saying plainly, because the seventh position here is not a comment on the licence. The site states a Doctor of Dental Surgery from the University of Colorado School of Dentistry, and a first-issue date of June 2002 is exactly where a Colorado graduate of that year would land, so the account and the record agree.
The practice ranks seventh on staffing and on the thinness of everything checkable other than the licence itself. It is a solo office, which means that when the dentist is away there is no second clinician to absorb an urgent appointment, and it is the one practice on this page where that constraint is structural rather than a matter of published hours. Beyond the dentist's name, degree and dental school, the site offers no graduation year, no postgraduate training, no staff detail and no review corpus published on its own domain that we could weigh, and it claims no specialty, no board certification and no award. After a screen in which several better-marketed offices were removed for reasons visible only in a state database or a federal geocoder, a site that claims nothing it cannot support counts in its favour rather than against it. For a household in far east Aurora choosing between a genuinely local practice with a twenty-four-year clean record and a longer drive west to a larger office, this is a defensible choice made with the evidence in front of you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is an "Aurora, CO" address always inside the City of Aurora?
No, and Aurora is a worse offender than most because of its size and shape. Aurora is the third-largest city in Colorado, it covers more than 160 square miles, and its boundary crosses three counties: Arapahoe, Adams and Douglas. The U.S. Postal Service applies the Aurora delivery name across ZIP codes running from 80010 to 80019 plus 80045, and that delivery area does not stop at the municipal line. The most common overlap in dentistry is with Centennial, which shares the 80015 and 80016 postal areas along the Smoky Hill Road corridor. In screening this page we ran every candidate address through the U.S. Census Bureau's geocoder, which returns the incorporated place and county a street address actually falls inside rather than the city name on the envelope. A dental office publishing 18525 East Smoky Hill Road, Aurora, CO 80015 returned Centennial city. A second office on South Himalaya Street in the same 80015 area returned Centennial city too. A third practice reached through a domain built on the word Aurora had moved and now publishes a South Parker Road address in Centennial. All seven practices we recommend returned Aurora city, and all seven returned Arapahoe County. If you are checking a practice we have not listed, take the street address from its own contact page and run it through the federal geocoder. It takes under a minute and it settles the question for good.
What does a Colorado dental licence record show beyond the word "Active"?
Considerably more than most patients realise, and the extra fields are the ones that matter. Dentists in Colorado are licensed under the Dental Practice Act by the Colorado Dental Board, which sits inside DORA's Division of Professions and Occupations, and dentist licences carry the DEN prefix. The public record for each licence shows the licence number, the date it was first issued, the date it was last renewed, the current expiry date and a status description. Separately from all of that, it carries disciplinary fields: a board case number, the action taken, and the dates that action took effect and was completed. Those fields are where a letter of admonition, a stipulation, a cease and desist order, a summary suspension, a revocation or a voluntary surrender appears. The critical point is that a licence can read "Active" and still carry recorded board action, because most disciplinary outcomes are conditions placed on continued practice rather than removals from it. Reading the status word alone will therefore tell you almost nothing. The same file is republished as an open dataset on the Colorado Information Marketplace, which is how all fifteen licence numbers, first-issue dates, expiry dates and disciplinary screens on this page were confirmed. It is free, it needs no account, and it is searchable by name.
Why were some well-reviewed Aurora practices left off this ranking?
For two different reasons, and it is worth separating them. Some were removed on geography: their own contact pages publish Aurora postal addresses that the federal geocoder places inside Centennial rather than Aurora, so they are good practices in a different city and simply out of scope for this page. Others were removed on the register. Two practices in our screening pool were set aside because a principal dentist held an Active Colorado licence that also carried recorded board discipline, and we treat that as disqualifying regardless of how the practice presents otherwise. We describe the rule rather than naming those practices, because the register records that a board matter exists and what category of action was taken rather than what the underlying complaint concluded, and a reader who wants that detail is far better served going to the source than taking our summary of it. It is worth understanding what these actions are. A stipulation is a negotiated agreement between a licensee and the board that resolves a complaint, and its terms vary enormously, from additional continuing education through to conditions on practice. A letter of admonition is a lesser action still. Neither is a finding that a patient was harmed. If you are weighing an Aurora practice that does not appear on this page, look the treating dentist up yourself in the state register linked in our sources, read the case and action fields, and ask the practice about anything you find. An omission from this page is not the whole story.
Aurora dentists advertise implants, Invisalign and sedation. Does any of that make them specialists?
Almost never, and the distinction is a defined one rather than a matter of opinion. The National Commission on Recognition of Dental Specialties and Certifying Boards recognises twelve dental specialties: dental anesthesiology, dental public health, endodontics, oral and maxillofacial pathology, oral and maxillofacial radiology, oral and maxillofacial surgery, oral medicine, orofacial pain, orthodontics and dentofacial orthopedics, pediatric dentistry, periodontics and prosthodontics. Each requires a formal postgraduate residency accredited for that discipline, and a practitioner claiming certification must hold it from the relevant recognised certifying board. A general dentist may lawfully place and restore implants, provide clear-aligner treatment and perform root canal treatment, and many do so to a high standard. None of that confers specialty status. Exactly one practice on this page publishes a certification from a recognised board: Dental Associates of Aurora states that Dr. Kayvan Fathimani is a Diplomate of the American Board of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, which is the recognised certifying board for that specialty. Everything else we encountered in this screen, including implantology fellowships, aesthetic medicine diplomas and academy memberships, comes from bodies outside the recognised specialty structure, and we have reported those as the practices' claims. Sedation is a separate question again: the permission to provide oral, intravenous or general anaesthesia in a dental office is regulated apart from the dental licence itself, so ask which level of sedation a practice is permitted to deliver rather than assuming the licence covers it.
