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...

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...

Direct answer: the insurance versus fee-for-service question is a math problem with an ethics problem sitting on top of it. Run the write-off analysis plan by plan to find your effective hourly rate on each one. Then, separately and never in the same conversation, make sure nobody on your team is le...

Direct answer: collect 98% or more of adjusted production, keep AR over 90 days below 15% of total AR, and submit clean claims within 24 hours of the appointment. The money you lose in collections is pure margin — there's no lab bill, no chair time, no supply cost attached to it. Planet DDS calculat...

Here's the short answer: there are ten numbers that tell you almost everything about whether your practice is healthy, and most owners are tracking maybe three of them. Production. Collections. Overhead. Case acceptance. New patients. Hygiene reappointment. Cancellation rate. Production per operator...

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...