Dental practice valuation calculator

Jacob Lee · October 4, 2026 · 6 min read

Most dentists cannot say what their practice earns. They can quote last year's collections to the dollar, and they know roughly what sits in the operating account, but the number a buyer actually prices the practice on is a different figure entirely.

That figure is EBITDA, and this page works it out with you.

What EBITDA actually means

EBITDA stands for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. Stripped of the acronym, it answers one question: how much cash does this practice throw off, before the owner's personal choices about debt, tax and equipment get involved?

Those four exclusions exist because they say more about the owner than the practice:

Interest depends on how you financed your build-out, not how well you run the schedule.
Taxes depend on your entity structure and personal situation.
Depreciation and amortization are accounting entries spreading past purchases across future years. No cash leaves the building.

Two practices with identical dentistry, identical staff and identical collections can show wildly different net income simply because one owner bought the building and the other leases, or one financed new chairs and the other paid cash. EBITDA strips that out so a buyer can compare practices on the thing they are actually buying: the operation.

Why your P&L does not show it

Your profit and loss statement is built for your accountant and the IRS, and both want your taxable income to be accurate. A buyer wants something different: what the practice would earn for them, under their ownership.

That means two adjustments your P&L will never make on its own.

Add-backs. Your salary, your spouse on payroll, the vehicle, the phone, the trip to the conference in Hawaii. These are legitimate, sensible tax planning. They are also not costs the practice would carry under a new owner, so they get added back.

Replacement cost. This is the one most owners miss, and it is the one that moves the number most. If you personally produce $600,000 a year, the buyer has to pay somebody to do that work after you leave. An associate at 30% of production costs them $180,000, every year, forever. That comes out before anyone talks about multiples.

The result of both adjustments is adjusted EBITDA, and it is the only profit figure a serious buyer negotiates from.

Work out your adjusted EBITDA

Start with what you produce and work down the way a buyer does. Your figures stay in your browser until you ask us for the result.

Gross production

What you billed last year, before any write-offs.

Insurance write-offs and adjustments · 18%

Takes you to $984,000 in net collections.

Operating costs, excluding your own pay · 58%

Staff, lab, supplies, facility, marketing. National average overhead sits near 61.7%, general practices nearer 65%, specialists under 60%.

Add-backs

Owner perks sitting in those costs: family on payroll, vehicles, phones, travel, one-off legal or build-out.

Replacement dentist cost

What a buyer pays an associate to do the clinical work you do today. Leave it at zero only if you are not producing.

Who is buying

The build-up

Gross production$1,200,000

Less write-offs (18%)− $216,000

Net collections$984,000

Less operating costs (58%)− $570,720

Plus add-backs+ $45,000

Less replacement dentist− $180,000

Adjusted EBITDA$278,280

28.3% of net collections

Enterprise value · 4x to 6x

$1.11M – $1.67M

The common range for general practices. Outliers reach about 7x where the practice is strategically important to the buyer.

This is enterprise value, not cash at closing. In a DSO deal it is split into cash, rollover equity, holdbacks and earnouts, so your day-one cash will be lower. Have us run it properly.

How to read your result

A few things worth knowing before you act on the number above.

The margin matters as much as the figure. Adjusted EBITDA of $300,000 on $1.5M of collections is a 20% margin, which is respectable. The same $300,000 on $2.5M of collections is 12%, and a buyer will see a practice working much harder for the same money, with more room to improve and therefore less reason to pay you for the upside.

Your trailing twelve months carry the most weight. Buyers look at several years, but they price off the most recent one. A down year from illness or a maternity leave lands directly in the number your price is built on. So does an artificially strong year, and that one can hurt twice, because an inflated baseline makes any earnout target harder to hit.

The multiple is a range for a reason. Where you land inside it depends on specialty, how badly the buyer wants your location, how long you intend to keep practicing, and whether you are negotiating alone or alongside neighbouring practices.

What this tells you, and what it does not

This calculator gives you an enterprise value range from your own figures. It is a serious estimate and a long way ahead of a broker's rule of thumb, but it is still an estimate built from inputs you supplied in under a minute.

What it cannot see is your production mix, your payer contracts, your hygiene reappointment rate, how concentrated production is across providers, or the quality of the records behind the numbers. A buyer's diligence will look at every one of those, and each can move the multiple.

What it does give you is the thing most owners lack entirely: a defensible number to think from, and an understanding of which line moves it most. Shave five points off overhead and watch what happens to the range. That is not a trick of the calculator. That is why every dollar of sustainable profit is worth four to eight dollars at sale.

Want the real number, not an estimate?

This calculator runs on what you typed in a minute. We run it on your transaction data, with every add-back documented, so the EBITDA you take into a negotiation actually holds up.

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