West Virginia Board of Dentistry

West Virginia dentist CE requirements

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

What the board requires

• 35 hrsTotal per biennial cycle.
• 3 hrsDrug diversion training, best-practice prescribing of controlled substances, and prescribing/administration of an opioid antagonist (initial licensure only, within one year of first license; NOT a recurring renewal requirement), counted within the total.
• 2 hrsTwo hours in any one or a combination of: drug diversion training, oral effects of tobacco use, or oral effects of substance abuse (each reporting period). A single 2-hour block satisfies any one option; the two subject slugs are alternatives, not additive hours., counted within the total.
• 2 hrsInfection control training (each reporting period), counted within the total.
• Up to 28 hrsSupervised (graded) self-instruction: graded audio/video, graded correspondence, and graded computer courses with a testing mechanism, capped at 80% of the requirement (28 of 35 hours).
• Up to 3.5 hrsNon-supervised self-instruction: ungraded home study journals/publications, ungraded correspondence, educational TV, audio/video, study clubs, capped at 10% of the requirement (3.5 of 35 hours).
• Up to 3.5 hrsScientific papers/publications/presentations and teaching or research appointments, each capped at 10% of the requirement (3.5 of 35 hours).
• RequiredCurrent comprehensive basic life support (BLS/CPR) certification for a health care provider (adult, child, and infant resuscitation; two-person rescuer; barrier/bag ventilation; foreign body airway obstruction; AED). Required each CE period. Note: the rule expressly allows this certification to also be counted toward CE hours, so it is not strictly non-counting. (does not count toward CE hours).

