There is no official national dental therapist salary: BLS has no occupation code for the role, so no federal median or percentile range exists.
The one sourced figure is a JADA survey of Minnesota dental therapists and advanced dental therapists, published in 2021, finding a median annual income in the $81,000 to $90,000 bracket.
Here is what that number does and doesn't tell you — and how to benchmark a real offer without one.
How much do dental therapists make? The short answer and the data limits
Honest answer first: there is no national dental therapist salary.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has no occupation code (SOC) for dental therapists, so no federal median, average, or percentile range exists, and the agency describes therapists only as hygienists with additional training in "a few states."
The one sourced pay figure in our research comes from a survey of Minnesota dental therapists and advanced dental therapists published in the Journal of the American Dental Association in 2021: a median annual income in the $81,000 to $90,000 bracket.
Read its limits before you use it — one state, a bracket rather than a precise median, and both therapist tiers pooled together.
Everything else on this page is built around that gap: what is known, what is not, and how to benchmark an offer when the official data doesn't exist.
If you are still deciding what the role involves, start with our dental therapist career guide and come back to the pay question.
No BLS dental therapist salary exists — check any figure against its source
Dental therapist pay by state: what's actually known
For one state only, yes — Minnesota, and that is where the sourced pay data stops.
The JADA bracket above is a Minnesota survey, and the state's Department of Health has published a dental therapy workforce report: it counted 92 actively licensed dental therapists, advanced dental therapists included, as of December 2018, in a state that authorized the profession in 2009 and saw its first therapists begin practice in 2011.
Beyond Minnesota, no state-level dental therapist pay data exists that we can cite.
Federal wage data is organized by occupation code, and dental therapists have none — so the federal program that produces state and metro wage tables (OEWS) has no data for the role.
What each state does decide is whether the job exists at all where you live, and on what terms.
Our states guide keeps the statute-confirmed list current, along with the setting limits and supervision rules that come attached to each authorization.
Who employs dental therapists?
The best window into employer mix is again Minnesota's 2019 workforce survey (58 responses).
Community and faith-based organizations and solo private practice tied at 25% each, followed by small group practice at 16%, community health centers and FQHCs at 14%, and large group practice at 12% — about half, 53%, reported private practice settings of some size.
The mix is not an accident.
Minnesota limits dental therapists to primarily practicing in settings that serve low-income, uninsured, and underserved patients, or in a dental health professional shortage area — so community and safety-net employers are built into the state's model, not a niche inside it.
Does the employer type change pay?
No source we can cite breaks dental therapist pay down by employer type, so we won't rank them.
What the survey does show is that Minnesota's therapists — the one state with a sourced sample — split between two very different kinds of employer, private practices and mission-driven community organizations, which is worth knowing before you start comparing postings.
Dental therapist vs. dental hygienist pay
Dental hygienists have what dental therapists lack: a federal wage series.
BLS put the hygienist median at $98,100 a year, or $47.16 an hour, in May 2025, with the lowest-paid 10% under $74,880 and the highest-paid 10% over $126,050.
| Dental therapist (best sourced data) | Dental hygienist (BLS, May 2025) | |
|---|---|---|
| Median annual | $81,000–$90,000 bracket — Minnesota survey, published 2021 | $98,100 |
| Hourly | not published | $47.16 |
| Lowest-paid 10% | not published | under $74,880 |
| Highest-paid 10% | not published | over $126,050 |
| Coverage | Minnesota only | national |
Put side by side, the honest reading is this: the only dental therapist figure we have — a Minnesota median bracket of $81,000 to $90,000, from a survey published in 2021 — sits below the $98,100 hygienist median BLS measured in May 2025.
But the two numbers come from different data series, different years, and different geographies, so treat that as context, not a like-for-like comparison.
Nothing sourced lets anyone say therapists out-earn or under-earn hygienists nationally.
For the full hygienist picture — national, state, and metro breakdowns — see our hygienist salary guide, and for how the two roles differ beyond pay, our hygienist vs. dental therapist comparison.
National dental therapist pay: median and 10th–90th percentile
Neither exists, and this is the single most important thing to get right about dental therapist pay.
A national median requires a federal wage survey that tracks the occupation; because dental therapists have no SOC code, the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program never counts them, let alone splits them into percentiles.
So when a site prints a precise national dental therapist median or a tidy 10th-to-90th percentile band, that number did not come from a measurement — no federal source produces one, and our research found no measured national series for the role.
We publish neither here, and won't until a source exists.
What you can use instead: the Minnesota bracket above as the one measured anchor, the hygienist series next door as the nearest tracked occupation, and actual postings in authorized states, reading each posted number as one employer's offer to verify.
Hourly, monthly, and yearly equivalents
Published sources give you a yearly bracket and that is the whole menu: no hourly, weekly, or monthly dental therapist rate exists in any source we can cite, and we won't manufacture one by dividing.
