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Most dental price lists are built by looking at what the clinic down the road charges and adjusting slightly. That works until the day you discover that the procedure you do most often is the one you lose money on.
A price list that holds up starts with one number.
Work out your cost per chair-hour
Add up everything the clinic spends in a month that does not depend on how many patients you see: rent, salaries, equipment leasing, software, utilities, insurance, accounting, marketing.
Divide that by the number of productive chair-hours in the month — not opening hours. If a chair is open 160 hours a month and realistically booked 65% of the time, that is 104 hours.
The result is what an hour costs you before a single material is used. Every price has to clear it.
Do this once a year. Most clinic owners are surprised by the number the first time, and it changes decisions immediately.
Price each procedure from time and materials
For each procedure: (chair-hour cost × hours) + materials + lab fee + a margin.
Time it honestly. Not the ideal case — the realistic average including setup, anaesthetic taking effect, and cleanup between patients. A composite filling booked as 30 minutes that reliably takes 50 is priced at 30 and costing you 50.
This is where copying competitors fails. Your rent, your lab, your assistant's salary and your chair utilisation are not theirs. Their price can be a sanity check; it cannot be your method.
Where clinics usually lose money
Three procedures come out wrong more often than any others:
- Emergency appointments. Unpredictable length, frequently overrunning, often priced as though they were short.
- Re-treatments and adjustments. Often given free out of goodwill, with no limit written anywhere, and quietly consuming a chair-hour each time.
- Anything involving a lab. If the lab fee is not passed through explicitly, a lab price rise silently eats the margin.
Structure the list so patients can read it
A price list of 180 line items is a document nobody uses, including your own reception.
Group by what the patient came for, not by clinical classification: consultation and diagnosis, prevention and hygiene, fillings, endodontics, extractions, prosthetics, implants, orthodontics.
For each item, publish a single price or a clear range with the reason for the range. "Root canal, 1 canal / 2 canals / 3 canals" is understandable. "Root canal — from X" invites a dispute at the end of treatment.
Raise prices in the right way
Prices should move annually. Clinics that hold prices for four years then raise 30% lose patients; clinics that move 5–8% each year mostly do not.
Practical rules:
- Change the whole list at once, on a fixed date, not procedure by procedure through the year
- Announce it in advance to patients mid-treatment, and honour the quoted price for any plan already agreed in writing
- Do not raise the price of the first consultation. It is the one number prospective patients compare, and it is your entry point.
- Update the list everywhere the same day: reception, website, printed sheet, booking page
Discounts
Have a policy or you will end up with one by accident. Decide in advance who may approve a discount, up to what percentage, and in what circumstances.
Discounts given ad hoc by different people are how a price list stops meaning anything, and patients talk to each other.
What actually determines acceptance
Clinics assume price drives acceptance. Usually it is presentation: a written plan, staged costs and a clear first step convert far better than the same total delivered verbally as one number.
If acceptance is low, test the presentation before you cut the price.
In DOQ, treatment plans are built from your price list with per-stage costs, so what the patient sees and what you charge cannot drift apart.