How often do Colorado dental licences renew, and what should I ask before booking in Aurora?
Colorado dental licences run on a two-year cycle that closes at the end of February in even-numbered years, which is why every one of the fifteen licences cited on this page shows the same expiry date of 29 February 2028. Across each two-year period, dentists holding an Active licence must complete continuing education set by the board, with reduced requirements for anyone whose first renewal falls less than two years after initial licensure. The practical consequence for a patient is that a practice website can go on listing a dentist who let a Colorado licence lapse at the last cycle and moved on, and nothing on the page will say so. So ask five questions before you book. First: which dentist by name will treat me, and what is their Colorado licence number? A practice with nothing to hide answers that in one sentence, and it is the single most useful question on this list. Second: is this office independently owned, or part of a group with shared scheduling across several locations, since that determines whether you can expect the same clinician twice. Third: when a case exceeds general dentistry, which specialist do you refer to, and are they certified by one of the twelve recognised boards? Fourth: will I get an itemised written treatment plan before any significant restorative, implant or cosmetic work begins? Fifth: which insurance networks do you participate in, as distinct from which plans you will bill, because a practice can bill a plan it is out of network with and the difference lands on your invoice rather than theirs.
Sources & References
-
Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies (DORA)
Dental Board — Division of Professions and Occupations
The licensing and disciplinary authority for every dentist named on this page. Backs the DEN licence prefix, the two-year renewal cycle closing at the end of February in even-numbered years, and the continuing-education requirement described in the FAQ.
-
Colorado Information Marketplace / DORA
Professional and Occupational Licenses in Colorado (dataset 7s5z-vewr)
DORA's licence file republished as open data, including the board case number, program action and discipline date fields. All fifteen DEN licence numbers, first-issue dates, expiry dates and disciplinary screens cited on this page, including the two practices set aside for board action, were read from this register.
-
Colorado General Assembly
Senate Bill 25-194 — Continuation of the Dental Practice Act
The current statutory authority continuing the Dental Practice Act, under which the Colorado Dental Board licenses and disciplines dentists, dental therapists and dental hygienists.
-
U.S. Census Bureau
Census Geocoder — address to incorporated place and county lookup
The federal geocoder returns the incorporated place and county a street address falls within. All seven recommended practice addresses returned Aurora city, Arapahoe County; the excluded Smoky Hill Road, Himalaya Street and South Parker Road addresses returned Centennial city.
-
National Commission on Recognition of Dental Specialties and Certifying Boards (American Dental Association)
Recognized Dental Specialties
Backs the list of twelve recognised specialties named in the FAQ, and the point that a general dentist providing implants, clear aligners or root canal treatment is not thereby a specialist.
-
ABOMS
American Board of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
The recognised certifying board for oral and maxillofacial surgery, cited for the single recognised board certification published by any practice on this page.
-
American Dental Association
Oral Health Topics — clinical guidance library
The ADA's clinical reference library, backing the general dentistry scope descriptions and the referral guidance in the FAQ.
-
City of Aurora
City of Aurora, Colorado — official municipal website
The incorporated municipality whose boundaries this ranking screens against, distinct from the Aurora postal delivery area, and the reference for Aurora's extent across Arapahoe, Adams and Douglas counties.
-
Arapahoe County
Arapahoe County, Colorado — official county website
The county returned by the federal geocoder for all seven recommended practice addresses, and the county shared with the Centennial addresses excluded on the municipal boundary.
-
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Oral Health — prevention and adult oral health basics
Federal patient guidance used as the neutral reference point for preventive-care language on this page. The CDC site rejects automated requests (HTTP 403) — bot-blocking, not a dead link; it loads normally in a browser.
Our Recommendation
For a household that wants the largest body of independently checkable evidence behind its choice, Deeg and Deeg Dentistry is the clearest option inside the Aurora city limits: two dentists matched to two clean state licences issued in 1982 and 1989, with both stated graduation years landing exactly where the register says they should. If the depth of a single record matters most, Aspenwood Dental Associates holds the longest clean dental licence we found anywhere in Aurora, first issued in January 1973 and unblemished for fifty-three years, though one of its four named dentists could not be matched to a record under the name the site publishes. If your treatment is likely to cross from general dentistry into surgery, Dental Associates of Aurora is the only practice here with a dentist holding certification from a recognised specialty board on site. Below those, H&M Family Dentistry and Mauck & Ricci each pair two clean licences in the Parker Road and Vaughn Way corridors, Iliff Family Dental does the same on Potomac Street, and Southlands Dental is the one genuinely Aurora practice we could confirm east of E-470.
Whichever you call, repeat the two checks we made, because both are quick and both changed our conclusions. Confirm that the street address is genuinely inside Aurora rather than an Aurora mailing address in Centennial, using the federal geocoder rather than the postal name, and look the treating dentist up in the state register, reading the board case and disciplinary action fields rather than only the status word, and noting the expiry date. Three practices were removed from this ranking on the geographic check and two more on the disciplinary check, and nothing visible on any of their websites would have told you why. Licensure is a floor rather than a ranking: it establishes that the state permits someone to practise, not that a proposed treatment plan is right for you.
This page is editorial research, not medical or dental advice. Nothing on it diagnoses a condition, recommends a treatment, or predicts an outcome, and no practice listed here has promised a result. Licence and disciplinary records reflect the state register as read in August 2026 and can change at any time. Discuss your own care with a licensed dentist, and verify every credential independently before you make a decision.
Denver Dean's List maintains editorial independence. We do not accept payment for rankings or accept advertising from the practices we evaluate. Rankings are based on state licensure and disciplinary records, federal address geocoding, and editorial research, and reflect the record as of August 2026. Licence status can change; verify it yourself before making a decision.