Common questions

Source: West Virginia Board of Dentistry (https://www.wvdentalboard.org). RECONCILIATION SUMMARY (adversarial reconcile of two blind extractors, A and B). This is an hours requirement extraction from a secondary mirror; it is NOT verified and may be incomplete. A human operator must confirm against the primary source before this state goes live. (a) WHAT FULLY AGREES. Both extractors agree on the core numeric spine: biennial (24-month) cycle; 35 total hours for a dentist; a recurring 2-hour infection control requirement; a recurring 2-hour requirement in one or a combination of drug diversion / oral effects of tobacco use / oral effects of substance abuse; supervised (graded) self-instruction capped at 80% = 28 hours; non-supervised self-instruction capped at 10% = 3.5 hours; no fully excluded delivery formats; no carryover of excess hours (maxHours 0); and a standing BLS/CPR certification requirement each period that the rule allows to also count as CE. These agreed values were adopted. (b) WITHIN vs ADDITIVE. All mandated subject topics are counted WITHIN the 35-hour total (they are floors inside the total, not on top of it). The rule frames these as portions of the required hours, not as extra hours, so none are marked additive. For the 2-hour combination topic, the board wording is: "At least 2 hours of continuing education shall be related to any one or combination of the following subjects during each continuing education reporting period: drug diversion training; oral effects of tobacco use; or oral effects of substance abuse." A single 2-hour block satisfies any one option, so the two subject slugs (opioid_pain, oral_cancer) are ALTERNATIVES, not additive hours. (c) WHY FLAGGED (flagged_ambiguous, not extracted_agree). Three independent reasons: (1) The source is a SECONDARY mirror only. Every quote comes from the Cornell Legal Information Institute mirror at law.cornell.edu; the primary WV Secretary of State Code of State Rules text (Title 5, Series 11, agency "Dental Examiners") is reportedly an image-based PDF that is not machine-readable and was not verified. (2) A genuine spine disagreement existed on the 3-hour drug diversion block and had to be resolved by the reconciler (see EXTRACTION FLAGS). (3) Per house rules, no agent may mark a state extracted_agree/verified when any field rests on a mirror-only source. verified is false on every citation. RESOLVED DISAGREEMENT (the main one): Extractor A OMITTED the 3-hour drug diversion / controlled-substance / opioid-antagonist requirement, asserting that a 2025 amendment to 5 CSR 11 DELETED it and replaced it with the 2-hour infection control mandate, and that the mirror was showing a stale transitional version. A's basis was a West Virginia Dental Association blog summary (secondary, unverified). Extractor B instead read the rule text and captured the 3-hour item as INITIAL-LICENSURE-ONLY (within one year of first license), coexisting with the separate recurring 2-hour infection control provision. The reconciler re-fetched the LII mirror on 2026-07-18 to break the tie. The current mirror text confirms B: the 3-hour block reads "Each dental applicant upon initial licensure shall complete at least 3 hours ... within one year of receiving his or her initial dental license," while infection control is a distinct recurring provision. They are two different provisions, not a stale duplicate. A's deletion theory is therefore NOT adopted. The 3-hour item is included as a topic with oneTime:true so that it is documented but clearly flagged as NOT a recurring renewal requirement. For an already-licensed dentist renewing, only the 2 + 2 = 4 recurring mandated hours apply, all within the 35 total. OTHER RESOLVED DIFFERENCES: (i) provider.strict: A said false, B said true. Adopted B (strict=true): the rule states "The Continuing Education course shall be offered by a Board approved provider," a mandatory gate, with ADA/CERP and AGD/PACE societies on the pre-approved list and all others required to petition. (ii) formatCaps: B additionally captured the papers/publications (3.7.4) and teaching/research (3.7.5) 10% caps; adopted B's fuller set (publication + teaching, 3.5 hours). Format partition verified: online_selfstudy and correspondence appear only in the 80% supervised cap; self_instruction only in the 10% non-supervised cap; publication and teaching only in the publications/teaching cap. No format code repeats. Live educational/scientific courses may satisfy up to 100%, so no cap object is emitted for live formats. (iii) board.url: adopted A's official board website (wvdentalboard.org) over B's SOS code-page URL. SUBJECT MAPPING (controlled vocabulary approximations): The combination topic was mapped to opioid_pain (drug diversion / oral effects of substance abuse) and oral_cancer (oral effects of tobacco use, the closest available slug for a tobacco-effects topic; there is no tobacco-specific slug). The 3-hour initial-licensure block mapped to opioid_pain. These are approximations of the board's own wording. FORMAT-PARTITION NOTE: WV lists "correspondence" under both the 80% supervised category (graded correspondence) and the 10% non-supervised category (ungraded correspondence). The 7-code activity vocabulary cannot distinguish them, so "correspondence" was placed once, in the 80% supervised cap (the practically relevant cap for typical graded online CE), and ungraded home study is represented by self_instruction in the 10% cap. EXCLUDED FORMATS: none. The Board rejects no delivery format outright. It does exclude certain SUBJECT matter from credit (e.g. estate planning, personal finance, cultural subjects, personal health/recreation, politics, memory training, speed reading) and caps practice-management-type subjects at 10%; those are subject-matter limits, not activity-format exclusions, so excludedFormats is empty. FEDERAL DEA NOTE (not a WV board mandate): The federal DEA MATE Act one-time 8-hour training on treating patients with opioid or other substance use disorders applies to DEA registrants as a federal registration condition, not a WV Board of Dentistry CE mandate, so it is excluded from topics. ANESTHESIA NOTE: Class 2/3/4 anesthesia permit holders have additional topic CE (section 3.6) that counts within the 35 hours. Not applicable to a general dentist without an anesthesia permit, so not included in the spine. EXTRACTION FLAGS (for the human reviewer to check against the PRIMARY WV SOS Title 5 Series 11 text): 1. SOURCE QUALITY: All quotes are from the Cornell LII secondary mirror, re-fetched 2026-07-18. Confirm every number and the exact subdivision numbering against the primary WV Secretary of State Code of State Rules PDF (image-based, not machine-readable) or the Board directly. 2. 3-HOUR DRUG DIVERSION SCOPE: Confirmed via mirror as INITIAL-LICENSURE-ONLY (oneTime:true, within one year of first license). Extractor A claimed a 2025 amendment deleted it; the current mirror does not support deletion, but verify against the primary/amended text and confirm whether any 2024-2025 amendment altered this provision. Note the mirror may not reflect the latest amendment cycle. 3. PROVIDER STRICTNESS: strict set to true based on the mandatory "Board approved provider" language. Confirm whether ADA CERP / AGD PACE courses auto-qualify by virtue of the pre-approved list or whether case-by-case board approval is needed. 4. BLS/CPR DUAL STATUS: Placed in requiredCredentials, but note the rule expressly allows the certification course to also count toward CE hours; confirm this is still current. 5. REPORTING DEADLINE / BIENNIUM ANCHOR: Extractor B reported a February 1 reporting deadline (next cycle naming February 1, 2026, fixing the biennium on even years). Not encoded in the spine; confirm the exact deadline and biennium anchor. 6. SUBJECT-SLUG APPROXIMATIONS: oral_cancer used for "oral effects of tobacco use" and opioid_pain for drug diversion / substance abuse are best-fit approximations, not the board's exact categories. These are the published requirements as we read them, not legal or board advice, and CEChart does not certify compliance. Confirm your requirements with West Virginia Board of Dentistry before you rely on them.