Dental Practice Valuation Multiples in Georgia (2026)

A general dentistry practice in Georgia doing $1M to $2M in collections is trading at roughly 70% to 85% of annual collections in 2026, which usually pencils out to 5x to 7x adjusted EBITDA. Above that, the number stops being about your practice and starts being about your size. Practices with more than $1M in adjusted EBITDA get bid at 7x to 9x, and platform-grade groups clear 10x or better. That gap is the entire valuation story in this state right now, and most owners misprice themselves by assuming the headlines about 10x multiples apply to a single-location office in Marietta. They don't.

Here's what you actually need to know, with the math.

The Two Different Markets Bidding On Georgia Practices

There are two separate buyer pools in Georgia, and they price on completely different logic.

The first is the individual dentist buyer, usually someone three to eight years out of school, financed by a bank lender doing 100% acquisition loans. This buyer prices on percent of collections because that's what the lender's model runs on and because the buyer is replacing your labor with their own. They care about collections, overhead percentage, patient count, insurance mix, and whether the practice can cover debt service plus their salary. They are not running a DCF. Their ceiling is set by what the bank will lend and what they can service.

The second pool is DSOs and private equity-backed groups. They price on adjusted EBITDA after they subtract the cost of replacing you as a producing dentist. That single adjustment is why an owner who does $1.4M in collections and takes home $490K can be quoted a number that looks like a discount to what a solo buyer offers. The DSO isn't lowballing you. It's pricing the business without you in it.

When those two pools overlap, which happens between roughly $1.2M and $2.5M in collections, you get real competitive tension and the best outcomes. Below $1M in collections, you're selling to an individual or you're not selling. Above $3M with multiple locations, the individual buyer is gone and you're in a pure EBITDA negotiation.

Why The Ownership Shift Is Driving This

The structural reason Georgia has this much acquisition activity is that solo ownership has been shrinking for two decades. As of 2023, 73% of U.S. dentists were private practice owners, down from 85% in 2005, according to the ADA Health Policy Institute's practice ownership analysis. That's a twelve-point drop in the share of dentists who own anything.

Two things follow from that number, and they pull in opposite directions on your sale price.

The bad news: fewer new graduates want to own. The individual buyer pool that pays 75% of collections for a single location is structurally thinner than it was when you bought in. In rural Georgia counties, it's close to empty. If you're in Valdosta or Dalton or Tifton and you're planning a 2028 exit to a young associate, you should stress-test that assumption now, not then.

The good news: the same shift is what created the DSO buyer. Groups need affiliated locations to hit their own growth targets, and Georgia's population growth plus the Atlanta metro's density makes it a priority market for almost every regional platform. If your practice is large enough to matter to them, there's a real bid.

The practices getting squeezed are the ones in the middle: $700K to $1M in collections, in a secondary market, with a retiring owner who produces 90% of the revenue. Too small for the DSO, too dependent on the owner for the associate buyer, and located where the buyer pool is thin. Those are the practices selling at 55% to 65% of collections, and the owners are always surprised.

The 2026 Multiple Ladder

For anything above a single location, the size-based bands matter more than percent of collections. Current 2026 bands, per The Sorso's compilation of FOCUS Investment Banking and McLerran & Associates data, run like this:

• Under $1M adjusted EBITDA: 5x to 7x
• $1M to $3M adjusted EBITDA: 7x to 9x
• $3M to $5M adjusted EBITDA: 9x to 11x
• Above $5M adjusted EBITDA: 10x to 12x and up for platform-grade groups

Read that ladder as a step function, not a smooth curve. Going from $900K of adjusted EBITDA to $1.1M doesn't add 22% to your value. It can add 50% or more, because you cross a band at the same time your earnings grow. That's the single most important fact in this article for anyone running two or three locations in Georgia, and it changes what you should do for the next three years.

It also means the most common Georgia exit plan, which is "sell my one great office for a premium multiple," is mathematically capped. One office almost never produces $1M of adjusted EBITDA. You're in the 5x to 7x band no matter how well you run it.

Operator Math

Let's run a real Georgia scenario. Dr. Whitman owns a general practice in Gwinnett County. Four operatories, one hygienist, $1.4M in collections, and she works four clinical days a week.

Her overhead excluding her own compensation runs 65%, which means $910,000 in operating costs.

That leaves $490,000 as seller's discretionary earnings, the number a solo buyer's lender cares about.

An individual buyer at 78% of collections offers $1,092,000.

Now the DSO version. Dr. Whitman personally produces $1,050,000 of the $1.4M. A DSO replacing her pays an associate 30% of production, or $315,000 a year.

Subtract that from SDE and her adjusted EBITDA is $175,000.

That puts her under $1M in EBITDA, so she's in the 5x to 7x band. At 6x, the DSO offer is $1,050,000.

