A year ago I went to the dentist, with some pretty intense pain, they did an X-Ray and found I needed five root canals done, along with some other work.

A year later, all teeth are fixed and today was hopefully the last one, where the tooth actually broke a few days ago and had the root canal/crown both done the same day.

I even kept the part that broke off as a little $10,000 souvenir from this experience.

Normally root canals are done in parts, with the first being a root canal and second visit being the crown. This tooth was visible, so to avoid looking like Cletus the Slack Jawed Yokel, I asked to have everything done today and they even did a really well done temp crown.

That said though, what was done only took about 90 minutes.

What made 90 minutes so important, it’d cost $2,500?

Especially when the average hourly wage in the US is $29 an hour or $43.50 in 90 minutes. Meaning, this 90 minutes costs what 57 average American’s would make in a 90 minute time frame.

Diving in, the first thing to look at is the cost of the dentist itself.

Determining what a person is worth, the best way I like to view value was the actual cost of getting the skills needed for that job.

21 years is the average time to pay student loan debts back.

10% of income is also the generally recommended number for the max a person should be spending on student loan debt.

Looking at the cost of dental school in the US, I found a few figures, but the most used one was $251,000.

Before that, there’s also undergrad, where the most common undergrad degree for dentists is biology.

Undergrad has a huge range with public and private colleges, but it’s reported $27,000 a year is what the average bio major will pay yearly, coming to $108,000.

That puts the total debt to $359,000 on average.

5.8% is the average student loan debt, with again a huge gap between public and private colleges. Also grad/medical school can have higher rates, where dental school debt actually averages at 6-8%, but I’ll keep it simple at 5.8% for both debts.

• $359,000 in debt.
• 21 years as the goal payback.
• 5.8% interest rate

This would make a payment of $621,000 over 21 years, for $29,571 a year.

Which dentist have a median salary of $158,000, the top 25% make $208,000 and bottom 25% average $115,000.

This would mean in this situation, even a top 25% dentist would be spending over 10% of their income for 20+ years on the initial costs to become a dentist.

While a lot of people think something like dental or other medicine is unfair in costs, there is a lot of initial work/money to justify it.

Outside of this example, lets go to the actual labor, which is $158,000 a year.

Let’s also assume the dentist works 50 weeks a year and 40 hours a week.

That’s 2,000 hours of labor, which comes to $79 an hour.

That’s one costs, but doing dental work, there’s also the dental assistant as well.

Salaries range a lot on that, but $49,000 a year is the average.

That’d be $24.

This doesn’t really sound like away to justify $2,500 for 90 minutes, seeing how labor has barely broken $100 so far.

But the costs go up.

• The X-Ray machines cost $125-220,000 on average.
• Patient chairs are $2-4,000.
• Hundreds of dollars for the cost of the permanent crown being made.

There’s also front office, maintenance and the cost of the property itself.

These are important to know and the biggest factor of all, prices are on issue over time.

Cavities costs on average $90-250 in the US.

The time on a cavity and filling averages about 30 minutes.

There’s also routine exams which are $80-120 and are about 20-30 minutes also.

These procedures while not very cheap, don’t actually make much money and in many cases lose money.

Every single time a dentist does a checkup, with staff, rent and basic tools used, it doesn’t make money.

There’s also the cancellation factor and the fact that even if a dentist/dental staff are in the office for 40 hours in a week, they aren’t promised enough customers to justify prices per hour with wages.

What this all means?

It means the costs for simpler things are low and designed to build reputation with patients, where more profitable things will eventually happen and that’s where the bills actually get paid.

Which that’s why a root canal/crown can be $2,500 and something like heart surgery can be $100,000.

Final thoughts?

Not a huge thought on this, but kind of laughing I needed this much dental work.

I tried figuring out what caused it, because I don’t smoke, drink, eat/drink almost anything with sugar and I brush/floss daily.

I had one dentist initially who said I had unusually large nerves in my teeth, which made it so cavities were getting infected 3-4x as fast as normal.

That guy though did a very poorly done cavity on me and the two dentists who both did great jobs on the root canals said what that dentists said made no sense at all.

So I’m pretty confident in what drives dental prices, but not confident in why now 15% of my teeth are crowned.