Every practice owner eventually asks the same quiet question: am I normal? The trade press is full of marketing tactics, but very little of it answers with numbers. Here is what the most credible public data says a healthy general practice actually hits — and, just as important, where the widely-quoted figures are solid and where they're guesswork.
- $942K Average annual gross billings per general-practice dentist1
- ~22% Of billings kept as owner net income (≈$208K–$215K)2
- 45% Observed average treatment-plan acceptance rate4
Production: what a practice bills
The most authoritative number in dentistry comes from the ADA Health Policy Institute's Survey of Dental Practice: the average general practitioner billed roughly $942,290 in 2024.1 Specialists run higher (about $1.15M). Of that top line, owner dentists take home around $208,000–$215,000 in net income — a net margin in the low-20s percent.2
Treat these as the gravitational center, not a goal. A solo practice in a rural market and a four-op practice in a metro will sit on opposite sides of that average for perfectly healthy reasons. What matters is the trend line of your own production — and whether you can tie its movement to something you did.
New patients: the number everyone quotes, nobody sources
What the ADA does publish is a target for the direction: new-patient volume should grow 10–15% per year in a healthy practice.3 That reframes the metric the right way. The absolute count depends entirely on your market, capacity, and how long you've been open; the growth rate is the part you can actually manage.
Case acceptance: the biggest gap between "typical" and "target"
This is where benchmarking gets interesting. Analysis of pooled practice data in Henry Schein One's 2026 Catalyst Index puts the observed average treatment-plan acceptance at about 45%, with the top 10% of practices around 75%.4 Yet the ADA's own recommendation is that 75–80% of presented cases should be accepted.3 In other words, the average practice accepts barely more than half of what "good" looks like.
Treatment-plan acceptance: typical vs. top vs. ADA target
Marketing spend: a sensible range, not a rule
There's no primary source for dental marketing budgets either, but the vendor consensus is consistent enough to use as a guardrail: most practices spend roughly 5–10% of gross revenue on marketing, with mature practices trending toward 3–4% and brand-new practices spending well into the teens in year one (industry estimate). The more useful question isn't how much — it's whether you can attribute what each channel returns. Which brings us to the metric that actually decides whether spending more is smart.
Retention: where the top decile quietly wins
Levin Group's data center, reported in Dental Economics, found the average practice loses 12–15% of its patients each year, while the top 10% of practices lose only 7–8%.5 That gap compounds. A practice that retains an extra eight percent of its base every year is, after a few years, running a structurally larger business on the same marketing budget — because it isn't refilling a leaky bucket.
The one-screen benchmark
Pulling it together — and flagging the source quality of each line so you know what to trust:
| Metric | Typical | Strong | Source quality |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gross billings (GP) | ~$942K | — | ADA HPI (primary)1 |
| Net income margin | ~22% | 30%+ | ADA HPI (primary)2 |
| New-patient growth | 10–15%/yr | 15%+ | ADA target3 |
| Case acceptance | ~45% | 75–80% | Aggregate data + ADA4 |
| Marketing spend | 5–10% rev | 3–5% rev | Industry estimate |
| Annual patient attrition | 12–15% | 7–8% | Levin Group5 |
Sources & methodology
Figures are drawn from the sources below. Where a metric has no authoritative primary source, it is labeled as an industry estimate in the text. Dasher does not yet publish first-party benchmarks; this analysis aggregates public data.
- ADA Health Policy Institute — Survey of Dental Practice / Dental Practice Trends (gross billings, 2024 data)
- ADA Health Policy Institute — Trends in Dentists' Income (net income, 2024–2025)
- ADA — Measuring Practice Success (recommended KPI targets)
- Henry Schein One / Dental Intelligence — 2026 Catalyst Index (observed case acceptance)
- Levin Group Data Center, via Dental Economics — 'The Secrets of the Top 10%' (patient attrition, 2020)