Viral Instagram Post and Framing the Big Question

So I didn't mean to do this, but I posted something on Instagram that went a bit viral, a bit controversial. It resulted in some great messages, but it also resulted in hate messages.

1706 shares, a ton of comments. And it had to do with what we're going to talk about now. I want to walk through this post. I want to walk through my opinions. I want all of us to understand what's happening, why I said what I did, and how we should maybe think about this next question. Should someone become a dentist in 2026? Is it financially worth it? We're going to do the math. We're going to look at the trends. We're going to look at the debt, the income, the averages, the returns, and we're going to be able to think about this answer in a new and different way. I think all of us in dentistry need to stop every now and then and ask ourselves, does all of this still make sense? Because if it does, great. And if it doesn't, we need change. Let's start that conversation today on this episode of the Dental CEO Podcast.

All right. I made this Instagram post and I actually kind of updated the post and reposted numbers. I'm looking at it right now on my phone. I've tagged it on my Instagram account dr.scott.LEUNE. Dr. Scott. E-U-N-E, pronounced Leun. And it's the first post you see and it's a continuation of our previous posts. It got a ton of shares, a ton of comments, positive and negative. It was very interesting to kind of see the environment of social media and when people start talking about something they're passionate about in some way, how they can get pretty extreme in the conversation. But let's work through it. I posted, is it worth becoming a hygienist or a dentist in 2026? How would we go about answering that question? And the way I approach this, I want to walk you through right now on this podcast episode. I asked basically, if I became a dental assistant at age 18, considering the income and the debt, how much money would I have by the time I'm 30 or 40 or 50 or 60?

Methodology: Comparing Assistants, Hygienists, and Dentists Over a Lifetime

And if I became a hygienist instead, same thing, how much money would I have at 30, 40, 50 or 60? And if I became a dentist, how much money would I have? At what point does the assistant and the hygienist meet up with the same money? And then the hygienist makes more after that. Or what age does the dentist make the same as an assistant or the dentist make the same as a hygienist? And then after that we make more. That is how I try to approach this. And I want to walk you through some of the data, some of the assumptions, some of the averages you may not even know the latest averages. So here's some averages. How much money do assistants and hygienists and dentists make? Here's the average data. From the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics, dental assistants on average make $47,300 per year.

And of course, that varies from region or from city to city, but there's the average, 47 grand. Hygienists. The latest data shows that hygienists make a whopping 94 grand a year, $94,260, 94 grand. There's hygienists that make less than that. In certain areas, there's hygienist make more than that, but that's the national average according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. So $94,000. How much do dentists make? And of course this is all pre-tax, but how much do dentists make? The average dentist, and this is according to the American Dental Association, today's dollars. So we're looking at here the ADA. The average dentist in the first two years of practice makes $161,000 income. Of course, I know dentists make way more than that, and I know dentists make less, but that's the average. That's the average, 161,000 first two years. Then years three through 10, a dentist makes 215,000.

A year's 11 to 25. Dentists make 228,000 on average. And then at the tail end of the career, years 26 through 32, the dentists drop in their income, they go down to 184,000. And those are the averages. And remember, averages include owners, they include associates, but those are the averages. So now we know how much they make, but when are we going to start making the money? A dental assistant gets to start making money at the age of, let's just assume 18, but a hygienist has to go to school and a dentist has to go to school. So while the hygienist and the dentist are in school, the dental assistant is making money. We need to account for that. So here are the assumptions. An assistant's going to start working at age 18. A hygienist is going to start working at age 22. So four years of school on average.

Assumptions: Start Ages, Debt Loads, Taxes, and Investment Returns

You can do it shorter, you could do it longer, but that's the assumption we're making 22. And the dentist, we're going to assume best case scenario here that we only have eight years of school. We went to undergrad for four years, went to dental school for four years. And so we're going to start being a dentist at age 26. There's the assumptions. Okay. Well, now let's look at debt. Here are the debt numbers. So according to the survey of assisting programs, dental assistant debt to be a dental assistant is $5,000. And there's programs that are more expensive. There's programs that are less. Some dental assistants work and they don't take out any debt. But we're going to make an assumption that the cost to be a dental assistant to learn through an accredited program is going to be $5,000. For hygiene, this is according to online data for hygiene schools.

It's on average 36,000 of debt, 36 grand. Dental school debt. The big one, this is according to the ADEA survey of dental schools. The average dental school debt load right now is $312,000.

