Alaska Board of Dental Examiners

Alaska dentist CE requirements

The published continuing-education requirements for a Alaska dental license, laid out clearly so you can see the whole picture before your renewal.

What the board requires

• 32 hrsTotal per biennial cycle.
• 2 hrsPain management and opioid use and addiction (mandatory only for licensees holding a valid federal DEA registration number), counted within the total.
• Up to 8 hrsInternet CE limited to 8 hours per 24-hour period (rolling per-day cap, not a per-cycle total; all 32 hours may still be earned online across multiple days).
• RequiredCurrent CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) certification meeting 12 AAC 28.920 must be held for renewal; it is a required credential and does not itself count as CE, though no more than 4 hours of CPR training may count toward the 32-hour total (does not count toward CE hours).

Common questions

Source: Alaska Board of Dental Examiners (https://www.commerce.alaska.gov/web/cbpl/ProfessionalLicensing/BoardofDentalExaminers.aspx). RECONCILIATION SUMMARY (Alaska, US-AK, dentist). Two blind extractors (A and B) independently researched this state from the SAME primary source: the official Alaska Board of Dental Examiners publication "Statutes and Regulations, Dentists and Dental Hygienists" (April 2025), hosted on the state .gov domain commerce.alaska.gov; controlling sections are 12 AAC 28.400 (CE requirements), 28.405 (first-time/prorated renewal), and 28.410 (approved courses). Both extractors cross-checked the text against the Cornell LII mirror (law.cornell.edu) and reported matching numbers. No stale-source or mirror-only condition was found that required an independent re-fetch, so none was performed. (a) WHAT FULLY AGREES (adopted as-is): cycle = 24 months / biennial (renewal due Feb 28 of odd-numbered years per board materials); totalHours = 32 contact hours per licensing period, where one contact hour equals a minimum of 50 minutes of instruction (12 AAC 28.400(d)(1)); the single subject topic = 2 hours in pain management and opioid use and addiction, conditional on holding a valid federal DEA registration number (12 AAC 28.400(a)(3)); formatCaps = Internet CE capped at 8 hours per 24-hour period (12 AAC 28.410(i)); excludedFormats = none; provider.accepts = CERP (ADA), PACE (AGD), state_approved (board-approved college/study-club/self-study and ADHA); carryover = 0 (CE must be completed during the concluding licensing period, 12 AAC 28.400(f)); requiredCredentials = current CPR per 12 AAC 28.920, non-counting. Alaska mandates NO general subject topics (no infection control, ethics, medical emergencies, child abuse, human trafficking, implicit bias, radiography, etc.); the opioid topic is the ONLY subject mandate. Citations were taken from Extractor A because A cites precise AAC subsection numbers while B cited only a generic "Alaska Board of Dental Examiners" authority; the underlying source URL and quotes are identical. (b) WITHIN vs ADDITIVE: set to "within". The board wording lists the 2 opioid hours at 12 AAC 28.400(a)(3) as a separate documentation item alongside the 32-hour requirement at (a)(1). Quote: "if the applicant holds a valid federal Drug Enforcement Administration registration number, verification that the applicant has completed not less than two hours of continuing education in pain management and opioid use and addiction." The regulation does NOT say the 2 hours are "in addition to" the 32, so per the extraction rule (mark additive only when the text is explicit) counting is set to "within". Both extractors independently reached the same "within" reading. This remains a genuine ambiguity: a reasonable reader could treat the 2 hours as additive because they appear as a distinct documentation item. Flagged for human review. (c) WHY FLAGGED (flagged_ambiguous): (1) the opioid within/additive question is not textually resolved (best-guess "within"); (2) A and B disagree on provider.strict; (3) the opioid mandate is conditional on a DEA registration trigger rather than universal; (4) no citation is human-verified (all verified:false) and no live-primary confirmation was performed by the reconciler. Any one of these forces flagged_ambiguous; reviewStatus is NOT extracted_agree and can never be verified_live without human sign-off. (d) EXTRACTION FLAGS (human reviewer must check each): 1. provider.strict DISAGREEMENT: A set strict=true (arguing the board accepts only an enumerated set of sources); B set strict=false (arguing broad acceptance). Reconciler adopted strict=false because 12 AAC 28.410(a) includes a board-approved catch-all plus study clubs and board-approved self-study, which reads as moderately broad. This is an interpretive label, not a factual number; re-fetching the identical PDF text would not resolve it. Verify against current board practice. 2. OPIOID within vs additive UNRESOLVED: set "within" as best reading; confirm whether the 2 DEA hours count inside or on top of the 32. 3. OPIOID TRIGGER is conditional: the 2 hours apply ONLY to licensees holding a valid federal DEA registration number. Nearly all practicing dentists hold a DEA number so it is effectively mandatory, but a non-DEA licensee is not subject to it. Confirm how the platform should surface a conditional topic. 4. SUBJECT/ACTIVITY CAPS NOT MODELED IN STRUCTURED FIELDS (recorded here, verify separately): practice management and risk management limited to 3 hours per licensing period (12 AAC 28.410(g)); volunteer service capped at 2 hours (12 AAC 28.410(h)); CPR training capped at 4 hours of the required CE (12 AAC 28.410(c)); teaching/presentation awards 3 contact hours per 50 minutes for an initial presentation and 1 per 50 minutes for a repeat, no stated cap (12 AAC 28.410(d)). These do not map cleanly to the 7 activity-format codes or the controlled subject vocabulary, so they are noted, not forced into a slug. 5. INTERNET CAP SEMANTICS: modeled as an online_selfstudy ceiling of 8 for schema purposes, but the actual rule is 8 hours per 24-hour period (a rolling per-day limit), NOT a per-cycle ceiling. Over a two-year cycle a licensee could complete all 32 hours online across multiple days. The ceiling value alone understates the true rule; read with this note. 6. FIRST-TIME RENEWAL: 12 AAC 28.405 prorates the requirement to one-half of the hours for each complete year licensed during the concluding period; the standard 32-hour spine above does not reflect this proration. 7. FEDERAL NOTE (excluded from topics on purpose): DEA registrants have a one-time 8-hour MATE Act training obligation under federal DEA rules; that is a federal requirement, not an Alaska Board CE mandate, so it is not modeled as an Alaska topic. This is an hours requirement extracted from the cited primary source. It is NOT independently verified, NOT certified complete, and requires human operator sign-off before going live. These are the published requirements as we read them, not legal or board advice, and CEChart does not certify compliance. Confirm your requirements with Alaska Board of Dental Examiners before you rely on them.