Every quarter the ADA publishes two index numbers side by side and every quarter the industry press reprints them without doing the arithmetic. The Q2 2026 report is no exception.

Here they are. Since January 2021, prices for dental equipment and supplies rose 23%. Hourly earnings for dental office...

Most of what gets written about the dental economy is cyclical. Good quarter, bad quarter, confidence up, confidence down. The ADA's Q2 2026 report contains one chart that isn't cyclical at all, and it's the one I'd put in front of anybody making a ten-year decision about this industry.

Over the de...

There's a slide in the ADA's Q2 2026 report that almost nobody is writing about, and it's the most revealing page in the deck.

In Q4 of 2025, the Health Policy Institute asked owner dentists what they planned to do in 2026. Then, six months later, they asked the same group what they'd actually done...

I spent twenty-five years on the manufacturing side of this industry, which means I've sat through a lot of forecast meetings where somebody held up a survey showing dentists planned to buy equipment. Those forecasts were usually wrong in a predictable direction.

The ADA's Q2 2026 report just publi...

Dental strategy is the set of financial, operational, and regulatory decisions that determine whether a dental practice survives, scales, or gets sold on someone else's terms. It breaks into six working pillars: practice transitions and DSO affiliation, equipment as a capital asset, insurance and re...

The ADA added an AI section to its Q2 2026 economic report, and the headline number is doing the rounds already: 43.3% of dentists use AI for at least one task in their practice.

Fine. Adoption is real, faster than most people expected, and that's a legitimate finding.

The number I can't stop lookin...

Every time the ADA publishes economic data, the comment sections split into two camps. One says the numbers prove independent practice is dying. The other says they prove corporate dentistry is overhyped and the independents are fine.

Both readings are lazy, and the Q2 2026 report is a good place to...

The ADA Health Policy Institute published its Q2 2026 economic report in July, and buried on slide 30 is a sentence I've been chewing on for two weeks. After laying out that dentists are busier and that consumer dental spending grew only 1% over twelve months, the authors offer three possible explan...

The ADA Health Policy Institute released its Q2 2026 update on the state of the U.S. dental economy in July. Forty-seven slides, four core sections, plus a new section on AI usage in dental practices.

Most of the coverage has focused on two numbers: dentist confidence is up, and 43% of dentists now...

Henry Schein put out a tidy little announcement this week about a new leadership structure. They're creating something called the Henry Schein Leadership Team to replace the old Executive Management Committee, folding the global supply chain group into distribution, and three long-serving executives...

The ADA's Q1 2026 data shows dental reimbursement rates rose slightly in February. I know how that headline reads — like good news, finally, after years of owners feeling squeezed from every direction. Read past the first line, though, and the long-term picture is a lot less flattering. Rates still ...

Six percent. Sit with that number for a second. That's how much dental equipment and supply prices climbed in the twelve months ending in February, according to the ADA — against a general inflation rate of roughly 2%. Your input costs are running three times the pace of the broader economy, and nob...