Dental Practice Valuation Multiples in Florida (2026)

A Florida general practice collecting $1 million can be worth $700,000 to one buyer and $300,000 to another on the same Tuesday, and the gap has nothing to do with how hard you negotiate. It's which arithmetic the buyer runs before the first phone call.

The average general practitioner in private practice took home $215,320 in 2025, according to ADA Health Policy Institute. Hold that number. If you earn roughly that and a buyer has to hire a dentist at market rate to replace your chair time, the profit a DSO is willing to buy is somewhere near zero, no matter how good the practice feels to run. Our view, and the thing an informed owner is free to argue with: for most Florida practice owners, the widely quoted 4x to 7x EBITDA range is not their market, and chasing it costs real money that the percentage-of-collections market would have paid in cash at closing.

The 4x to 7x Spread Isn't a Negotiation, It's a Sorting

Most Florida dental practices sell between 4x and 7x adjusted EBITDA, with a wider 4x to 8x band across specialties, per CBH Business Group. Owners read that range as a bargaining corridor: start at 7, settle at 6, feel clever. It isn't a corridor. It's a sorting mechanism, and you get sorted before you sit down.

The low end of the range is where single-location, single-doctor, fee-for-service-light practices land when they land there at all. The high end is where multi-doctor practices with real management depth, stable hygiene, and EBITDA above roughly $500,000 land. Moving from 5x to 6x isn't persuasion. It's a different practice.

Meanwhile a separate market runs in parallel. Florida practices commonly trade at 60% to 80% of trailing annual collections, with goodwill carrying 55% to 75% of total value, per KMF Business Advisors. That's the private buyer market: an associate going out on their own, a nearby owner adding a second site, a dentist relocating. These buyers don't subtract a replacement dentist's salary from your profit, because they are the replacement dentist. They're buying a job with a practice attached, and they finance it with an SBA loan.

Two markets, two formulas, one practice. Most owners only price themselves in the market that pays them less.

What Most Owners Get Wrong: SDE Is Not EBITDA

The specific mistake, and it's concentrated among owners in their late fifties and early sixties running solo practices between $800,000 and $1.2 million in collections: they take what the practice pays them, call it EBITDA, and multiply by six.

An owner clearing $350,000 from a $1 million practice hears "4x to 7x" and starts thinking $1.75 million to $2.4 million. Then a DSO letter of intent arrives at $300,000 and the owner assumes the buyer is lowballing. The buyer isn't. The owner ran the multiple against seller's discretionary earnings, which includes every dollar the owner's own hands produced. The buyer ran it against adjusted EBITDA, which is what's left after paying somebody else to produce that dentistry.

Brokers know the difference. Accountants know the difference. The problem is that the number that circulates at study club dinners is always the multiple and never the base it's applied to. The multiple everyone brags about is the one applied to the number they don't have.

A $1 Million Practice and a $2 Million Practice, Priced Side by Side

Run both formulas on two hypothetical Florida general practices.

Practice A: $1,000,000 in collections, one doctor, five operatories. Operating costs excluding owner compensation run 65%, so $650,000 out, leaving $350,000 in seller's discretionary earnings. A DSO buyer subtracts a replacement dentist at 30% of collections, or $300,000, which leaves adjusted EBITDA of $50,000. At 6x, that's a $300,000 enterprise value. A private buyer at 70% of trailing collections offers $700,000. The private buyer pays $400,000 more for the identical practice.

Practice B: $2,000,000 in collections, owner plus one associate. Operating costs including the associate's pay run 62%, or $1,240,000, leaving $760,000 in discretionary earnings. The owner personally produces $1,150,000; replacing that at 30% costs $345,000. Adjusted EBITDA lands at $415,000, a 20.8% margin. At 6x, that's $2,490,000. A private buyer at 75% of collections offers $1,500,000. Here the EBITDA formula pays $990,000 more.

Same state, same year, same published multiples. Opposite answers.

The 12% Line Decides Which Formula You Get

There's a clean way to know which market you're in before you spend a dollar on a broker. Divide the collections percentage by the multiple. At 6x against a 70% collections benchmark, the breakeven adjusted EBITDA margin is 11.7% of collections. At a more conservative 5x against 75%, it's 15%.

