Dental Practice Overhead Percentage: What's Normal in 2026?

What Is Dental Practice Overhead Percentage?

Overhead percentage is one of the simplest numbers in your practice — and one of the most misunderstood. It measures how much of every collected dollar goes toward running the practice before you take home a profit.

The formula is straightforward:

Overhead % = Total Practice Expenses ÷ Total Collections

If your practice collects $100,000 in a month and spends $65,000 to keep the doors open, your overhead is 65%. That leaves $35,000 before owner compensation and profit — and that's the number most owners actually care about, even if they've never calculated it directly.

What's a Normal Overhead Percentage?

General dentistry practices typically run 60–65% overhead. Specialty practices — orthodontics, oral surgery, periodontics — often run lower, somewhere in the 55–60% range, because of higher production per chair and different staffing ratios.

If your number is sitting above 70%, that's not automatically a crisis, but it's a signal worth investigating. Some practices run high overhead intentionally — a newer practice still building its patient base, or one investing heavily in equipment or a recent renovation. The problem is when high overhead becomes permanent instead of a phase.

The Categories That Usually Drive Overhead Up

Three expense categories account for most of the swing between a lean practice and an overhead-heavy one:

• Staff compensation — Typically 25–28% of collections. Above that, it's worth looking at scheduling efficiency and whether staffing levels match actual patient volume.

• Dental supplies and lab fees — Usually 5–8% combined. Supply costs creep up quietly when ordering isn't tracked against usage.

• Facility costs — Rent, utilities, and equipment payments. A good rule of thumb is rent under 5% of collections; well above that and the lease itself becomes a structural drag on profitability.

Marketing, insurance, and administrative costs round out the rest, but they rarely move the needle the way these three do.

Why This Number Matters More Than Revenue

A lot of practice owners chase production numbers without watching overhead, and it's an easy trap — production growth feels like progress, but if overhead climbs at the same pace, take-home profit barely moves. A practice that grows revenue 15% while overhead creeps from 62% to 68% can end up with less owner profit than the year before, even though the top line looks like a win.

This is why overhead percentage, tracked monthly and compared against your own trend (not just industry averages), tells you more about the health of your practice than collections alone.

Getting a Clear Read on Your Number

The overhead percentage is only useful if it's calculated the same way every month, from clean books. That means consistent categorization in QuickBooks, expenses booked to the right period, and owner compensation separated out from operating expenses so you're comparing apples to apples.

If you've never run this calculation for your own practice — or you're not confident the number you'd get is accurate — that's usually the first thing we look at in a discovery call.

Book a free discovery call and we'll walk through your numbers together.