Dental Assistants Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Dental Assistants offer sit among all 375,430 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 375,430, or 0.24% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 54,580 jobs; the top three states sum to 29.0% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Washington posts a location quotient of 1.55, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $25,590 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($61,780) is 1.7 times the 10th percentile ($36,190), a gap of $25,590 a year. The mean of $48,860 sitting above the median of $47,300 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

Minnesota posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $64,630, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Dental Assistants stands number 98 by employment and number 586 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Healthcare Support Occupations, the group median wage is $41,590 across 17 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 14% more than its group median, and it supplies 5.0% of the group's 7,448,000 jobs. In 25 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $47,300, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 21,100 jobs, 5.6% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $25,160 a year, against $69,810 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $47,300 a year is $3,942 a month gross, $1,819 every two weeks, $910 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($39,520) to the 75th ($56,910) is worth $17,390 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. The next step from a gross figure is a net one: run the $3,942 monthly figure through the paycheck calculator applies your state's taxes, the salary calculator compares two offers in any unit, and the raise vs inflation calculator tells you whether a nominal raise is a real one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $52,030 would sit between the median ($47,300) and the 75th percentile ($56,910), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $39,520, is $7,780 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Healthcare Support Occupations

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Nursing Assistants, Medical Assistants, Phlebotomists, Veterinary Assistants and Laboratory Animal Caretakers, Physical Therapist Assistants, Healthcare Support Workers, All Other. The full directory is on the Careers hub.