How to read this evidence
A direct, year-by-year comparison of tooth loss statistics US vs Champaign, IL is possible only up to a point.
National tooth-loss estimates come mainly from NHANES and NHIS, which directly measure edentulism or dental care use in nationally representative samples.
Recent local public reports for Champaign County, by contrast, lean much more heavily on community needs assessments and access-to-care surveys, while CDC’s PLACES system provides local small-area estimates but cautions that its model-based figures should not be used to evaluate local programmes or policy change.
For that reason, the strongest local evidence is not a recent, measured county edentulism rate, but a set of closely related indicators: who can get dental care, who cannot, where services are located, and which groups are most exposed to extraction risk.
That caveat matters for Rantoul in particular.
The public record is much richer for Champaign County overall than for Rantoul specifically, so the Rantoul section below uses official demographic and service-location evidence to identify likely risk concentration rather than claiming a directly observed village-level tooth-loss rate.
The national picture
At national level, tooth loss has improved markedly over time, but it remains concentrated among older and more disadvantaged adults.
Among U.S. adults aged 65 and over, the prevalence of complete tooth loss fell from 29.9% in 1999–2000 to 13.1% in 2017–2018. In 2015–2018, complete tooth loss among adults 65+ was 12.9%; it rose sharply with age, from 8.9% at ages 65–69 to 17.8% at ages 75+, and it was substantially higher among non-Hispanic Black older adults than among non-Hispanic White older adults, and far higher among people with less than a high-school education than among those with more education.
CDC’s newer prepandemic summary is consistent with that broad picture.
For 2017–March 2020, 13.2% of U.S. adults aged 65+ had complete tooth loss; CDC also reports that about 11% of adults aged 65–74 and about 20% of adults aged 75+ had lost all of their teeth. CDC further identifies cavities, periodontitis, and smoking as the leading causes of tooth loss, and notes that chronic conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and emphysema are associated with higher tooth loss among older adults.
Access remains a limiting factor even where edentulism is falling. In 2023, 65.5% of U.S. adults had a dental exam or cleaning in the previous year, while among adults aged 65+ the comparable figure was 63.7% in 2022.
Older adults with dental coverage were much more likely to have had a dental visit than those without it, and visit rates rose with income.
Healthy People 2030’s tooth-loss objective for adults aged 45+ is 6.3%, but the most recent national figure is still 8.9%, officially classified as showing “little or no detectable change”.
Illinois as the bridge between national and local
Illinois broadly mirrors the national trend of gradual improvement, but recent state data show why progress remains fragile.
In the Illinois Oral Health Surveillance Brief, the share of adults aged 18–64 reporting any permanent tooth loss was 27.9% in 2018 and 27.6% in 2022, with a dip to 24.6% in 2020.
Among adults aged 65+, the share reporting loss of six or more teeth fell from 8.5% in 2018 to 7.8% in 2022, and complete tooth loss fell to 8.7% in 2022 after a 2020 spike to 14.9%.
The same Illinois surveillance documents also show pressure on access. From 2018 to 2023, the share of Illinois adults reporting that they could not get needed dental care because of affordability rose from 11.3% to 14.5%.
Over roughly the same period, the number of dentists participating in Illinois Medicaid and submitting at least one claim fell from 2,766 in 2019 to 2,525 in 2023.
Illinois’ 2026–2030 Oral Health Plan sharpens that concern for older adults. It states that 34.3% of Illinois adults over 65 do not visit a dentist or dental clinic, and 31.2% have lost more than six teeth because of tooth decay or gum disease.
The plan also frames access-to-care and workforce shortages as statewide structural problems and explicitly notes that many Illinois counties are Health Professional Shortage Areas for dental care.
What recent Champaign County data actually show
The best current Champaign County evidence points to access barriers that are fully capable of sustaining tooth loss even if direct county edentulism surveillance is thin.
In the county’s 2021–2023 community health plan, 80.6% of respondents said they had a dentist, 66.4% said they had had a routine dental check-up within the past year, and 9.8% said it had been more than five years since their last routine dental check-up.
Nearly 90% of respondents said they used a private dentist’s office for dental care.
The same report found that having a dentist and having more frequent dental check-ups were more common among White, higher-income, and more educated residents, while dental check-up frequency was lower among Black residents.
The newer 2025 Champaign County CHNA/IPLAN shows a more strained picture. In that survey, 29% of respondents reported that they did not have access to dental care when they needed it, a higher proportion than for medical care.
