Dentists in Winston-Salem, NC: Local Guide

Quick answer: Winston-Salem, NC has 180 dental practices in the Dental.me directory. 90 are rated on Google, averaging 4.55★ across 23,989 reviews. Top by independent Dental.me Score: LEAL AND SPANGLER, DDS, PA, Michael Choi, Twin Oaks Dentistry. Compare them below and shortlist two or three near you to call.

Across the city’s 180 practices, people have written close to 24,000 reviews — 11 short of that, actually 23,989. That number is the single most useful fact about finding a dentist here: you are rarely choosing blind. Somebody has almost always been in the chair before you and written down what happened.

But the paper trail is unevenly spread. Only 90 of the 180 practices carry a public rating at all — an exact 50/50 split between the documented half of the market and the half that is, for now, a blank page. And the documentation is lopsided in a second way: a single practice, Leal and Spangler, DDS, PA, accounts for 2,310 reviews on its own — roughly one in every ten reviews written about a Winston-Salem dentist. Understanding those two facts, the split and the skew, is most of the work of choosing well here.

It helps to picture the scale. Spread across the 90 rated practices, 23,989 reviews works out to an average of about 266 reviews per office — a large sample. What that buys you is confidence. When a Winston-Salem practice shows a 4.9, it is usually a 4.9 earned over hundreds of reviews, not a fragile average that one bad week could tip. The catch is that averages lie: a few giants like Leal and Spangler pull the mean up, while plenty of other offices sit with only a few dozen reviews each. So treat 266 as a reason to trust the top of the market, not as a floor you should expect from every practice.

The rated half is where you should spend your attention

When half a market has no public rating, the instinct is to treat unrated as a red flag. It isn’t — a missing rating says nothing on its own about the care, and Dental.me does not record why one is missing. But it does change the math. If you want a decision you can check, start with the 90 rated practices, because those are the ones where thousands of neighbors have already done the diligence for you. The unrated half is worth a phone call, not a leap of faith.

Inside that rated half, the ratings are high but not uniform. Of the 90 practices with a score, 52 sit at 4.8 or above — the top band — while another 11 land in the 4.5–4.79 range and 13 in the 4.0–4.49 range. That leaves 14 practices rated below 4.0. In percentage terms, more than half of the rated market is highly rated, but roughly one in six carries a below-4.0 score. The 4.55 city average hides both extremes.

That below-4.0 group deserves a word, because a low score is not automatically a verdict. A practice can slip under 4.0 for reasons that have nothing to do with the dentistry — a billing dispute that drew a cluster of angry reviews, a front-desk problem since fixed, or a small sample where two bad visits drag the whole average down. The way to read a low score is to open the reviews and look for a pattern. If the complaints are all about one thing and it’s a thing you don’t care about, the number may be misleading. If they describe the clinical work itself, believe them. In a city this well-documented, you rarely have to guess.

The names with the most Google reviews

In Winston-Salem, review count matters as much as stars, and a handful of practices have both. The clearest example is Leal and Spangler, DDS, PA, which holds a perfect 5.0 across 2,310 reviews — the deepest review count in the city by a wide margin. A top rating over that many reviews is a much stronger signal than a 5.0 built on a dozen reviews.

Behind it, several practices combine near-perfect scores with review counts in the hundreds:

• Twin Oaks Dentistry — 4.9 across 935 reviews, the second-largest review base in town.
• Eric J. Sadler, D.D.S., PA — 4.9 across 771 reviews.
• Londry & Modlin XVII DDS PLLC — 4.9 across 674 reviews.
• Pryor Dental — 4.9 across 615 reviews.
• Michael Choi — a perfect 5.0 across 608 reviews.

Together, those six practices account for nearly 5,900 reviews — about a quarter of everything written about dentists in this city. If you want a shortlist backed by the most patient evidence available, this is the front of the line. You can see all of them, and the rest of the rated field, on the Winston-Salem dentist hub.

Matching a practice to what you actually need

A city-wide average tells you little if what you need is a root canal at 7pm or braces for a ten-year-old. Winston-Salem’s depth shows up when you break the market down by service. Cosmetic and restorative care is especially well-covered, and the city carries a distinct set of prosthodontists, the specialists who rebuild full smiles with crowns, bridges, and implant-supported dentures.

Read that chart as a supply map. The deep benches — teeth whitening (36 practices), dental implants (33), and cosmetic dentists (33) — mean you can afford to be picky and compare several options on price and reviews. Families are well served too, with 26 pediatric dentists. The thin benches are where you should book early and be flexible on timing: only five oral surgeons and five prosthodontists serve the whole city, so complex surgical or full-mouth reconstruction cases have fewer chairs to choose from. And if you have a same-day problem, the 24 emergency dentists are the list to start dialing.

A method for choosing, not just a list

With 180 options, the mistake is scanning for the single highest number. A 5.0 on eight reviews and a 4.9 on 900 are not the same claim. Here is the order of operations that works best in a review-rich market like this one.

Step two is the one not to skip. In a market with 23,989 reviews, you have the luxury of ignoring thin samples entirely — there are enough practices with 100, 500, even 900-plus reviews that you never have to gamble on a score built from a handful of reviews. Step three matters because the best-reviewed office is worthless if it doesn’t take your plan; before you commit, read our national guide to what a dental quote depends on and ask for the estimate in writing. And step four — calling two — costs an afternoon and routinely saves hundreds of dollars on the same procedure.

When to look just outside the city

Winston-Salem sits at the center of a cluster of smaller communities, and for some patients the right dentist is a short drive away rather than downtown. If you live on the west side, Clemmons and Lewisville have their own well-reviewed practices; to the north, Pfafftown, Rural Hall, and Walkertown can be closer and easier to park at; and Advance, just across the county line, is convenient for anyone on the southeast edge. Widening the search a few miles gives you more offices to call — especially for the thin-bench specialties.

Whichever way you go, start from the evidence. The full Winston-Salem directory lets you sort the rated half of the market by specialty, rating, and review count, so the 24,000 reviews already written work for you instead of against you. To understand how we score and order every practice, see how we rank dentists.

Dental.me organizes dental directory data so patients can compare offices with confidence. Use each practice profile and its available website, map, and phone details for current appointment, payment, and care decisions.