November 2026 Benchmarking Report: The Practice Market Index

November 2026 Practice Market Index: the median dental practice for sale collects $996,000 (n=857).

Credentialing Runs 38 to 142 Days. Start With the Slowest

A credentialing delay never shows up as a line item. There's no invoice, no vendor, no entry in the P&L called "ninety days of an empty operatory." That's exactly why it's the most expensive unmeasured event in a dental practice:

DSO IT Spend Runs 2.4% of Collections. 1.5% Is Enough

On a practice collecting $1 million a year, the difference between an IT budget of 2.4% of collections and one of 1.5% is $9,000 a year, every year, forever, and almost none of it shows up in production. That $9,000 is the quietest line in your

Why 98% Collections Still Leaves $60K on the Table

A practice running 98% collections on $1.25 million of production is quietly losing about $60,000 a year, and the ratio itself is the reason nobody goes looking for it. That is roughly 28% of the $215,320 the average general dentist earned in 2025, according to ADA Health

Buying Your Building vs Leasing: The Operator Math

A $195,000 down payment is the largest single check most practice owners will ever write, and in year one that building will hand back roughly $16,000, none of it in cash. That isn't a scandal. It's just arithmetic almost nobody runs before the broker&

Card Processing Fees Are Quietly Taking 2% of Your Collections

A practice collecting $1 million a year with 80% of that money arriving across a card terminal hands its processor roughly $27,040 annually. Run the same volume at the rate the ADA says practices should be targeting, 2.1% to 2.2%, and the bill drops to about $17,

Third-Party Patient Financing: The Real Cost Per Case

Finance $360,000 of treatment a year on a 10% merchant plan and you've handed the lender $36,000 before the lab invoice even arrives. Run the identical cases through a 1.9% plan and the bill is $6,840. Same chairs, same clinicians, same patients saying yes.

What a Dental Practice Loan Actually Costs in 2026

A median SBA dental acquisition loan in 2026 is $853,000, and at today's pricing it will take $10,689 out of your practice every month for ten years before you pay yourself a dime. That's the number that matters, and almost nobody shops for it.

Hygienist Wages Rose Again in 2026. Here Is What It Costs You.

A practice collecting $1.19 million this year is handing roughly $10,800 of margin to its payroll that it did not hand over in January 2021, and not one person on staff got rich in the process. That is five years of dental economics compressed into a single number,

What Multiple Are Buyers Actually Paying for Dental Practices in 2026?

Two general practices can hand a buyer the same $1 million of adjusted EBITDA and walk away $3 million apart at closing. Neither one is better run than the other. One is simply classified as a platform and the other as an add-on, and that classification was decided long before

Dental Practice Valuation Multiples in 2026

The same practice can fetch $1,690,000 or $2,242,500 from the same buyer in the same week, and the difference has nothing to do with the multiple. It comes down to four lines in a recast spreadsheet that most sellers never read closely, and the buyer'

Payroll as a Percentage of Collections: The Benchmark Most Practices Skip

Six points of payroll on a $1 million practice is $60,000 a year. That is the difference between a practice that buys its own chair and one that finances it, and most owners cannot tell you within three points where their payroll ratio sat last month. Our view: a

Insurance

Dental Claim Denial Rates: What Normal Looks Like and What Yours Costs

A practice submitting a million dollars of insurance claims a year at the national average denial rate is handing about $28,500 annually to paperwork it will never collect. That money does not show up as a loss anywhere an owner looks: it hides inside write-off lines, inside a billing

Knowledge Base

October 2026 Benchmarking Report: What Dental Practices Are Selling For Heading Into Q4

A single-location general practice collecting $1.6 million can be worth $1.69 million or $2.57 million heading into Q4 2026, and the $875,000 spread has almost nothing to do with which broker you hire or how many letters of intent you stack up. It has to do

Practice Management

Hygiene Reappointment Rate: The Number That Predicts Next Year's Production

The clearest dividing line between a practice that collects $500,000 and one that collects over $1,000,000 isn't the marketing budget, the number of chairs, or whether there's an associate. It's that the smaller practice reappoints about 60% of its hygiene patients

Industry Trends

The Dental Practice Market in 2026: What Practices for Sale Actually Collect

Two general practices collect $900,000 a year. One sells for $720,000. The other sells for $1,188,000. Nothing separates them but a margin line neither owner looked at closely until the year they decided to quit. Here is the claim, and plenty of brokers will argue with

Dental Economics

What an Hour of Dental Chair Time Is Actually Worth in 2026

In the average general practice, an hour of doctor chair time collects somewhere near $679 and keeps roughly $258 of it. The hour right after that one, the one nobody filled, still costs about $326 in rent, payroll and equipment notes, and collects nothing at all. That gap is the

Insurance

What a UCR Fee Schedule Actually Is and How to Set Yours

Hold your fees flat for one more year while your costs move the way they've moved lately, and a $1.2M practice quietly hands back roughly $36,000 in profit without a single patient noticing. ADA Health Policy Institute data shows practice revenues up 1.4% against expenses

Financial Strategy

How Much Should a Dental Practice Raise Fees in 2026?

A 4% Fee Increase Is the Floor, Not the Answer If your fee schedule has sat still for two years, you have handed roughly seven percent of your pricing power to your suppliers, your lab, and your hygienist's raise. The Producer Price Index for dental care services rose

Financial Strategy

In-House Membership Plans: The Economics Nobody Runs

Sell 300 memberships at $33 a month and you've just signed a $118,800 fee schedule with yourself, and unlike a PPO contract, nobody is going to audit it for you. That's the part owners miss when they bolt a membership plan onto the practice: you

Practice Management

Dental No-Show Rate Benchmarks: What Good Practices Hold It To

A single-doctor general practice running a 12% hygiene no-show rate and a 4% restorative no-show rate is handing back roughly $67,776 of production a year, and most of that owner has no idea which half of the loss actually matters. They will spend the next quarter buying text reminders

Knowledge Base

September 2026 Benchmarking Report: The $48K Collections Gap

Collections are rising with patient spending, but only your collection rate shows whether your revenue cycle works. The benchmarks to measure against, and the math on recovering the gap.

Insurance

Collections per Provider Hour: The Metric That Should Replace Write-Off Percentage

Two Plans, One Schedule, $54,012 There are two PPOs on your schedule right now. One writes off 38 cents on the dollar and the other writes off 15, and the one you think is bleeding you is earning you $360 more per chair hour than the one you'

Insurance

The Break-Even Retention Test: The Only Math That Should Decide Whether You Drop a PPO

A practice collecting $1 million a year with a 35% average write-off is handing roughly $350,000 in billed fees to insurers before it pays a single hygienist, according to Veritas Dental Resources citing the ADA's 2023 Survey of Dental Fees, which puts PPO write-offs at 30% to