Dental Wages by Metro Area

Front-office roles have no metro figures here. BLS doesn't track them as dental occupations, so their guides use national figures for the nearest occupations as paid inside dental offices. See the dental front desk, dental billing coordinator, dental office manager and treatment coordinator salary guides. Pediatric dentist and endodontist pay comes from the ADA Health Policy Institute's practice survey, covered in the pediatric dentist and endodontist salary guides.

Ready to look at openings? Browse dentist jobs, dental hygienist jobs or dental assistant jobs.

BLS also publishes metro medians for orthodontists (10 metros) and oral and maxillofacial surgeons (9 metros), but every one of those estimates rests on a small sample, so none is ranked here. For national pay see the orthodontist salary and oral surgeon salary guides.

General dentists: 100 of 183 ranked metros pay above the national median of $170,950. Their medians run from $114,470 in Lake Charles, Louisiana to $241,850 in North Port, Florida.

Dental hygienists: 75 of 224 ranked metros pay above the national median of $98,100. Their medians run from $58,310 in Dothan, Alabama to $139,990 in San Jose, California.

Dental assistants: 97 of 225 ranked metros pay above the national median of $48,070. Their medians run from $36,580 in Provo, Utah to $74,600 in San Jose, California.

Dental lab technicians: 51 of 105 ranked metros pay above the national median of $49,610. Their medians run from $36,170 in Lubbock, Texas to $78,010 in Cape Coral, Florida.

A higher wage doesn't always mean more buying power. Each metro page converts its medians to national average prices using the Bureau of Economic Analysis price index, so you can compare a high-cost coastal metro with a lower-cost one on equal terms.

Every figure comes from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) survey, May 2025 release. It covers employers in all industries, not only dental offices, and reports wages for each metropolitan area as BLS and OMB define it.

The figures are medians, not averages. A median is the midpoint, so a few very high earners don't pull it up. It also doesn't reflect experience, specialty or hours: each metro page shows the 10th to 90th percentile band for that spread.

A metro gets a page only when BLS publishes a median for at least three dental roles there. Metros with fewer appear in the city table on the matching state salary page instead.

OEWS wages count base pay plus incentive pay such as production bonuses and commissions. They exclude overtime, nonproduction bonuses and the employer's cost of benefits.

Hourly and annual figures are shown only as BLS publishes them. We don't convert them to daily, weekly or monthly pay, because dental schedules vary too much for one conversion to hold. Where BLS withholds a figure it is left out, never estimated.