So: calculate your adjusted EBITDA after subtracting a market-rate associate's pay on your own production. Divide by collections. If the answer is under about 12%, the DSO math will not beat a private sale, and every hour spent courting group buyers is an hour of value you're not building. If it's over 15%, the collections rule is the trap, and selling to an associate at 70% of collections could leave several hundred thousand dollars on the table.

Practice A above sits at 5% and should stop reading DSO press releases. Practice B sits at 20.8% and should not sign a percentage-of-collections deal under any circumstances.

The useful corollary: in a 6x market, every $10,000 of permanently removed overhead is worth $60,000 at closing. A supply contract renegotiation, one redundant part-time role, a lease you've been meaning to renegotiate for three years. Those aren't housekeeping items in the two years before a sale. They are the highest-return work available to you.

Goodwill Carries Three Quarters of the Price, and the Bank Notices

Goodwill accounts for 55% to 75% of total practice value in Florida. That means most of what a buyer pays for is not collateral. It's the expectation that patients keep showing up after your name comes off the door.

Two consequences owners underestimate. First, lender underwriting leans hard on documented cash flow and patient retention, which is why tax returns that were optimized to minimize income for a decade quietly reduce your sale price. Every aggressive deduction was a loan against your exit. Second, goodwill-heavy deals invite structure: holdbacks, earnouts, required post-close employment at a set compensation rate for two to five years. A headline 6.5x with 30% rolled into equity and a three-year work requirement is not the same deal as 5.5x in cash at closing, and owners routinely take the bigger headline.

We wouldn't. Price the cash, not the number in the press release.

Florida's 40% DSO Share Cuts Both Directions

DSOs now account for over 40% of dental practice acquisitions in Florida. Nationally, ADA HPI reports 16% of dentists were DSO-affiliated as of 2024, while the share of practices with a dentist owner fell to 72.5% in 2023 from 84.7% in 2005.

Owners read that as pure demand and assume it lifts everyone. It doesn't. Group buyers are selective by design, and their appetite concentrates in practices that clear the EBITDA threshold. What the consolidation trend actually does to a sub-$1 million solo practice is thin out the private buyer pool, because the associates who used to buy those practices are increasingly employed by the groups instead. Fewer independent buyers competing for the low end means less pressure on the 60% to 80% band, and more practices sitting listed.

The Dental Signal Practice Market Index, our dataset built from active broker listings, currently shows 925 practices listed nationally, with Florida listings carrying a median of $975,000 in collections and a middle half spanning $566,849 to $1,325,000 across 35 Florida listings. Nationally the listing median sits at $957,588 across 753 listings, with a median of 5 operatories. That's the asking side of the market, not a picture of all practices, but the shape of it matters: the supply arriving at market is heavily weighted toward exactly the single-location, mid-size practices that sit below the DSO threshold. Methodology is at the Practice Market Index.

What Would Change Our Read

Two things we're watching into 2027. If Florida's DSO acquisition share climbs meaningfully past 40% while independent buyer financing stays tight, we'd expect the sub-$1 million segment to see longer time on market and softer terms, not softer headline percentages, since sellers hold the list price and give ground on notes and holdbacks instead. And if group buyers start bidding on smaller practices as tuck-ins to existing Florida locations, where they eliminate rent and back office rather than hiring a replacement dentist, the 12% rule loosens fast and our call here weakens. We'd want to see that in actual closed tuck-in structures, not in acquisition-team marketing, before changing the advice.

Do This Before the End of the Quarter

Pull your last twelve months of collections and calculate adjusted EBITDA properly: subtract a real associate's compensation on your own production, add back genuine personal expenses, and divide by collections. If you land under 12%, stop talking to group buyers and start building a clean two-year record for a private sale. If you land above 15%, get a second valuation before you answer another acquisition email. Either way, list the three largest permanent overhead reductions you could make this year and price each one at six times the annual savings, because that's what they're worth at closing.

If you want the crossover math on your own numbers rather than a hypothetical practice, our valuation calculator runs both formulas side by side, the EBITDA multiple and the percentage of collections, and shows you which market you're actually in. It takes about four minutes with a P&L in front of you. Run your own numbers and find out whether the multiple everyone quotes applies to you at all.