Some of you are listening to this and you've got more than $500,000 of debt. So I realize that that might sound like a lower number to many of you, but the reality is that's the current average $312,000 of school debt. That's assuming by the way, you had no undergrad school debt. I'm just assuming for this calculation that you only had dental school debt. Maybe that's an incorrect assumption. So the results I'm going to show you are going to be skewed a little to be a little more positive maybe for dentists than they should be because I'm assuming you had no debt for undergrad. Okay. We know how much we make. We know when we're going to start working. We know the average debt loads. Well, what about tax rates? Dental hygienists are taxed differently than dental assistants than dentists and that matters because we're going to have to pay taxes.

And so assumptions, this is based on using AI to get flat blended tax rates for those different income levels. We're going to assume that a flat blended effective tax rate for an assistant is 22%, hygienist is 27%, dentist at 35%. Now, we still need to make a few other assumptions. The value of time. If a dental assistant is making money at the age of 18, but a dentist isn't making money until the age of 26, the dental assistant's 18-year-old dollars can grow over time. So in order to make an even and appropriate and logical comparison, we have to assume that we're going to get a rate of return of all the dollars we make, a rate of return. I understand that we're going to spend those dollars on living expenses and I can't estimate how much people are going to spend on living expenses, but what I can do to level this out and compare apples to apples is assume that every dollar we make gets a rate of return and I'm going to make the assumption that it's 8% annually.

So we're going to calculate what would happen if we were an assistant hygienist or dentist and we had these debt levels and we had these income levels and we started these ages. What would happen if we saved every dollar we made and got an 8% return? That is the healthiest way, in my opinion, to get to the answer. So we're going to assume that we're not spending any of the money because we want to be able to compare the three to each other. So we're going to assume we're not spending any of it. We're saving it all, we're getting an 8% return. All right, those are the assumptions. Now let's talk about what happens when we run the math. So very, very interesting. When we look at a dental assistant and compare them to a dental hygienist, remember an assistant's getting about 47 grand of salary has a five grand of school debt.

Break-even Analysis: Assistants vs Hygienists vs Dentists

Hygienist is getting 94 grand a salary, has 36 grand of school debt. When we compare the two, then the assistant is making more money from age 18 through the age of 27. So even when the hygienist is out of hygiene school working as a hygienist and they're age 26, the assistant has still made more money because they had more years of work and the money they made had a return. And so not until a hygienist turns 28, do they break even with their decision to be a hygienist compared to had they been an assistant at age 18 and stayed that way? Not until age 28 is their breakeven. Now what about a dentist? When does a dentist break even with a dental assistant? Because the dentist has to be in school longer. They're not making any money for longer while the assistant is and the assistant's getting a return.

At what age does a dentist have to be to break even with their dental assistant? If the assistant started at age 18, the dentist started at age 26. At what age does the dentist and the assistant break even together? And that is at age 38, 38. If you are a national average dentist and you are younger than 38, you would hypothetically have more money right now had you never gone to dental school and never gone to college and just been a dental assistant instead. If you're younger than 38, all the work you've done so far, you've made less money than an assistant. It's at stage 38 that the breakeven point exists. That's a pretty interesting number. Okay. Well, let's go on to the next layer. I think the more important layer is saying, well, what if I was a hygienist versus a dentist? Because at some point we might've had to make that decision.

We thought to ourselves, "Well, am I going to be a hygienist? Maybe a dentist." Or what if I don't get to dental school? Will I try to get in a hygiene school? So let's talk about the breakeven points there. A hygienist is obviously starting to work earlier than a dentist and they're making some pretty good money, 94,000 and they've got a lower tax rate. And when you look at hygienists to dentists, not until the dentist is age 43, do they break even with the hygienist? So if you're a dentist today, again, national average numbers and you're age 42 or younger, your hygienists have had more of an opportunity to make money than you. Even though you've been a dentist since you were 26 years old, now you're 42, right 16 years later and being a dentist, you still haven't caught up 16 years into being a dentist and you still haven't caught up to what the hygienist has been making with all the assumptions I went over, you still haven't caught up.

How interesting, how very interesting. And so the conclusion of all of this is that dentists aren't earning more than assistants until they're age 38. They're not earning more than hygienists until they're age 43. So really does it make sense to be a dentist? Well, not if you're planning on retiring in your mid 40s, then you should be a hygienist. It makes sense to be a dentist in, let's just call it two simple categories. Category one is if you intend on working until retirement age, until you're 60s, well, yeah, then it makes sense to be a dentist because from age 43 to 65, you're making good money and surpassing those other two options.

