Dentists, General Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Dentists, General offer sit among all 113,490 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 113,490, or 0.07% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 14,760 jobs; the top three states sum to 27.2% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Connecticut posts a location quotient of 1.49, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

BLS top-codes or suppresses part of this occupation's national ladder, so the published center is the median of $172,790 and the mean of $196,100. The state table below is the more useful negotiating document: it shows how far the same job title travels across the 48 states with published estimates.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 48 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Vermont at $230,990; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Dentists, General stands number 246 by employment and number 25 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations, the group median wage is $98,340 across 71 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 76% more than its group median, and it supplies 1.2% of the group's 9,592,720 jobs. In 21 of the 46 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $172,790, 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 6,940 jobs, 6.1% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 318 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Denver-Aurora-Centennial, CO posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $134,560 a year, against $250,330 in Columbia, SC. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Dentists, General paycheck, gross, is $6,646 every two weeks on an annual $172,790, which is $14,399 a month and $3,323 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($126,090) to the 75th ($220,380) is worth $94,290 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $190,069 would sit between the median ($172,790) and the 75th percentile ($220,380), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $126,090, is $46,700 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 Practitioners and Technical Occupations

Sibling occupations in Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations: Radiation Therapists, Cardiologists, Nuclear Medicine Technologists, Recreational Therapists, Audiologists, Orthopedic Surgeons, Except Pediatric. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.