Dentist Salary

Video Transcript

"These are also two other common instruments that a dentist uses basically everyday of their career. One being the straw, the straw is basically a way of evacuating or eliminating all the spit and saliva that's in you're mouth while were doing dental procedures. This is what's called a dental hand piece or core drill and this is the device that's typically used to help remove the cavity or the filling out of a tooth to help us fix it. Every geographical location dictates the income of the dentist. Now typically, typically a dentist if I'm not mistaken the household income of a dentist I believe in 2004 was approximately $129,000. That again can be very variable because depends certainly on the location where your at. It also depends on how much you work. Some dentist will work as little as three days a week, some work six days a week, some work Fridays some work Saturdays there's a lot of flexibility in the schedule and it also goes hand in hand with fact that whether or not the dentist is working for himself or a group practice, or a hospital or even the military. So there's a lot of variability you know, in the salary of a dentist depending upon where you are, who you're working for, and also how long you've been practicing. If you're going into like a residency so you want to get additional training, it may be starting as little as $50 or $60,000 or if you go directly into private practice which is what most people do when they graduate dental school they could start out for as much as probably I'd say as much as $100 to $120,000. There is basically an unlimited potential for dentist depending on what they pursue. It's obviously dictated by how big their personnel is and the size of the practice that they have. I know dentist that make as little as $120 and I tell you dentists that make as much as a million. And again it's all variable based on you know, what sort of services they provide how large their staff is, how large that their patient clientele is, certainly where they're practicing. It's definitely growing a recent statistic approximately a year or two ago has suggested that for every four dentist that were retiring only one dentist was entering into school. Which is an outstanding feature for some one who's pursuing the career of dentistry because there's a lot of dentist that are baby boomers and because of that the access to dental care is becoming decrease very rapidly so it's a great time for someone to pursue dentistry."