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...

Most dental practices have an AR problem they don't fully see.

Not because they're not looking — but because the numbers on the AR aging report are accepted as fixed, when they're actually a signal. High AR days, a bloated 90+ bucket, a climbing denial rate: these aren't just administrative annoyan...

"Are we paying market rate?" is the most frequently asked compensation question in dental practice management — and it's almost never answered with real data.

Most practice owners rely on what their study club says, what a hygienist told them they made at their last job, or a LinkedIn comment from a...

Most dentists know their PPO write-off rate is high. Few know exactly which plans are the worst offenders, what it's actually costing them in annual dollars, and what would realistically happen to their revenue if they dropped one.

That's not a knowledge problem — it's a data problem. The analysis ...

The hygienist shortage is the most discussed operational problem in dentistry right now. But the conversation almost always focuses on hiring — finding hygienists, paying them more, offering better schedules.

What gets talked about less is the math of what unfilled hygiene capacity actually costs yo...

Every dental practice owner asks some version of the same question: How are we actually doing?

Not gut feeling. Not "we had a good month." Real numbers compared to real peers.

The problem is that until now, there hasn't been an independent, practice-level benchmark for dentistry. You've had your a...

By Dental Strategy Institute | June 2026 | 6-Minute Read

Most dental practice owners think about their equipment the same way they think about their waiting room furniture: it is there, it is functional, it has a cost, and it does not need much more attention than that.

This is a mistake — and it i...