Access to dental care was rated lower for Black residents and for people in unstable housing, and the leading reasons for missing needed family dental care were inability to afford co-payments or deductibles, lack of insurance, and dentists refusing insurance.
Those access findings sit within a county population that still carries substantial risk. In 2020–2024, 14.5% of Champaign County residents were aged 65 or older, 6.5% of residents under 65 were uninsured, and 18.8% lived in poverty.
At the same time, local organisations continue to describe adult dental access as a standing community problem: Champaign County Health Care Consumers says affordable dental care for low-income adults has been identified as a top health-care problem in every major county needs assessment, and the local public health district reported serving as a dental home for more than 6,000 children aged 0–18 in 2023, which suggests that paediatric safety-net capacity is stronger than adult capacity.
Champaign and Rantoul are not likely to face the same risk
Within the county, Champaign and Rantoul do not appear equally exposed. Champaign city has lower uninsurance than the county overall, with 5.8% of residents under 65 uninsured, but it also has a high measured poverty rate of 25.9%.
Importantly for service access, the county’s 2025 dental resource guide lists multiple dental access points in Champaign and Urbana, including the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District clinic, Promise Healthcare, CU Dentists, Parkland College’s clinic, Champaign County Christian Health Center, and Carle Hospital in Urbana.
Rantoul’s profile is different and, on balance, more concerning for tooth-loss risk. In 2020–2024, Rantoul’s median household income was $48,691, 16.9% of residents were in poverty, and 12.4% of residents under 65 were uninsured, nearly double the county figure.
Rantoul is also older than the county in one important respect: 14.6% of residents are 65+, and the village has sizeable Black and Hispanic populations, groups that county and national evidence associate with lower access and worse tooth-loss outcomes when compounded by insurance and income barriers.
Service geography strengthens that concern. The CHP Rantoul Health Center is a real local access point, but it is open only every other Monday and lists medical, behavioural health and support services rather than on-site dental care.
Meanwhile, the county’s dental referral guide concentrates routine Medicaid and uninsured dental options in Champaign, Urbana, Mahomet, Gibson City and other locations, and devotes a full section to arranging Medicaid transport rides to appointments.
Taken together, those facts strongly suggest that Rantoul residents face greater travel and coordination burdens for routine dental care than residents of Champaign proper.
What this suggests after 2026
The most defensible forecast is not that edentulism will suddenly rise everywhere, but that absolute need will remain high even if prevalence continues to inch down.
Nationally, the older population is still expanding fast: the U.S. population aged 65+ reached 61.2 million in 2024, and all baby boomers will be 65 or older by 2030.
Because tooth loss is concentrated among older adults, that demographic shift means the number of people living with severe tooth loss, dentures, dental implant need, or extraction risk may remain large even while the percentage with complete tooth loss slowly falls.
For Illinois, the state plan through 2030 assumes continued pressure from workforce shortages, access barriers and social determinants of health.
For Champaign County, the local strategy through 2031 does not set a tooth-loss target; instead, it prioritises reducing cost, insurance gaps, provider shortages and transportation barriers across medical, dental and behavioural health systems.
That is telling: local leaders appear to view tooth loss less as an isolated dental condition than as the downstream result of fragmented access.
For research purposes, the clearest conclusion is this: national tooth-loss statistics show real long-run improvement, but Champaign County’s recent evidence shows that the local bottleneck is still getting people into care early enough to prevent extraction.
Within the county, Rantoul likely sits on the more vulnerable side of that divide because it combines higher uninsurance, lower income, a meaningful older-adult population, and thinner local service availability.
Unless access improves materially after 2026, the most plausible local trend is not a dramatic reversal of national progress, but a persistent concentration of preventable tooth loss among poorer, uninsured, Medicaid-dependent, rural-edge and racially marginalised residents.
References
- PLACES: Local Data for Better Health, County Data 2023 …
- U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts: Rantoul village, Illinois
- Products – Data Briefs – Number 368 – June 2020
- FastStats – Oral and Dental Health
- dph.illinois.gov
- astdd.org
- c-uphd.org
- champaigncountyil.gov
- U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts: Champaign County, Illinois
- U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts: Champaign city, Illinois
- CHP Rantoul Health Center – Community Health Partnership of Illinois
- Older Adults Outnumber Children in 11 States, Nearly Half …
- About Tooth Loss | Oral Health | CDC
