Costs & benchmarks
How to Tell if a Dental Fee Still Earns a Margin
By Raman Kapil · July 6, 2026 · 4 min read
General guidance for directional use, not accounting, tax, or legal advice. Your own records are the deciding numbers.
A fee set two or three years ago was set against the costs of two or three years ago. Since then, staffing, supplies, and lab work have moved, and reporting through 2025 and into 2026 describes practices feeling that pressure as costs rise faster than fees. A fee that covered its cost when you set it may not cover it now, and nothing on the fee schedule will tell you.
Margin is the fee minus the loaded cost
To know whether a fee still works, compare it to the loaded cost of delivering that procedure: the chair time it consumes, the supplies and lab it uses, and a share of the overhead that runs regardless. Fee minus loaded cost is the margin. If it is thin or negative, the fee is no longer keeping pace with what the procedure costs you.
Why the regional average will not answer this
The common reflex is to check the fee against the regional average. That is a price comparison, not a cost test. It tells you how your fee compares to other practices, not whether your fee, or theirs, covers the cost of the work. If a whole region has let a fee lag behind rising costs, matching the average simply means losing money alongside everyone else. This is a self-assessment of your own numbers, not a comparison to other practices.
A simple check, one procedure at a time
Pick a procedure. Estimate its loaded cost using your own chair cost, materials, lab, and a share of overhead. Set it against the current fee. Repeat for the codes you perform most and for any you suspect. The ones that no longer clear their cost will stand out, and you will usually find a few surprises among procedures that feel routine.
What to do with a flagged fee
A flag is information, not an instruction. You might adjust the fee, adjust the time booked, change the mix of work, or keep a procedure as a deliberate loss leader that feeds higher margin work. Any of those can be right for your practice. The point is to choose it knowingly rather than subsidize a procedure without realizing it. DentistOpFlow raises these flags automatically from your own costs, and it never changes a fee for you; the judgment stays yours.
Sources
- American Dental Association, Dental fiscal squeeze continues into 2026. https://adanews.ada.org/huddles/dental-fiscal-squeeze-continues-into-2026/
- American Dental Association, Health Policy Institute, Dental Practice Research. https://www.ada.org/resources/research/health-policy-institute/dental-practice-research
- NetSuite, Dental Practice Overhead: Cost Breakdown, Benchmarks, and Insights. https://www.netsuite.com/portal/resource/articles/financial-management/dental-office-overhead-percentages.shtml
See it on your own numbers
DentistOpFlow turns the costs you already pay into the estimated cost and margin of every procedure. Check one of your own fees in about a minute, no login.
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