At Aspen Dental, the Office Manager Trainee posting puts one practice's non-clinical side — patient satisfaction, revenue, profitability and the team — in the role, inside a corporate support system.
Heartland's title for the role is Practice Manager of Operations.
Aspen recruits trainees from sales and retail backgrounds and trains them for ten weeks.
Neither company publishes an office-manager pay figure we could verify.
Here is what we could confirm about each job, how the bonus question works, and the pay data that does exist.
Short answer: you run one office inside someone else's system
Both companies hire for a practice-level job.
Aspen's posting makes the trainee "responsible for the daily non-clinical operations of their assigned office" — patient satisfaction, revenue, profitability and the non-clinical team — and Heartland's title for the role is Practice Manager of Operations.
Who owns the office is the first surprise: Aspen's own posting states that "Aspen Dental-branded practices are independently owned and operated by licensed dentists" and that the practices "receive non-clinical business support services from Aspen Dental Management, Inc., a dental support organization."
Heartland Dental says it supports more than 3,200 doctors in over 2,000 dental offices.
That support layer is what dental support organizations centralize: the Association of Dental Support Organizations describes DSOs as contracting with practices to handle facility maintenance, supply procurement, human resources, compliance, accounting and marketing.
How that changes the job day to day, title by title, is the whole subject of our DSO vs private practice comparison — this page is the brand-level version of the same question.
It's a common version, too.
16% of U.S. dentists were DSO-affiliated as of 2024 (ADA HPI), and on October 22, 2026, DentistryHires showed 548 office manager jobs among its 11,475 live dental openings — with the five largest employers posting more than half of them.
If you're new to the career, start with the full dental office manager role guide; the rest of this page assumes you know the job and want the DSO-specific version.
Aspen Dental office manager: dentist-owned offices and a ten-week trainee program
Two things define the Aspen version of this job: who owns the office, and how the company staffs it.
Ownership first.
The practices are independently owned and operated by licensed dentists, with Aspen Dental Management, Inc. — the DSO — supplying the non-clinical business support.
Who owns the practice is a separate question from who employs its office manager, so check which entity the posting and your offer letter name as the employer.
Staffing is the more distinctive part.
Aspen recruits for the role directly through an Office Manager Trainee posting, and that posting is the company's own public description of the job: responsibility for the office's daily non-clinical operations, including patient satisfaction, revenue, profitability, and non-clinical team selection, performance and development.
The entry requirements are not dental ones — the posting asks for 2–5 years of experience in a sales or retail environment, with some combination of management and sales preferred, plus a high school diploma or equivalent.
In other words, the requirements are retail and sales ones — the dental part is what the ten-week program covers.
The training is explicit in the company's own text: "When you join Aspen, you will participate in an extensive, ten-week training program, where you'll gain business and leadership knowledge designed to help you become successful."
Ten weeks is the length that posting states; it carries no date, so treat it as a snapshot that can change.
The same posting shows how far down the front desk the role reaches at an Aspen-branded office: checking in patients, collecting co-payments, verifying insurance and running patient treatment-plan consults are all listed among the responsibilities.
That last duty is its own patient-facing role at DSOs — see the DSO patient coordinator guide if you'd rather stay in that seat than run the office.
Heartland's Practice Manager of Operations
Heartland Dental's own careers page puts its scale at more than 3,200 supported doctors across 39 states and the District of Columbia, in over 2,000 dental offices.
Those are the company's figures, not an independent count.
The title to search for is Practice Manager of Operations.
Here we have to be straight with you: when we researched this page, Heartland's own job pages redirected rather than loading, so we could not verify the role's duties, qualifications or pay from the company itself.
Search results describe a business-partner role to the dentist — operations, insurance, hiring, reports — which matches what the title implies, but we won't put those details on the page as verified fact.
What we could and couldn't verify at Heartland
Other DSOs: Sage, Coast and PDS
Pacific Dental Services (PDS Health) is the other DSO we could verify from its own pages.
Its careers site says it supports over 1,000 practices and advertises structured onboarding and mentorship plus a "path to practice ownership."
PDS also led all employers posting this role on DentistryHires on October 22, 2026, with 114 of the office manager listings; the five largest employers together accounted for 52.9% of them.
At least 5.8% of those listings were part-time, which matters if schedule flexibility is part of what you're shopping for.
Sage Dental and Coast Dental we can say much less about: our research could not verify their office-manager titles, training programs or pay from their own pages, so we won't repeat the third-party figures that circulate for them.
The same evaluation checklist applies to any DSO posting, including theirs: who owns the practice, who you report to, which functions are centralized above you, what the bonus is based on, and whether the pay figure in the posting is base, base-plus-bonus, or something else.
Bonuses and targets: what's documented and what isn't
This is the part of the job where our research found the thinnest public information, so it's worth separating what's documented from what isn't.
Documented: the role is accountable for money.
Aspen's own trainee posting puts revenue and profitability in the job's core responsibilities, alongside patient satisfaction.
If a bonus plan is tied to this job, those are the outcomes the company's own description points to.
Commonly tracked, no benchmarks: the metrics a manager in this seat commonly tracks are schedule fill, production and collections, case acceptance, and accounts receivable.
We can name the metrics; we can't give you target numbers, because our research found no reliable public source that publishes DSO bonus amounts or the targets behind them.
Not documented: every specific figure.
No reliable public source we could find publishes Aspen's or Heartland's bonus percentages, target levels, or how the two companies' plans differ — so treat any exact DSO bonus structure you see quoted elsewhere as unverified.
The dependable move is to ask, in the interview, before you accept: what is the bonus based on, what are the current targets, how often is it paid, and can the structure be written into the offer letter?
Pay vs private practice: the numbers that actually exist
We could not verify an office-manager pay figure published by either company, and BLS has no occupation for a dental office manager, a treatment coordinator or a front-desk coordinator.
Two national anchors bracket the job:
- BLS's nearest series inside offices of dentists (May 2025) is first-line supervisors of office and administrative support workers: 32,840 employed, median $30.72 an hour ($63,910 a year), 10th percentile $49,270, 90th percentile $88,020.
- A tier up, offices of dentists employed 9,240 medical and health services managers at a median of $37.53 an hour ($78,050 a year), 10th percentile $54,200, 90th percentile $143,010 — a higher-tier manager series measured inside dental offices, not a regional-manager wage.
DentistryHires' own listings show advertised pay where the jobs actually are: across all office manager postings on October 22, 2026, the median posted rate was $29 an hour (middle half $24 to $33.50, across 271 listings stating an hourly rate) and the median posted salary was $68,500 a year (middle half $61,500 to $78,500, across 94 listings).
Those figures cover every employer posting the role — DSO names like Pacific Dental Services (114 listings) are in the mix — but they're advertised pay, not earnings, and not a split by practice setting.
Which is the honest answer to the direct question: does a DSO pay more or less than a private practice for this job?
No source we could verify splits office-manager pay by setting, so any claim either way is a guess.
What the listing data does show is what the job comes with: office manager postings named paid time off in 85.6% of listings, health insurance in 82.1%, a 401(k) in 68.1%, dental or vision coverage in 67.5% and paid or provided continuing education in 40.3% (October 22, 2026).
For the full percentile and state-by-state breakdown, see the office manager salary page.
This article is general career information, not financial or legal advice. Company details above come from the companies' own postings and pages, change without notice, and should be confirmed with the employer before you accept an offer.