TL;DR: There is no honest universal figure for how much a dental practice should spend on marketing. Decide from two of your own numbers: the free chair hours you can staff, and what a new patient has been worth to you in the past. Spend on the gap you can fill, test each channel small with a stop rule, and count staff time as part of the cost. Nobody can promise what a given budget will bring back.
An owner asks a colleague at a study club how much they spend on marketing. The colleague names a percentage of revenue. Another names a monthly figure. A sales rep at the coffee break names a third. None of them knows how many hygiene hours the owner can staff next quarter, which is the number that decides whether any of it makes sense.
This article gives a way to decide the budget instead of copying one. It is part of our dental practice marketing strategies guide and works with the one-page marketing plan.
How much should a dental practice spend on marketing?
Enough to fill the chair hours you can staff and no more, at a cost per new patient you are comfortable with given what new patients have been worth to you. That is a method, not a number, because we found no sourced benchmark worth quoting. Any figure someone gives you without knowing your capacity is a guess.
The common rules of thumb — a set share of collections, a fixed amount per month — circulate without sources we could verify, so we do not repeat them. They also skip the step that matters most in dentistry: a practice with a waiting list for hygiene appointments and a practice with empty afternoons should not spend the same, even at the same size.
The method has four steps, each covered below: find the capacity gap, estimate a new patient's value from your own records, list what you are really paying for, and test with a stop rule.
How does chair capacity cap the budget?
Free capacity sets the ceiling. If the hygiene column is full and you cannot hire, spending to attract more hygiene patients creates a waiting list. If the dentist has two empty afternoons a week, the budget question is how to fill those afternoons. Start every budget conversation with the appointment book open.
Two pieces of ADA polling explain why this matters. In October 2022, US dentists reported schedules about 83% full, and nearly 82% named last-minute no-shows and cancellations as the main reason for the gap (ADA News). In the Q4 2024 poll, about three in five dentists worried about recruiting and keeping staff, especially dental hygienists (ADA News).
Read together, they suggest that for many practices the least costly capacity to fill is the capacity already booked and then lost. Before you set a new patient budget, look at what reminders, a second recall message and same-day rebooking could recover. That spend is mostly staff time and software settings you already have.
What is a new patient worth to your practice?
Look it up rather than guess it. Take the patients who joined two or three years ago, add what the practice collected from them since, subtract lab and material costs, and look at the spread. That figure describes your past, not a promise about the next patient, but it tells you roughly how much acquiring one is worth to you.
How to do it in practice management software:
- Export new patients from a past quarter, two or three years back.
- For each, sum collections since their new patient exam.
- Subtract lab fees and expensive materials for treatments such as crowns and implants.
- Note how many are still active in recall.
- Look at the middle of the range, not the highest cases.
The spread is usually wide. A patient who needed an implant and stayed in recall is very different from one who came for an emergency and never returned. That is why one average can mislead, and why the budget should be set against the middle of the range.
Example (illustrative, not a real case): a two-dentist practice runs this export and finds that new patients who stay for recall are worth much more to the practice than those who come once. It also finds that most one-visit patients came from a paid directory listing, while most who stayed named a person on the "who sent you" field. The owner does not cut the listing straight away. She moves part of that spend to a referral card and a faster text reply for new enquiries, and sets a date to compare the two sources again.
What are you actually paying for?
Three kinds of cost: fixed costs such as the website and software, variable costs such as ads and print, and staff time, which is usually the largest and the least counted. A budget that leaves out the hours the front desk spends on reviews, recall calls and social posts understates the real spend.
A simple budget sheet has three columns per channel:
| Channel | Money per month | Staff hours per month | What we'll count |
|---|---|---|---|
| Website and treatment pages | Hosting, edits | Dentist review time | Desk questions about those treatments |
| Google Business Profile and reviews | Usually none | Replies, review requests | Reviews and replies per month |
| Recall and reminders | Software you already pay for | Calls to non-responders | Overdue patients, monthly |
| Paid search | Ad spend, management fee | Checking enquiries | New patient exams booked from it |
Keep the money cells honest and the staff cells honest too. If the practice manager spends four hours a week on social posts, that is part of the social budget, whether or not it appears on an invoice.
How do you test marketing spend without promised returns?
Run each new channel as a small, time-boxed test with a stop rule written down in advance: what you will spend, for how long, and the result that would make you stop. Measure with the "who sent you" field and booked new patient exams, not with impressions. No channel can be promised to work; a test tells you whether it did for you.
A stop rule looks like this: "We will run this for three months. If it brings fewer new patient exams than the referral card, we stop and move the money." Write it on the plan before you start, so the decision is not made by whoever liked the campaign.
Ask any vendor the same questions: what exactly they will do each month, how they will report booked exams rather than clicks, and what happens if the numbers do not move. Anyone who promises a fixed number of new patients or a top ranking by a set date is selling certainty that does not exist.
Which spending choices do the rules decide for you?
Some spending is off the table whatever the budget. You cannot pay for reviews, you cannot target paid health ads using your own lists of visitors or patients, and you cannot run ads that make misleading claims. Check these before a vendor builds a plan around them, because they change what a campaign can do.
The US FTC rule bans paying for positive or negative reviews, fake or AI-generated reviews and undisclosed insider reviews. In Google Ads, health is a sensitive interest category, so advertiser-curated audiences such as remarketing lists and Customer Match cannot be used when promoting in it. That removes a tactic many general marketing budgets assume.
What remains is the work most of this cluster describes: better treatment pages, answered reviews, recall that works and referrals made easier. For ideas to spend the budget on, see dental practice marketing ideas. For the full approach, go back to the pillar guide.
If you want a workbook to write down your practice's capacity, prices and new patient sources once, so budget decisions start from your own facts, we are building the Business Brain Starter Kit. Get notified when it launches.
FAQ
Is there a standard percentage of revenue a dental practice should spend on marketing?
You will see rules of thumb quoted online, but we could not find a sourced, current benchmark we were willing to repeat. A percentage also ignores the two things that matter most: how much free chair capacity you have and what a new patient is worth to your practice. Decide from those, then compare with any benchmark only as a sanity check.
How do we work out what a new patient is worth?
Use your own records. Take patients who joined two or three years ago, add up what the practice collected from them since, subtract lab and material costs, and look at the spread, not only the average. Treat the result as a description of the past, not a forecast, because your mix of treatments and patients will change.
Should a new practice spend more on marketing than an established one?
A new practice usually has more free capacity and fewer referrals, so it may need to spend more to be found at all. An established practice with full hygiene columns may need to spend almost nothing on new patients and more on recall. The method is the same in both cases: capacity first, then value, then a small test.
What marketing spending should a dental practice avoid?
Avoid paying for reviews in any form, buying a promised number of new patients from someone who cannot show how they will get them, and campaigns built on remarketing to people who looked at health pages. The first breaks Google policy and the FTC rule, the second is a sales pitch, and the third is restricted in Google Ads.
Sources
- Dentists report less busy schedules in latest HPI poll — ADA News, 2022.
- Staffing shortages top expected challenges this year — ADA News, 2025.
- Final rule banning fake reviews and testimonials — U.S. Federal Trade Commission, 2024.
- Personalized advertising policy — Google Ads Help, accessed 2026.
- Tips to get more reviews — Google Business Profile Help, accessed 2026.