Is dental school worth it?
The answer
It pays for itself in about 4.5 years
Dental school costs about $290,166 over 4 years. The median dentists, general earns $170,950, against $79,084 for a bachelor’s-degree holder — an increase of $91,866 a year before tax.
How that is worked out
What it costs
$290,166
- Tuition and fees a year
- $57,702
- Living costs a year
- $14,840
- Years
- 4
Median across the 72 schools whose per-programme price we hold. In-state where a school charges differently.
What the work pays
$170,950
- Bottom 10%
- $86,250
- Median
- $170,950
- Top 10%
- $319,630
Pay for Dentists, General. This is what people in that work earn, not what everyone who finishes the degree earns.
What it adds
+$91,866/yr
- With the degree
- $170,950
- Bachelor’s median
- $79,084
- After tax, roughly
- $64,306
We count 70% of the increase as reaching your pocket. An approximation, not a tax calculation.
What this figure leaves out
- The pay you give up while studying. 4 years out of full-time work is roughly $316,336 of earnings not banked. Counting it moves payback well beyond the figure above.
- Interest. The cost shown is what the degree costs, not what borrowing it costs. Grad PLUS ended for new borrowers on 1 July 2026, so anything above the federal cap is private borrowing.
- Whether you end up in the work. The pay figure describes people employed as dentists, general. It does not describe someone who finishes the degree and does something else.
Where these numbers come from
- Tuition
- IPEDS, with per-programme tuition from the professional associations where they publish it. Living costs are each school’s own published figure.
- Pay
- Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics — Dentists, General, national.
- The comparison salary
- U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample, 2024 one-year release: median earnings of bachelor’s-degree holders working full time year round, aged 22 to 65 (ACS PUMS 2024). Federal rules measure graduate programmes against a bachelor’s-holder median, but the Department of Education has published no figures for it, so we compute our own and say so.