Reference ranges, by specialty

Production and collections — not revenue.

Two credible sources report 39 and 46 new patients per month; a practising operator with three decades in the field reports 12–20 as typical. All three are right. The distribution row shows why — 38.8% of practices sit under 20, and a long right tail pulls the mean up. Any single “industry average” for this metric conceals more than it reveals.

Starts and referrals — a referral is not a lead. In orthodontics, “retention” means retainers.

The ADA has gone dark on four of five dental specialties. In the 2026 Survey of Dental Practice only pediatric dentistry cleared the reporting threshold (n=70) — oral surgery n=20, endodontics n=20, orthodontics n=24, periodontics n=27 were all suppressed. A practical consequence worth knowing: any “2025 average orthodontic, endodontic or oral-surgery practice revenue” figure in circulation cannot have come from the ADA.

Clients, not patients. The pet is the patient; the owner is the revenue unit.

Seven independent datasets — five private, two federal — agree on the same structure: visits down roughly 2–3%, revenue up roughly 2–3%, price doing all the work. The cleanest is the Bureau of Economic Analysis real quantity index, which fell in 2025 while nominal spend rose 3.48%.

One practice, two businesses. Medical runs on encounters and wRVU; cosmetic runs on consults, units and syringes.

The top-decile dermatologist bills 4.1× the median on only 2.7× the patients. The gap is service mix, not panel size — and it is stated by Medicare's own claims file, with no vendor anywhere in the chain.

Census and admissions — not new patients. Length of stay, levels of care, verification of benefits.

This is three businesses wearing one name. Residential, intensive outpatient and outpatient therapy differ by an order of magnitude in census, length of stay and economics — and an opioid-treatment-programme split matters more than the residential-versus-outpatient one.

Visits per clinic per day. Walk-in led, not appointment led.

There is no NAICS code for urgent care, so unlike dentistry or veterinary medicine no federal revenue-per-establishment denominator exists for this vertical at all. Seasonality also runs a 39-point peak-to-trough swing, which makes any single annual visits-per-day figure an artefact of when it was measured.

Encounters, wRVU, service lines, referral leakage and capture.

The referral figure is the most important number on this page. It was measured inside a single integrated health system — where capture should be easiest — across 103,737 scheduling attempts. In nearly four cases in ten, the system could not establish whether the patient was ever seen.

Exams and capture rate. A clinical practice bolted to a retail business.

The MBA Key Metrics series publishes the full decile distribution for every metric, and discloses its own upward sampling bias in writing — which is rarer than it should be. It is also a 2015 edition with no free successor, so treat the levels as dated and the distribution shape as the durable finding.

Adjusted EBITDA, same-store growth, add-ons, entry and exit multiples. The one setting where acquisition cost and payback are native.

Bain's deal counts exclude add-on transactions below $250 million — which is essentially every tuck-in a mid-market platform actually executes. Bain measures the top of the market accurately and the rollup middle not at all. Cited here for direction, not for a middle-market denominator.

Acquisition cost — where it exists, and where it does not

We went looking for a credible cost-per-new-patient benchmark in all nine specialties. In three we found one. In three it does not exist at any tier we would cite — and the reason is structural: the ADA's own Survey of Dental Practice aggregates every practice expense into a single figure and never breaks out advertising, so there is nothing to derive from. Every percentage in circulation traces back to a vendor with no disclosed sample.

This is worth stating plainly: if a marketing agency quotes you an industry patient acquisition cost for dentistry, veterinary medicine or urgent care, it is quoting a figure no institution measured. We build yours from your own spend and your own instrumented new-patient count instead.