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.
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.
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,
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
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'
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Dental Economics
A general practice collecting $1 million in 2021 that did nothing wrong, held every cost line to the national average, and left its PPO fee schedules untouched is about $51,300 a year poorer in owner income today. Not one invoice was mismanaged. The money left through a door nobody
Technology
The federal government now expects about 2,000 dental laboratory technician jobs to disappear by 2035, a 6% decline, and it names 3D printing as the reason in plain language on the Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational outlook. When a federal forecaster writes down that a technology is going to
Technology
A complete CEREC chairside setup, scanner plus mill plus furnace, runs roughly $79,900 to $150,000 and up, with a Primescan, Primemill and SpeedFire bundle listed at $99,900, per CAD/CAM Center's 2026 pricing guide. Financed over five years at 8%, that $99,900 costs about
Financial Strategy
COGS Percentage: Specialty vs General Practice: ADA HPI benchmark data and what it means for your practice.
Financial Strategy
Dental Practice Overhead by State 2026: ADA HPI benchmark data and what it means for your practice.
Practice Management
Summer Slowdown in Dental Practices: What Causes It and How to Fix It: ADA HPI seasonal benchmark data and what top practices do differently.