When Does It Make Sense to Be a Dentist? Career Length and Above-Average Performance

The second time it makes sense with these assumptions is if you're going to do better than the national average. You're not going to be a dentist that makes national average money, which is 228,000 a year, whatever it is. You're going to be an owner, you're going to take home 500,000 year, you're going to take home $900,000 a year. You're going to be better than the national average. Well, then for sure financially it makes sense to be a dentist as opposed to a dental assistant or a hygienist. This is another reason why in the age of increasing debt levels and pressure on profit margins, this is another reason why dentists need to learn the business side of dentistry and be an owner as soon as possible so that they can build independent wealth for themselves to make this decision worth it financially being a dentist.

I'm comparing a dentist to a hygienist and to an assistant. What would happen if I did the same exercise and compared a dentist to a plumber that makes more money than a hygienist? Why I compared a dentist to a physician or I compared a dentist to a military dentist that had no debt and was making money. So this gets very, very interesting. I believe that the method I created of comparing these, there's a lot of value there. There's a lot of good there. And kind of my strategy of trying to answer this question, all I've really answered with this is, is it worth being a dentist as opposed to a hygienist and assistant? And is it worth being a hygienist as opposed to an assistant? That's the questions that we've answered. So for someone that is looking at dentistry and they're kind of looking at it as it like, "Well, I want to do dentistry, but I also want to take a bunch of time off to have kids or I want to stop doing dentistry when in my mid forties or really slow down or I only want to work part-time as a dentist.

Advising Future Dentists and Current Practitioners

I'm going to be a dentist, but I'm only going to work two and a half days a week or three and a half days, whatever it is. " It's probably not worth it. It's probably better to look at other careers or even inside of dentistry, it might be better to be a hygienist instead of a dentist. But for the other dentist saying, "No, I intend for this to be a full-time profession until retirement age, maybe not till 65 or 70, but maybe till 58, till those kinds of years, then it's definitely like logically thinking it's financially worth it even if you are the national average dentist, right? Logically, it's financially worth it to still be a dentist." But then the next question we should ask is, well, that's when looking at hygiene, but what if I'm looking at plumbing or AC, HVAC, or being a lawyer or being an accountant or being a physician and maybe the answers start changing.

Alternative Careers, Debt Extremes, and National Averages vs Top Performers

I don't know. I haven't ran the numbers, but no one in the United States has more school debt than a dentist, no one. Literally the top nine different professions with the highest school debt are all different versions of a dentist. So a dentist has the highest school debt and the income levels can be incredibly high, but the national averages are not that much higher than a lot of other professions. Blue collar professions and white collar professions combine both. So dentists might make more today than plumbers, but not that much more. They might make a little bit more than a general physician, but not that much more, not on average, but the debt levels are completely different and the schooling might be different.

I want this kind of study to be really not applied to you at all. If you're listening to this, I don't want this to apply to you whatsoever because you are not a national average dentist. You are an owner, you're bringing in 900 grand or more in take home pay and this whole exercise, while maybe interesting, doesn't apply to you, you have outperformed this whole kind of question. Your great performance has said, "Oh, of course it was worth it for you. Of course it was worth it for you. " Now, if you're a dentist and you're in the national average side, the next step for you is to join the last dentist I just talked about, to force this to be a decision that was worth for you. Don't become a victim. Don't say, "Well, now my school debt and all that and it wasn't worth it.

I wish I hadn't done it. " No, be so successful that you're still happy you did it. You're much bigger than the national average and you're so thankful you did this and did this path and outperformed the national average because you and your family can now benefit from this success, this lifestyle, this stability, this health. Be that dentist. But when your nephew asks you, "Hey doc, hey uncle, hey aunt, should I be a dentist?" Ah, now we need to have this conversation. It's always going to make sense if they're incredibly successful at being a dentist, but if they're not incredibly successful, it's a hard question to answer today, isn't it? It's a hard question to answer. If they don't want to work a full career, it's a hard question to answer. I hope you go to my Instagram. I hope you look at this, look at this post, look at the older posts as well, all the hate messages and everything about income levels and debt and dentists and hygienists and assistance.

And look at this and try to understand how we can analyze this and maybe for some of you, let this be yet another reason why you need to get out of your current situation that is too close to national average and start the next chapter of your career that is going to be a more lucrative chapter with more of your control that's going to represent what you stand by, what you want to be known for, the people you want to work with, you're going to own. Whether it's a startup or buying a practice you're going to own and you're going to start the next chapter that gets you to numbers that you can look back and say, "Of course it made sense for you to be a dentist. You're doing so well. You're not the national average." That's what I hope. I hope this was an interesting exercise for you guys and I appreciate you guys subscribing and tuning in and I will speak to you again in another episode next week of the Dental CEO Podcast.

My name is Scott Leune. Thank you so much.