The conversion is genuinely unsound here, not just unpublished.
In Minnesota's 2019 survey, 95% of dental therapists reported working full time, averaging 36 hours a week — a "full-time" clinical week that any single hourly figure we printed would hide.
The closest federal hourly number belongs to hygienists: $47.16 an hour, the May 2025 BLS median.
Different occupation — though in states such as Maine and Connecticut, dental therapy is legally structured as an add-on to a hygiene license.
The practical move is to run conversions yourself, on your own terms: if a posting quotes an hourly rate, multiply it by the hours you actually expect to work, not by a generic full-time year.
Pay by setting: private practice, DSOs, hospitals, and public health
No source we can cite pays dental therapists by setting, so this section hands you no ranking.
What the states do shape — before pay ever comes up — is which settings a therapist can work in at all.
The setting rules differ sharply by state: Arizona restricts therapists to FQHC-type settings, community health centers, nonprofit practices serving low-income patients, and private practices treating referred community-health-center patients; Connecticut limits therapists to public health facilities; Nevada permits only listed settings, hospitals and rural health clinics among them; Washington limits therapists to federally qualified health centers, tribal FQHCs and FQHC look-alikes statewide; Wisconsin ties practice to shortage areas or settings where at least 50 percent of patients are Medical Assistance, uninsured, or other listed groups; and Maine confines therapists to the limited practice settings a written agreement spells out.
Reading that against the four settings people ask about: private practice is real but bounded — 53% of Minnesota's survey respondents reported private practice settings inside exactly these kinds of limits.
Hospitals appear in one place in our sources — Nevada's list — with no pay data attached.
DSOs appear in no category of Minnesota's survey; its large-group-practice bucket was 12% of responses.
Public health is the opposite story: community and faith-based organizations (25%) and community health centers and FQHCs (14%) were well represented in Minnesota's reported settings.
The takeaway for comparing offers: in Washington, dental therapy jobs are confined to FQHC-type settings; in Connecticut, to public health facilities.
Our states guide maps every restriction — start there before comparing pay across settings.
Pay by experience and credential
Experience pay curves for dental therapists are not published anywhere we can cite — our research found no survey that tracks therapist pay by years in practice, so any "what experienced therapists make" claim has no source behind it.
The credential ladder is real, though, and Minnesota's is the model.
Minnesota certifies an advanced dental therapist (ADT): a licensed dental therapist with 2,000 hours of dental therapy practice under direct or indirect supervision, a graduate of a master's-level advanced dental therapy program, and a passed board exam.
In the state's 2019 data, 70% of dental therapists licensed in 2018 were advanced dental therapists, and 42% of therapists were dually licensed as dental hygienists.
What the ladder does to pay is unmeasured: the JADA survey pooled therapists and advanced therapists into one income bracket, so it cannot tell you an ADT premium — and no source we can cite publishes a separate ADT figure either.
If you're mapping the training route itself, our hygienist to dental therapist guide covers the path, the education standard, and which states license the role.
The highest-paying states and metros for dental therapists
There is no sourced ranking of highest-paying states or metros for dental therapists, and we won't build one by borrowing hygienist numbers or running a model, because a modeled ranking isn't data.
No source we can cite publishes dental therapist pay by state or metro.
You can still narrow a market with real data, in three steps.
First, restrict yourself to states where therapy is authorized, and note each state's setting limits — in Washington, therapy jobs are confined to FQHC-type settings; in Connecticut, to public health facilities.
Second, benchmark the local hygiene market: hygienists are the nearest occupation the federal wage data does track, and our hygienist salary guide carries the state breakdowns.
Third, read actual postings in that metro, taking each posted number as one employer's offer to verify.
For the inverse question — which dental roles the federal data does rank, and by how much — our dental jobs ranked by pay guide has the full ladder.
Dental therapist jobs on DentistryHires — and what they pay
DentistryHires has no dedicated dental therapist job category, and we don't publish a pay figure from therapist listings — checked October 22, 2026, there isn't a meaningful listing sample to measure.
The nearest first-party data is our hygienist listings: on October 22, 2026, employers on DentistryHires advertised a median of $52.50 an hour across 1,951 hygienist postings that stated hourly pay (974 employers) — advertised pay, not earnings, and hygienists, not therapists.
Practically: browse dental hygienist jobs and search both "dental therapist" and "advanced dental therapist" as separate titles — advanced dental therapist is the tier Minnesota certifies.
Read posted numbers as individual offers to verify, not as market statistics.
If you're reading as an employer instead: with no market series to anchor to, you're pricing a new position.
Our guide to hiring a dental therapist covers the settings, credential checks, and supervision agreements that shape the role before pay is set.