About DentalSalary.com

DentalSalary.com helps dental professionals, students, hiring practices, and recruiters understand what dental roles pay across the United States. We turn public wage data into a fast, searchable reference — by role, state, metro, and specialty — and we label the source and confidence of every number we publish.

What we cover

We publish national pay for general dentists, dental hygienists, dental assistants, orthodontists, and oral and maxillofacial surgeons, plus hourly pay benchmarks, role comparisons, a salary calculator, and modeled state/metro estimates. Each figure carries a status label — Verified · BLS for official survey values, or Modeled estimate for figures we derive from verified national data.

How our data is sourced

Our verified baseline comes from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program, reference period May 2025. Where BLS does not publish a clean local or specialty series, we either model an estimate from verified national data using a documented labor-cost index — and label it as such — or we do not publish a number at all. We explain exactly how this works on our methodology and data sources pages.

Our principles

• Source transparency. Every public salary number shows where it comes from and how confident we are in it.
• No fabricated data.We never invent salary figures. When data isn't available, we say so.
• Independence. Sponsored content and advertising never influence our salary estimates. See our editorial policy.
• Honest local data.Most state and metro figures are verified BLS OEWS local data; where BLS doesn't publish a role for a place, we show a clearly-labeled modeled estimate instead — never an unlabeled guess.

Our editorial process

Every figure we publish goes through the same pipeline. National and state wages are imported directly from the BLS OEWS release, then cross-checked against the live BLS Public Data API before they go live — every verified national and state median must match the authoritative source exactly, top-coded cells included, or it is not published. Modeled estimates are computed only where BLS suppresses a local or specialty figure, using a documented wage index, and are labeled as estimates everywhere they appear. Location pages carry computed, location-specific analysis — rankings, percentile spreads, and comparisons — rather than boilerplate.

We review the data on each BLS refresh and welcome corrections from the profession. Anything a reader flags is checked against the source and fixed or explained. See our data dictionary for the full source registry, definitions, and known limitations, and our corrections policy for how we handle fixes.

Independence & affiliation

DentalSalary.com is an independent reference and is not affiliated with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the American Dental Association, or any government agency, employer, or staffing firm. Salary figures are informational and are not guarantees of pay or offers of employment.

Get in touch

Questions, data corrections, or partnership inquiries? See our contact and corrections pages.