As a percent of collections, that's 75%, right in line with the individual buyer.

Both buyers land in the same zip code, and the DSO offer will come with 20% to 30% held in equity or an earnout while the bank buyer pays cash at close. For a single location, the individual buyer is frequently the better deal on a risk-adjusted basis, and most Georgia owners never seriously price both.

Here's the part that changes behavior. Dr. Whitman keeping the practice five more years at current earnings collects $2,450,000 in SDE.

That's more than double either offer, before the sale she still gets at the end. Selling a healthy single location at 6x is very often the worse financial decision, and the reason to do it anyway should be that you want out, not that the multiple is good.

Now the group math. To reach the 7x to 9x band she needs $1M in adjusted EBITDA. At $175,000 per location, that's 5.7 locations.

That's about $7,980,000 in combined collections.

At 8x, the group sells for $8,000,000.

Selling those same six offices one at a time at $1,050,000 each brings $5,985,000.

The band crossing is worth $2,015,000 of pure structure, with zero additional patients.

And note that per-location adjusted EBITDA of $175,000 assumes she keeps 65% overhead across all six, which almost nobody does. Real group overhead creeps to 68% or 70% without central billing and real scheduling discipline. At 70% overhead, her per-location adjusted EBITDA drops to $105,000 and she needs nine and a half offices for the same band.

The Adjustments That Move Your Number Most

Three line items decide more of your valuation than the multiple does.

Your own production share. If you produce 75% of practice revenue, the associate replacement cost eats most of your EBITDA, as the math above shows. An owner who produces 40% and has built hygiene plus an associate into the other 60% keeps far more adjusted EBITDA on the same collections. Shifting production off yourself over two or three years is the highest-return valuation work available to a Georgia GP, and it takes longer than almost any owner expects.

Your PPO mix and fee schedules. Buyers underwrite your current contracted rates, not the rates you plan to negotiate. A practice carrying two bad PPO contracts that account for 30% of collections gets marked down for it, because the acquirer knows those contracts are a margin problem and will model them staying that way. Fix or drop the worst contract 18 months before you go to market so the improvement shows up in trailing twelve-month numbers.

Your add-backs and your books. Every dollar of personal expense running through the practice is a dollar you have to prove to get credit for, and unprovable add-backs get thrown out. If your vehicle, your family's phone plan, and a chunk of travel are on the practice P&L, clean that up two years out or accept that a diligence team will haircut them.

The benchmark to test yourself against is owner earnings for general practitioners in private practice, which the ADA Health Policy Institute tracks annually. If your take-home is well below that benchmark on above-average collections, the problem is overhead, not price, and no buyer is going to pay you for the earnings you could have had.

Working Capital Is The Valuation Story Nobody Reads

That's not a coincidence in a year with this much deal activity, and it's directly connected to valuation in two ways operators tend to miss.

First, working capital pressure is what forces bad-timing sales. An owner who needs $180,000 for a CBCT, an operatory build-out, or a slow quarter's payroll and can't get it goes to market from a weak position. Buyers can smell it. The discount on a distressed Georgia practice sale runs 10 to 20 points of collections, which on a $1.4M practice is $140,000 to $280,000 of value given away because a line of credit wasn't in place two years earlier.

Second, working capital shows up inside the purchase agreement. Most DSO deals include a working capital peg and an accounts receivable holdback. If your A/R is aged and ugly, you will either eat the writeoff at closing or fund a bigger escrow. Practices with clean 30-day A/R close faster and closer to the headline number.

The practical move is to put a line of credit in place while your numbers look good, not when you need it, and to run your A/R down before anybody sees your books.

What We're Seeing In The Calculator Data

It's a small sample and we'll say so plainly, but the pattern in it is consistent with what the deal data shows.

Owners are entering collections and overhead accurately, then overestimating value by assuming a multiple from the wrong band. The submissions cluster in the $900K to $1.8M collections range, which is squarely in the 5x to 7x zone, and the expectations attached to them are frequently double that. The gap almost always traces to one thing: the owner hasn't subtracted their own replacement cost.

The second pattern is overhead. Submissions with overhead above 68% are the ones with the largest gap between expected and modeled value, because overhead compounds through the multiple. Every point of overhead you take out of a $1.4M practice adds $14,000 to earnings, which at 6x adds $84,000 to enterprise value.

The Takeaway

Run your own number two ways this month: percent of collections at 70% to 85%, and adjusted EBITDA after subtracting what an associate would cost to replace your production, times the band you actually fall into. If those two numbers are far apart, the second one is the truth and you have a production-dependency problem to fix before you sell. If you're running more than one location, decide deliberately whether you're building toward $1M in adjusted EBITDA or selling each office separately, because the band crossing is worth seven figures and you can't stumble into it. And get a line of credit in place now, while your trailing twelve months look good, so a working capital squeeze never becomes the reason you sell.