What Is My Dental Practice Worth in 2026?

August 6, 2026

A dentist sent me a text last spring that read, in full: “They offered 85% of collections. Is that good?”

It is a fair question and an impossible one. Eighty-five percent of collections might be excellent.

It might be well below what the same practice would clear in a competitive process. Nothing in that sentence tells you which.

This is the single most common confusion I run into, and it costs owners real money. So let me take it apart properly.

Key takeaways

Buyers price adjusted EBITDA, not collections. Two practices collecting the same amount can be worth very different numbers, because overhead and owner dependence differ.
A percentage of collections is not an EBITDA multiple. They are separate measurements. Any offer quoted one way has to be converted before you can compare it to anything.
Overhead is the biggest single lever. At a normal multiple, a dollar of overhead you permanently remove is worth several dollars of practice value.
Owner-dependent production drags the number down. Buyers are purchasing cash flow that survives your departure, and they price the risk that it does not.
The multiple is not fixed. It moves with size, buyer type, and how many buyers are actually competing.

What is a dental practice worth in 2026? Value equals adjusted EBITDA multiplied by a market multiple. Multiples scale with size and buyer type, from the low-to-mid single digits for small single-location tuck-in acquisitions up to low double digits for platform-scale groups.

Collections alone do not determine value.

Start with the number buyers actually use

Adjusted EBITDA is what your practice earns in pure operating profit after paying a market-rate dentist to do the work you currently do yourself.

That last clause is the one owners skip, and it is the whole point. A buyer is not buying your labor.

They are buying a practice that will still generate cash after you leave, which means they have to hire someone to replace your chair time and pay them.

If you produce heavily and pay yourself through profit rather than salary, your practice’s real EBITDA is lower than your bank balance suggests.

Here is the bridge, step by step.

Step	What it means
Collections	Money actually collected. Not production, not billings.
− Operating overhead	Staff, facility, supplies, lab, marketing, admin, equipment
− Market-rate replacement dentist	What it costs to hire someone to do your clinical production
+ Add-backs	Genuine one-time or personal costs run through the practice
= Adjusted EBITDA	The number every buyer prices from
× multiple	Set by size, buyer type, and bidder competition
= Enterprise value	What the practice is worth

For context on the starting point: ADA Health Policy Institute data put the average private-practice general dentist at roughly $942,290 in gross billings and $207,980 in net income in 2024, with average general dentist income around $215,320 in 2025.

Those are owner income figures, not practice values, but they tell you what an ordinary practice looks like before anyone applies a multiple.

Overhead is where most of the value hides

Industry benchmarks put healthy overhead for a US general dentistry solo practice in the region of 60% to 65% of collections, with well-run group practices operating meaningfully tighter.

Typical category shares run roughly: staff 25% to 28%, facility 7% to 10%, supplies 5% to 8%, lab 5% to 8%, marketing 3% to 5%, equipment and technology 3% to 5%, administrative 4% to 6%.

Those ranges vary by market and payer mix, and any single practice can sit outside them for legitimate reasons. But they are the frame a buyer’s analyst will use.

Now the part that matters. Overhead flows straight through to EBITDA, and EBITDA gets multiplied.

Suppose a practice collects $2.5 million at 68% overhead. Trim that to 62% through genuine, durable changes and you have added roughly $150,000 of annual EBITDA.

At a mid-single-digit multiple that is somewhere near $750,000 to $1 million of additional enterprise value, for cost work you would have wanted to do anyway.

I have watched owners spend a year negotiating hard over the multiple and ignore the overhead line that would have moved the number further.

One caution. Buyers test whether a cost reduction is durable or cosmetic.

Cutting marketing to flatter a year of financials shows up immediately in the diligence, and it works against you.

What actually moves your multiple

Size is the biggest factor, and it is largely outside your control in the short term. A single-location practice is bought as a tuck-in.

A multi-location group with real infrastructure is bought as a platform, and platforms are priced very differently.

Beyond size, four things move the number consistently.

Hygiene as a share of collections. Buyers read hygiene as a proxy for recurring, transferable patient revenue. Practices where hygiene runs above roughly 30% of collections tend to earn a premium, because that revenue does not walk out the door when the owner does.

Associate-led production. Practices where the owner is not the primary producer are worth measurably more. This is the same principle as hygiene, applied to restorative.

Industry analysis puts practices that operate independently of the owner’s personal production at a meaningful valuation premium.

Payer mix. A book weighted toward fee-for-service and well-negotiated PPO contracts prices better than one carrying heavy low-reimbursement exposure. Across most states, Medicaid rates land below 50% of what dentists charge and below 60% of private insurance reimbursement, per ADA HPI analysis.

