This dental practice calculator tool generates financial projections including monthly revenue forecasts, employee cost breakdowns, overhead analysis, and five-year ROI calculations. Whether you’re evaluating different scenarios for chair counts and patient volume, you’ll get clear calculations to support your business planning process. The calculator also gives you best and worst-case financial scenarios, helping you understand different variable outcomes based on your estimates.

Dental Practice Calculator

Calculate profitability and revenue projections for your dental practice

Basic Information

Employee Wages

Overhead Costs

How to use this calculator

This dental practice calculator helps you understand the financial side of running a dental practice. I built this tool using industry research and national averages to provide realistic starting points for many of the default calculations and cited my sources below. 

Start by entering the basics into this tool: 

family dentist

My local dentist office.

Staff and Wages

The calculator’s default staffing setup reflects current national salary averages:

You should adjust these values to match your local market for more accurate results.

Monthly Expenses

The calculator includes research-backed expense defaults:

  • Rent or mortgage payments, utilities, dental supplies.
  • Marketing costs (default: $3,500/month, based on FirstDentist’s recommendations for practices generating $750,000 in annual revenue).
  • Loan payments

Again these expenses will be highly variable from practice to practice so try to get as close as possible to the true costs of operating a dental practice including software and even taxes. 

What You’ll Learn

The calculator will give you the following outputs that an be printed or saved in a CSV file:

  • Monthly and yearly revenue projections (aligned with Statista’s reporting of approximately 3,800 patient visits per dentist annually). For the default setting I went a bit above this number at 400 patient visits per month or 4,800 per year. 
  • Complete cost analysis
  • Projected profits
  • Investment recovery timeline
  • Visual expense breakdowns
  • Three scenarios: expected, best case, and conservative estimates.

Understanding the calculations

Revenue Calculations: 

				
					Monthly Patients = (Patients per Chair × Days per Week × 4 weeks) × Number of Chairs
Monthly Revenue = Monthly Patients × Revenue per Patient
Annual Revenue = Monthly Revenue × 12 months
				
			

Overhead Calculations: 

				
					Total Monthly Salaries = Sum of all employee monthly salaries
Total Monthly Overhead = Total Monthly Salaries + Sum of all overhead costs
Annual Overhead = Monthly Overhead × 12 months
				
			

Profit Calculations: 

				
					Monthly Net Income = Monthly Revenue - Monthly Overhead
Annual Net Income = Monthly Net Income × 12
Profit Margin = (Monthly Net Income ÷ Monthly Revenue) × 100
				
			

Examining Dental Practice Revenue

While this dental practice calculator helps crunch the numbers, Dr. Chris Salerno, of The Curious Dentist and the Chief Dental Officer at Tend, emphasizes that when it comes to practice of profitability: the timing of revenue can matter as much as the amount when it comes to paying your bills on time.

Here’s are a few nuances the calculator won’t tell you operating a dentist office: insurance reimbursements can take 30-90 days to hit your bank account, while cash patients pay on the spot. This timing differential can make or break a new practice’s cash flow even when the raw numbers look solid on paper.

Here are a few nuances to keep in mind based on the Mastering Dental Economics presentation with Chris. 

  • Don’t just look at top line revenue. “The famous statistic is that less than 1% of dental practices in the U.S. default on their loan… However, the other side of that is just because a practice isn’t failing doesn’t mean it’s successful,” Salerno notes. He emphasizes that a practice can be technically surviving while the dentist isn’t taking home enough to invest in new technology or even fix broken equipment.
my dental office.

My local dentist office.

  • Find the Profit Sweet Spot: Salerno breaks down the target overhead ranges by specialty: “Research that shows the average overhead for a practice in the U.S. can be as high as 70 or 75 percent… many consultants that I speak with or the information I read would say that a good target for general dentists could be closer to maybe sixty percent overhead taking home 40 percent.”
  • Staff Costs: “From a business standpoint, it’s the largest part of your overhead is how is your team members and you compensate them that is the number one line item,” Salerno states. I made sure to include a large visual bar graph to emphasize the compensation section that will be the largest expense category for most dental practices.

The Bottom Line: While the calculator provides a starting framework for financial planning, Salerno’s insights remind us that successful dental practices need to balance the raw numbers with real-world timing of cash flows. A practice showing $100,000 monthly revenue might only see $70,000 of that in the first month with insurance reimbursements trickling in over the following months.

Remember that every dental practice will have unique revenue forecasts based on location, size, and the founder of the business (you!). Also consult with a licensed professional who understands the dental industry before investing in your own dental practice.  

Related tools:

Market Demand Calculator for New Business Ideas: Go deeper into projecting market demand for your dental practice with this tool. 

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