The median general dentist in the U.S. earns $82.19 an hour — the only one of the hour, week and month figures BLS publishes directly (OEWS, May 2025).
Divide the $170,950 annual median and you get about $3,288 a week or $14,246 a month.
Dentists are rarely paid by the hour, though: offers are built on salaries, daily guarantees and percentages of production or collections, and locum work is quoted as a negotiated day rate.
Here's the math, and how each model works.
Hourly, weekly and monthly dentist pay, from the BLS annual median
Of the three pay periods people search — hour, week, month — the federal wage data publishes only the hourly one directly.
In BLS OEWS, May 2025 (released May 15, 2026), general dentists (SOC 29-1021) had a national median of $82.19 an hour and $170,950 a year, across 124,390 jobs.
The weekly and monthly figures people search for are division on that annual median: about $3,288 a week ($170,950 ÷ 52) and about $14,246 a month ($170,950 ÷ 12).
Those two are arithmetic, not BLS publications — read them as "about."
BLS publishes the full distribution in both annual and hourly terms:
| Percentile | Annual wage | Hourly wage |
|---|---|---|
| 10th | $86,250 | $41.47 |
| 25th | $125,710 | $60.44 |
| Median | $170,950 | $82.19 |
| 75th | $224,040 | $107.71 |
| 90th | $319,630 | $153.67 |
Three methodology notes change how you should read any of those numbers.
First, OEWS annual figures assume a full-time, year-round schedule of 2,080 hours — annual = hourly × 2,080 — so the weekly and monthly conversions inherit that assumption.
Second, OEWS wages are straight-time gross pay: production bonuses, commissions and incentive pay are included, but overtime pay, non-production bonuses, year-end and attendance bonuses, profit-sharing and employer benefit costs are not.
Third, the survey excludes the self-employed and owners and partners in unincorporated firms — a slice of dentistry whose income shows up in ADA survey data instead of the federal wage series.
Where you practice moves the annual median too.
The highest state medians for general dentists in May 2025 were Alaska ($230,990), North Dakota ($220,660), Minnesota ($219,200), Tennessee ($215,290) and Oregon ($211,690) — ranked by median; ranking by mean produces a different order.
State-by-state wage tables are kept on our dentist salary page, and the settings and job types where the pay data tops out are ranked in highest-paying dentist jobs.
For the profession as a whole — training, licensure, settings — start with the dentist career guide.
Why dentists are rarely paid hourly: daily guarantees and % of collections
That $82.19 is a statistical wage from a federal survey — it is not how a dentist's paycheck is calculated.
Overtime rules don't set it either: under the FLSA regulations, a licensed dentist (doctor of dental medicine) who is actually practicing is an exempt "practice of medicine" professional (29 CFR 541.304(b)), not a non-exempt hourly worker owed a federal overtime premium.
What you are actually offered falls into a handful of structures.
Salaried roles pay a fixed amount for a defined schedule.
Production-linked roles pay a percentage — of production (the work you perform, before billing) or of collections (the money the practice actually collects) — and a daily guarantee can be set as a floor under a production percentage while a schedule builds.
Base-plus-bonus blends a fixed base with a production incentive.
The ADA's Survey of Dental Practice groups all of these as "employed" dentists: those paid by salary, commission, percentage or associate basis, with no ownership share.
The actual numbers are thinner than searchers expect.
ADA HPI's Survey of Dental Practice (2025 data) put the median net income of employed (non-owner) general dentists in private practice at $165,520, with the middle half between $129,280 and $191,470 — from just 65 responses, and a different measure from the BLS wage series (surveyed net income, not a wage).
On DentistryHires, employers hiring dentists posted a median of $240,000 a year as of the October 6, 2026 snapshot (an employer median across 177 employers and 465 listings stating annual pay; the listing median was $215,000, with the middle half between $197,500 and $300,000).
That is advertised pay, not earnings, and it excludes bonuses and production pay unless the employer folds them into the posted range.
How each model converts into effective pay per day and per hour — and the fine print that decides it — is covered in our guide to daily guarantees and % of collections.
No benchmark found for the percentage or the guarantee
Temp and locum dentist day rates: negotiated, with no published benchmark found
Locum and temp dentistry — covering a colleague's leave, a vacation, a staffing gap — is quoted as a day rate.
Our research found no BLS, ADA or DentistryHires listing data giving typical locum or temp day rates, agency-versus-direct rates, or travel and housing stipend amounts, so we will not print a substitute number: rates are negotiated engagement by engagement.
Two offers can differ for reasons that never show up in the rate — the clinical days assumed, the patient flow, whether travel or housing support is part of the deal — and where an engagement includes that support, its amount is negotiated too.
The closest federal signal is indirect.
BLS OEWS, May 2025 puts the median wage for general dentists employed by employment services firms (NAICS 5613, which includes temporary help agencies) at $193,060 a year, across 610 jobs — an annual wage for agency-employed W-2 dentists, not a day-rate figure.
It does show agency employment pricing a little above the profession-wide median of $170,950 in the same data release.
How locum engagements actually work — state-by-state licensing, classification, logistics — is covered in what a locum dentist is.
When you evaluate a day-rate offer, judge it on its own terms: the rate, the number of clinical days it assumes, what expenses it covers, and how it compares with the production-based alternative on the table.
Hours worked per week — and what they do to the weekly math
The conversions at the top of this page assume BLS's full-time year of 2,080 hours.
Surveyed schedules run lighter.
BLS's Occupational Outlook Handbook says many dentists work less than 40 hours a week, although some work considerably more, and some work evenings and weekends.
In the ADA HPI survey (2025 data), employed general dentists averaged 1,518 hours a year in the office for their primary practice — about 29 hours a week if spread evenly over 52 weeks — versus 1,726 hours for owner general dentists.
That gap is the caveat on the hourly figure.
The $82.19 median describes what dentists earn per hour across the profession; it does not mean any given dentist is at the chair 2,080 hours a year.
On a schedule closer to the surveyed 1,518 office hours, annual earnings under any hourly-equivalent arrangement track the days you actually work — which is how production-linked pay already behaves: the day you work is the day you earn, and a slow day pays the guarantee, not the percentage.
For comparing offers, the practical takeaway is that annual, weekly and monthly figures only line up if the schedules behind them match.
Two offers with the same annual number are different jobs if one assumes four clinical days a week and the other five — so normalize by days worked, and get the guarantee in writing, before you compare.
This article is general career information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Pay structures are contract terms — evaluate any offer against its own written agreement.