By Pete Volk, founder of Dental Strategy Institute, with clinical review by Susan Volk, RDH.
Can a dental hygienist practice independently? In some states, yes — a hygienist can evaluate, treat, and bill patients without a supervising dentist on-site, under what's called a direct access law. But rou...
Three numbers decide whether a dental office build actually pencils out: your debt service coverage relative to the new monthly payment, your realistic new-patient flow, and what your new operatories will actually produce compared to the benchmark for a healthy practice. Get any one of these wrong a...
Financing a dental office build almost always means stacking three separate loans — construction, real estate, and equipment — and the number your banker actually cares about isn't your total project cost. It's the monthly payment increase your production has to cover, starting the month the doors o...
Two dentists graduate the same spring. Same school, same $300,000 balance on the day they cross the stage. Ten years later, one is debt-free with money in the bank. The other still owes more than $240,000 and hands over a fifth of every paycheck to service it.
Same start. Very different endings. An...
Dental office construction runs $165 to $330 per square foot depending on finish level, before equipment. That's the range you'll hit whether you're building a lean, function-first practice or a design-forward flagship — the difference is entirely in what's behind that number.
Contractors and denta...
Opening a dental practice from scratch — a true de novo, no patient chart, no existing goodwill — costs most dentists somewhere between $650,000 and $1 million all-in in 2026, and the number that surprises first-timers isn't the construction bid. It's everything else stacked on top of it.
I've watc...
Twenty-five states have filed some version of a dental loss ratio bill since 2023, by my count. Two of them have actually gotten a mandatory minimum across the finish line. Sit with that gap for a second — that's the whole story of where this fight stands in 2026, more than any single headline could...
A new dental office runs somewhere between $150 and $300 per square foot for construction alone in most U.S. markets in 2026 — and once you add equipment, technology, and the soft costs nobody budgets for, that number climbs to $300 to $500+ per square foot all-in. For a typical six-operatory practi...
If you caught our first post on dental loss ratio, you already know the mechanics — DLR sets a floor on how much of every premium dollar an insurer has to spend on patient care. What that post skipped over is the question every practice owner and DSO operator actually cares about, which is whether a...
Ask ten dentists what "dental loss ratio" means and you'll get eight blank stares, one wild guess about lost patients, and one office manager who read something on the ADA site last month and has been waiting for an excuse to bring it up at lunch. Fair. It's not a phrase that rolls off the tongue in...
Every dollar a dental practice spends that isn't doctor compensation falls into one of six overhead categories. Most practice owners know their overhead is "too high" — but they don't know which category is the problem, or how their specific mix compares to practices like theirs.
That's the gap the ...
Most of what's circulating about Colorado's new dental rules is wrong in one direction or the other. Either someone is calling it a ban on DSOs — it isn't — or someone is waving it off as business as usual. It isn't that either.
Here's what actually happened, what it means for your structure, and wh...