Is buying a dental practice in Texas worth it? What owners take home after the loan

What I've seen

Yes, buying a dental practice is worth it when the practice is the right asset. On a representative $1.2M general office, an owner keeps about $313,000 pre-tax after the loan, $109,000 a year more than an associate doing the same dentistry. The figures here are representative, not Texas data. I'm a broker at Dental Practice Connect (DPC), which represents buyers for 3% of the purchase price at closing, so I am paid when you buy.

I see this question come up all the time on forums and in Q&As. The answer is almost always that it is better to be an owner than an associate. It depends on the asset. This is not a question of whether to own or to work. It is a question of the asset itself.

An associate making $300,000 a year would make a mistake buying a practice that grosses $500,000 on a five-day schedule. A practice that carries its loan and pays you more than the associate job is the right asset for your skill set. One that doesn't is not. The rest of this post shows both cases with arithmetic.

What an owner earns that an associate doesn't

An owner is paid twice. The first payment is for the dentistry: the production an associate would be paid to do. The second is the practice's profit, measured as EBITDA, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. "Adjusted" EBITDA adds back owner-specific costs; how buyers test those add-backs is its own post. The loan payment comes out of the second payment.

On a typical general office, DPC's valuation model puts overhead at 62% of collections and the cost of an associate doing the owner's dentistry at 17%. That leaves 21% as adjusted EBITDA.

The ADA reports that the average net income for dentists in private practice in 2025 was $215,320 for general dentists and $346,520 for specialists. Those are averages for all private-practice dentists, owners and associates together.

The owner comparison comes from Dental Economics, summarizing the ADA's study: owners netted $217,781 and non-owners $160,891 in 2024. That is a gap of $56,890. Owners also work more, with hours averaging 37 a week against 31.8, which is 5.2 more.

A worked example: a $1.2M general office, from collections to take-home

This is a representative practice built from DPC's table, not a client. It collects $1,200,000 a year and uses the 62% / 17% / 21% split above. It sells to an individual buyer, whose single-office multiples run 3.0× to 4.25× EBITDA with a median of 3.5×. How the multiple is built is in the valuation formula post.

Debt service coverage is EBITDA divided by the yearly loan payments. Full financing is a simplifying assumption, not a typical structure, and a lender may ask for a down payment.

The example uses 10.0% on purpose. The SBA's 7(a) program allows a term of "10 years or less" and lists "Acquire a business or partial ownership in a business" as a use. For a loan above $350,000 the rate may not exceed the base rate plus 3.0%. The Federal Reserve's bank prime loan rate is 7.00%, so with prime as the base the ceiling is 10.0%.

That is a legal maximum, not a quote. A lender's actual rate can be lower. At 7.0% the payment is $10,450 a month, or $125,397 a year, and the owner keeps $330,603.

In this example the owner is ahead before tax from year one, by about $109,000 a year while the loan runs. When the loan is paid off, the $252,000 of EBITDA is no longer committed to the payment. The table does not price the extra hours or the risk of owning.

Why the ADA averages differ from this example

The ADA figures are national averages across many kinds of practices, including small ones, and they are net income. The example is one typical office, sold at the median multiple and fully financed. Its $313,277 is a pre-tax cash figure for that office. It is not a forecast of the average owner, so the two numbers need not match. The target practice's own numbers are the ones to use.

I haven't seen the details of how the ADA collected its data. Income by itself leaves out the other side of the equation, which is equity. Owners build equity in the business, whether by paying off the loans for the practice and the real estate or by raising the practice's own goodwill value. Owners also work more hours, but not always clinical ones.

Where this breaks

Four things break the example.

The asset is wrong. Take the associate earning $300,000 and a practice collecting $500,000. Scale the same model down: a 21% margin and a 3.5× multiple. EBITDA is $105,000 and the price is $367,500. The owner's own dentistry is worth 17%, or $85,000, so cash before the loan is $190,000. A 10-year loan at 10.0% costs $58,278 a year, leaving $131,722. That is $168,000 less than the associate was making. This is the same model at a smaller size, not a measured small-office result. The loan is not the problem. The practice is too small for this dentist.

The price is too high for the cash flow. A buyer should not rely only on upside: Henry Schein's practice-transition team writes that "the current cash flow should make sense first." One question to put to your CPA is whether the practice's cash flow can provide the income you need after the purchase payment and the practice's expenses. To see whether a practice can carry its own loan, I look at EBITDA, plain and simple, against the payment.

The costs sit outside the table. Most first-time buyers don't understand the costs of the transaction's friction: IT switching costs, promised future raises, and the cost of finding, attracting and training new talent. These can be in the tens of thousands of dollars. The example also leaves out working capital. Every figure is pre-tax, and loan principal is repaid from after-tax dollars, so take-home after tax is lower. Ask your CPA how the loan payment is treated.

The deal terms take control away from you. I would avoid buying a practice where the rules are written for you and you have no power to change them. That can be an operating agreement that makes you the minority owner, a bank or other institution with preemptive rights, or an office manager or team member who doesn't fit your style of management and controls the office.

What to do this month

1. Take your time and hire great advisors. It is hard to be a dentist and harder to be a business owner.
2. Pull the practice's collections and adjusted EBITDA for several years, and have your advisors check the add-backs.
3. Compute the loan payment on the asking price at 10.0%, then divide EBITDA by the payment. The example practice covers it 1.77 times. A practice that barely covers it leaves nothing for the first bad year.
4. Write down what you earn today. Compare it with the table's last two lines for that practice: the value of your own dentistry there (17% of its collections, or your own production if you know it) plus its EBITDA, less the yearly loan payment.

DPC represents buyers on the purchase and takes no fee from lenders; see how buyer representation works. Your attorney handles the lease and the building.