Revenue by State

Scroll dental practice listings for any length of time and the prices start to feel arbitrary. A practice at $1.1M with $850K in collections. A practice at $400K that looks suspect. The same revenue selling for very different multiples in different states.

So we pulled the data. 17,963 active GP listings off the U.S. transition marketplaces, with broker-reported annual collections attached, capped at $5M so the dataset stayed focused on single-office sales instead of group rollups. Here is what the market actually looks like.

The national picture.

The median listed GP practice does $750K in collections a year. A quarter of them do less than $500K. Three-quarters do less than $1.09M. About 1 in 10 does over $1.6M.

The "million-dollar practice" gets thrown around like an average. It is not. A million-dollar GP is top-quartile of the listed market. Most practices on the market today gross less than that, and most do fine.

Montana at the top, New Jersey at the bottom.

The state-level spread is bigger than the trade press lets on. The median GP listing in Montana grosses $1.25M. The median in New Jersey grosses $600K. Roughly 2×.

The gap is mostly competition and density. Montana has fewer dentists per capita than almost anywhere in the country. One practice serves a wide radius. Insurance has less leverage. The math works in the owner's favor before the doors open.

New Jersey has the densest dentist-to-population ratio in the country. Patients have choices, insurance carriers know it, and fees get squeezed. Same hours, same procedures, fewer dollars at the end of the day.

The same $800K practice in those two states is a completely different asset. In NJ it's top-decile. In MT it sits below the local median. Same number, different scoreboard.

Specialists out-gross GPs by 25 to 60%.

Pulling the same dataset by specialty shows the ceiling on GP revenue is real.

This is not about effort. It is procedure mix. A specialist's chair time is concentrated on high-value procedures — implants, full-arch cases, third molars, RCTs. A GP's chair time is exams, prophys, fillings, and crowns. The same eight hours don't bill the same way.

The path for a GP to close the gap isn't grinding more chairs. It is bringing higher-value procedures in-house: clear aligners, implants, sleep medicine, sometimes Botox. The practices that have already done that work command real premiums when they hit the market.

The listing market itself is wildly uneven.

California has roughly 2,500 GP practices currently for sale. Texas has 1,400. New York has 1,200. Pennsylvania, Florida, Washington, and Illinois all clear 700.

In those states, the market is genuinely shoppable. A buyer can compare a dozen practices in a single county, hold out for the right combination of buildout, lease, and hygiene schedule, and walk away from any one deal without losing the search.

Delaware, North Dakota, and Rhode Island didn't even have enough listings to make this analysis. When a practice comes up in those states, it moves fast and the price is whatever the room agrees on. Negotiation leverage flips entirely.

Topline revenue still lies a little.

A million-dollar practice in San Francisco and a million-dollar practice in Tulsa are not the same asset. Different rent. Different staff wages. Different cost of living for the owner.

The cleanest translation from revenue to lifestyle is to compare it to local incomes. Dividing each state's median practice revenue by its median household income gives a rough measure of how far the practice dollar stretches.

Montana stays on top, with practices grossing 17.6× the state's median household income. But after that, the leaderboard reshuffles: Arkansas, New Mexico, West Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky. None of these are states the trade press treats as flagship dental markets. On a cost-adjusted basis, they're among the best places in the country to own one.

The states with high cost of living (California, New York, Massachusetts, Hawaii) tend to fall off the cost-adjusted list. Collections in those markets are higher in absolute terms, but the local cost structure rises in lockstep. A higher number does not always buy a better year.

How to read a listing.

The most useful thing this data lets a reader do is anchor any individual listing against the state it sits in. The state-level p25, median, and p75 numbers are the actual benchmarks. A national average smooths away exactly the variance that matters most.

A $900K practice in Georgia clears the state's p75. The same $900K practice in New Jersey is top-decile. Same number, different asset. A national multiple applied to either of them is the wrong number.

The within-state spread also matters. Indiana's p25 listing is $510K. Its p75 is above $1.1M. Twice the revenue, same state. The practice across the street can be in a completely different business than the one for sale on the corner.

Practice value is regional, and the regional picture is sharper than the industry talks about.