Reimbursement is also the profession’s top-cited pressure: 55% of dentists named low reimbursement their leading challenge in 2026.

Infrastructure and records. Real lease term remaining, current equipment, employment agreements that exist, clean payroll, a modern practice management system. None of this is exciting.

All of it shows up in the price, and its absence shows up faster.

The three numbers to have before any conversation

Owners often ask what to prepare. It is shorter than you would think.

Your real overhead, by category. Not one number. Staff, facility, supplies, lab, marketing, equipment, admin.

The single blended figure hides where the problem actually is.

Your production split. How much of the dentistry is yours, how much is the associate’s, how much is hygiene. This drives the multiple more than almost anything else, and most owners have never written it down.

Your documented add-backs. With evidence attached. An add-back you can describe is worth nothing.

An add-back with an invoice behind it is worth its face value times the multiple.

Have those three and any advisor can give you a real answer in an afternoon. Turn up without them and you will get a range so wide it tells you nothing.

Why “percentage of collections” keeps causing trouble

Practice brokers historically quoted value as a percentage of annual collections, because for small owner-operated practices it was a reasonable shorthand. Buyers acquiring at scale do not think that way.

They think in EBITDA multiples, because that is how their own capital is priced.

Both numbers can describe the same deal. They are not interchangeable, and the conversion depends entirely on your overhead.

A practice at 55% overhead and a practice at 70% overhead, collecting the same amount, produce very different EBITDA. The same “percentage of collections” offer means something quite different to each of them.

So when an offer arrives quoted as a percentage of collections, convert it. Work out the implied enterprise value, divide by your adjusted EBITDA, and see what multiple you are actually being offered. Then you have a number you can compare against something.

Owners who skip this step are negotiating in a language they do not speak, against someone fluent in it.

The conversion, worked through properly

The text I mentioned at the top deserves a real answer, so here is one.

Take a practice collecting $2.4 million a year. The owner produces about 60% of the dentistry, an associate produces the rest, hygiene runs at 26% of collections.

Overhead sits at 64%.

The offer: 85% of collections. That is $2,040,000 of enterprise value. It sounds substantial, and against the owner’s mental benchmark of “what I collect in a year,” it sounds generous.

Now convert it.

Overhead at 64% leaves $864,000 before the owner’s own compensation is dealt with. The owner produces 60% of $2.4 million, so roughly $1.44 million of production.

Replacing that at a market associate rate of, say, 30% of production costs about $432,000 a year.

So adjusted EBITDA is roughly $864,000 minus $432,000, or $432,000. Add back a documented $35,000 of genuine personal expenses and call it $467,000.

That $2,040,000 offer is therefore about 4.4x adjusted EBITDA.

Which is a very different sentence from “85% of collections.” For a practice of that profile, in that band, 4.4x is not where a competitive process lands it.

Now run the same exercise on a second practice. Same $2.4 million of collections.

But overhead at 57%, hygiene at 33%, and the owner producing only 25% of the dentistry because two associates carry the rest.

Adjusted EBITDA on that one comes out closer to $780,000. The identical 85%-of-collections offer is now roughly 2.6x, which is worse still, and the practice is objectively the stronger of the two.

Same headline offer. Same collections.

Wildly different quality of deal. That is the entire problem with percentage-of-collections quoting, and it is why the conversion is not optional.

Dental practice financial records on a desk

One more thing owners get wrong about timing

There is a belief that you should fix everything first and only then find out what the practice is worth. It is backwards.

You cannot prioritise repairs without knowing which ones move the number. Overhead work, hygiene growth and associate leverage all help, but not equally, and not equally for every practice.

A practice already at 58% overhead has little left to gain there and everything to gain from production mix. A practice at 70% has the opposite problem.

Get the number first. Then fix the two things that actually move it, rather than the five things that merely feel productive.

It is also cheaper. Two years of focused work on the right lever beats four years of effort spread thinly across everything, and it gets you to market sooner.

The number nobody can give you over the phone

I get asked for a valuation on a first call constantly, and I understand why. But an honest answer requires seeing the financials, because the entire question is what your adjusted EBITDA actually is once it has been normalized properly.

What I can tell you is what the range depends on.

A well-run single-location general practice being acquired as a tuck-in sits at the lower end of the market. A two-to-four-doctor group with associate-led production sits higher.

A multi-site group with genuine infrastructure and management depth is a different transaction entirely, priced as a platform.

Be careful with the numbers you find online. Several widely-read pages publish EBITDA multiples for general dentistry in the low single digits.

