Unexplained Wide Variation in Dentist Salary By Location???

[deleted901759]

Apparently general dentists in Peabody, MA make $290k median salary despite being half an hour from downtown Boston. Is this because most dentists in these areas own their own practices? Is there no competition for some reason? What gives?

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[Cold Front]

BLS salary data is not in line with the real world salaries. The BLS data does not take into account the deductions and write-offs dentists use when they report their salaries. I would use the ADA salary data as a better reference. In reality, the salary spectrum is very broad - from dentist to dentist, office to office, zip code to zip code, and beyond.

 

[hellopeople]

I've been researching dentist salaries by location and had one major question. Dentists seem to make a median $150k a year, lower for new grads and higher for practice owners/specialists. However, according to BLS, in some towns general dentists make insane salaries. There seems to be a wide discrepancy even between similar rural towns. For example, apparently general dentists in Peabody, MA make $290k median salary despite being half an hour from downtown Boston. Is this because most dentists in these areas own their own practices? Is there no competition for some reason? Are the BLS stats flawed? Most salary sites say dentists in Peabody have average salaries. I've done some basic dentists per capita calculations and there doesn't seem to be much of difference either from other even more rural areas. What the frick gives?

There is a lot of variation. The area your mentioning probably has a low number of older dentists servicing a relatively affluent population. $290k would be a rather high figure and you should probably not expect to make that in this field to be blunt.
$150k would be more realistic so long as things level off and salaries do not resume their decline.

I'm confused by your name and avatar though. Are you a pharmacist?

 

[321931]

Associate 100-200k.

Business Owner: Bankruptcy to -100k, to 100k, to 200k to 500k, to 1 million.

The reason why everything is skewed is due to business owner=X amount of income.

 

[distressstudent]

Look at the data set.
They have sample sizes that aren't even reported because it's less than like 10. If that number less than 10 are all established business owners and not associates, then it's going to skew towards what an owner makes which is like 250k+

The raw data that BLS collected is actually accurate. It's just the reporting/ summary that's misleading.