How we are paid, and what we refuse
Three links on this site can earn us money, and all three go to dental discount plans, which are not insurance. No insurer, dentist, clinic or lender can pay us anything, and that is a rule with a reason rather than an oversight.
The whole commercial arrangement, in one paragraph
This site can earn a commission from three companies that sell dental discount plans: DentalPlans.com, Careington and DentalSave. Their links run through our own /go/ address, carry rel="sponsored nofollow", and are marked in the text with an arrow. If you follow one and buy a membership, the seller may pay us. That is the entire list.
What a discount plan is, stated again here
A dental discount plan is not insurance. You pay a membership fee, and dentists in that plan's network agree to charge members a lower fee, which you then pay in full yourself. No benefit is paid on your behalf, so there is no annual maximum, no deductible, no claim and no waiting period — and none of the consumer protections that attach to an insurance policy attach to it.
We say that beside every one of those links, not because it is a formality but because it is the single fact most likely to be misunderstood. Several states require sellers to say it too: South Carolina's consumer code permits marketing only where the plan expressly states in bold and prominent type, prominently placed, that the discounts are not insurance.
What we refuse, and why
No insurance company is linked here, and none can pay us. Nobody on this site holds an insurance licence. The NAIC describes an insurance producer as an individual who sells, solicits, or negotiates insurance, licensed by state regulators — and being paid to send you to a policy is that activity. So Delta Dental, Humana, Cigna, Aetna, Guardian, Ameritas and every other insurer appear on this site only where we quote their own published documents, with the date we read them. There is no ranking, no "our pick" and no affiliate relationship with any of them. Reversing this would mean rewriting this page first, in public.
No dentist, clinic, booking service or dental-tourism facilitator is linked. Sending patients to named clinics for money is a different business with different duties, and we are not in it.
No lender, medical credit card or buy-now-pay-later provider is linked. Deferred-interest credit taken out against a dental bill deserves a warning, not a referral link.
No rate is printed that we have not confirmed. We are told, by third-party sources, what the three discount-plan programmes pay. We have not confirmed any of it in a network account for this site — this domain has no approved programme account yet — so no commission figure appears anywhere, and the links currently point at the sellers' own front doors rather than at tracked addresses.
What we could not read, and did not paper over
On 24 September 2026 we tried to read the published terms of all three sellers. DentalPlans.com and DentalSave both returned HTTP 403 to every request — a bot-protection page, not a broken site — and Careington's consumer pages render their terms in the browser, so nothing readable came back.
The consequence is deliberate and slightly awkward for a site that could be paid by them: we print no price, no savings percentage, no plan count and no network size for any of the three. What we print instead is what to check on their own pages before paying — the fee schedule for the procedures you need, whether a dentist you can reach is in that network, the cancellation terms, and the statement that the plan is not insurance.
What pays us nothing, and gets said anyway
The routes that are often the right answer earn this site precisely nothing, and they appear on the pages where they belong. The National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research names dental schools and dental hygiene schools, which treat patients at reduced cost under supervision, and federally funded health centres where you pay what you can afford, based on your income. For children, Medicaid's dental benefit is a federal entitlement under EPSDT. For a lot of healthy adults, paying cash for two check-ups is cheaper than any product on this page.
A payment never decides an order, a heading or a recommendation here, for the simple reason that this site makes no recommendations to be bought.
No dentist reviewed this site
There is no dental reviewer at Benefit Year, no clinician on the masthead and no reviewer in this site's structured data. We say so at the top of every page. If you ever see a claim to the contrary on a page here, it is an error — tell the editors and it will be removed the same day.