Dental Economics
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
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
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.
Practice Management
An operatory costs real money to plumb and then costs money every month whether or not a patient is sitting in it. The best peer-reviewed estimate available says that adding 10% more operatories buys a general practice about 1.2% more patient visits, while adding 10% more chairside hours in
Financial Strategy
The average general practice in this country bills $965,660 a year, and the average practice never sees about $86,900 of it. That figure comes from putting two numbers side by side: the ADA Health Policy Institute puts 2025 average gross billings per dentist in private practice at $965,