Those figures generally describe small practices, or they are revenue multiples mislabeled. Applying them to a well-prepared practice at scale will set your expectations well below what the market actually pays.

The other thing worth knowing: the multiple is not a property of your practice alone. It is partly a property of the process you run.

A single buyer negotiating against nobody prices differently from four buyers who each know the others exist. That is not a claim about anyone’s integrity.

It is how every market works.

Creating that competition is what the Elite Selling System does. We hand-select and vet every buyer who gets to bid, the way a doorman with a velvet rope lets in only the right people, then run a private competitive window inside that group.

What to do before you ask anyone for a number

Get twelve months of clean financials and a current production report by provider. Separate hygiene production from restorative.

Identify every personal or one-time expense running through the practice, with documentation, because an add-back you cannot evidence is an add-back a buyer will disallow.

Know your real overhead percentage, by category, not as a single number.

Then get an assessment. Ours is free, confidential, and comes with an honest answer about timing, including when the honest answer is that you should wait two years and fix three things first.

You can request a free, confidential practice value estimate and we will walk you through what we see.

We work on a success basis, with a fee that varies depending on the value of the practice. If we do not get you a result, we do not get paid.

Frequently asked questions

How much is my dental practice worth?

Value is adjusted EBITDA multiplied by a market multiple. Adjusted EBITDA is what the practice earns after paying a market-rate dentist to do your clinical production.

The multiple scales with practice size, buyer type and how many buyers are competing. Collections alone do not determine value.

Is a percentage of collections a fair way to value a dental practice?

It is a shorthand, not a valuation method. Because it ignores overhead, the same percentage means very different things to a practice running at 55% overhead and one running at 70%.

Any offer quoted that way should be converted into an EBITDA multiple before you compare it to anything.

What is adjusted EBITDA in a dental practice?

Operating profit after normal overhead, after paying a market-rate dentist to replace the owner’s own production, and after adding back genuine one-time or personal expenses that were run through the practice. It is the number buyers price from.

Does high hygiene production increase practice value?

Generally yes. Hygiene is read as recurring, transferable patient revenue that does not depend on the owner, and practices with hygiene above roughly 30% of collections tend to attract a premium.

Will reducing overhead really increase what I can sell for?

Yes, and by more than most owners expect, because EBITDA gets multiplied. A durable reduction in overhead adds to EBITDA every year, and the sale price applies a multiple to that.

Cosmetic cuts do not survive diligence.

Does it matter how much of the production I do myself?

Considerably. A buyer is purchasing cash flow that continues after you leave.

The more of the production that runs through associates and hygiene rather than through your hands, the less risk the buyer is taking and the better the practice prices.

Why do the multiples I find online vary so much?

Because they describe different things. Some are revenue multiples presented as EBITDA multiples.

Some describe small single-location practices. Some describe platform-scale groups.

Always check what size and what measurement a published figure refers to before applying it to your practice.

Can I get a valuation without committing to sell?

Yes. A proper assessment tells you what the practice is worth today, what is holding the number down, and whether this is the right moment.

Plenty of owners get one and decide to wait, which is often the correct answer.

Sources

Practice income, economics and benchmarks

ADA Health Policy Institute. “Trends in Dentists’ Income, Revenue and Hours Worked.” ada.org
ADA Health Policy Institute. “The State of the U.S. Dental Economy, Q1 2026 Update.” ada.org
ADA Health Policy Institute. “Dental Practice Research.” ada.org
ADA Health Policy Institute. “The Dental Care Market.” ada.org
NetSuite. “Dental Practice Overhead: Cost Breakdown, Benchmarks, and Insights.” netsuite.com
Dental Economics. “Overhead and profitability.” dentaleconomics.com

Reimbursement and payer mix

ADA Health Policy Institute. “Medicaid Fee-For-Service Reimbursement Rates.” ada.org
American Dental Association. “Dental Benefit Trends.” ada.org
National Association of Dental Plans. “Statistical Reports.” nadp.org
The Lead Magazine. “Low Reimbursement Rates Top Dentists’ Challenges in 2026.” theleadmagazine.com

Buyer landscape and transaction context

Association of Dental Support Organizations. “About ADSO.” theadso.org
Becker’s Dental Review. “The largest DSOs headed into 2026.” beckersdental.com
Becker’s Dental Review. “69% of DSOs plan to boost acquisitions in 2026: Report.” beckersdental.com
Group Dentistry Now. “DSO Deal Roundup — July 2026.” groupdentistrynow.com
Mandelbaum Barrett PC. “The Four-Phase DSO Transaction Process.” mblawfirm.com
Cranfill Sumner LLP. “Selling Your Dental Practice to a DSO.” cshlaw.com