April 2026 Benchmarking Report: The Top-Quartile Gap Is Widening
Dentist confidence is up, but the broad middle went nowhere in 2025. Why operators are looking for working capital, and what the top quartile does differently.
An earlier summary of this report listed headline benchmark figures (median and top-quartile collections, overhead and hygienist wage) that came from a projection model, not measured data. We have removed them. The analysis below cites its sources directly.
The top quartile isn't beating you on production. It's beating you on the 30 days between doing the work and having the money, and on the perio you're not diagnosing. Those two gaps are where the spread comes from, and per the benchmark data from more than 10,000 practices in The State of Dentistry 2026, both are widening at an accelerating rate.
Here are the two numbers to sit with. Top-tier practices collect accounts receivable in under 7 days, while bottom-tier practices sit at 74 AR days. And top-tier practices diagnose and treat periodontal disease in nearly 30% of patients over 30, versus barely 1% for bottom-tier practices.
State of Dentistry 2026 benchmark data
Source: The State of Dentistry 2026 (Dental Intelligence, benchmark data from 10,000+ practices)
State of Dentistry 2026 benchmark data
Source: The State of Dentistry 2026 (Dental Intelligence, benchmark data from 10,000+ practices)
Not 30% versus 20%. Thirty percent versus one percent. That's not a performance gap, that's two different businesses wearing the same sign.
Dentist Confidence Is Up. That's The Trap.
The mood in the industry right now is genuinely good, which is exactly why this report matters. ADA Health Policy Institute's Q2 2026 update found dentist economic confidence in their own practice rose to 67.5%, up from 62.6% the prior quarter. Meanwhile the University of Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment fell to 48.0, a historical low.
Read that divergence carefully. Your patients feel worse about the economy than they have at any measured point, and dentists feel better about their own practices than they did three months ago. One of those groups is holding the credit card.
Confidence in your own practice is not the same as performance in your own practice. It usually tracks how busy you feel, and "busy" is the single most expensive lie in this industry. A schedule full of hygiene recall with no perio diagnosis and a 74-day AR ledger feels exactly as busy as a top-quartile schedule. It produces a fundamentally different P&L.
