DENTAL // UPDATED SEPTEMBER 2026
Dental Trust and Practice Consolidation Statistics 2026
Dentistry starts from a strong trust position and is losing the structural thing that made a practice distinguishable: independent ownership. This page is about that gap. Every figure names the organization that ran the study and the year, including where the most-quoted trust number turns out to be two years older than the people quoting it think.
7 statistics · 6 sources · every one dated and linked
59%
Of Americans rate dentists’ honesty and ethical standards as high or very high, placing dentists fourth of 23 professions, ahead of medical doctors at 56% and pharmacists at 55%.
Gallup, Honesty and Ethics of Professions, fielded December 2023 · 2023
16.1%
Of US dentists were affiliated with a dental support organization in 2024, more than double the 7.2% of 2015. A DSO manages some or all non-clinical functions, marketing included.
ADA Health Policy Institute, The US Dentist Workforce · 2025
80% / 89%
Of consumers are more likely to use a business that responds to every review, and expect owners to respond at all. 42% are unlikely to use a business that ignores its reviews entirely.
BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey, 1,002 US adults · 2026
THE TRUST POSITION
High, and unevenly distributed
59%
Of Americans rate dentists’ honesty and ethical standards as high or very high, placing dentists fourth of 23 professions, ahead of medical doctors at 56% and pharmacists at 55%.
Gallup, Honesty and Ethics of Professions, fielded December 2023 ·2023
This is the most recent reading available. Dentists were not included in the poll published the following year, so anyone citing this as a current figure is citing December 2023 fieldwork without knowing it.
70% vs 53%
Dentists’ honesty rating among college graduates versus non-graduates. The 17 point gap is among the largest of any profession Gallup measured.
Gallup ·2023
Directly relevant to who you are talking to. The profession’s trust advantage is much weaker with audiences without a degree, which is also the audience most likely to be deterred by cost.
CONSOLIDATION
What an independent practice is competing against
16.1%
Of US dentists were affiliated with a dental support organization in 2024, more than double the 7.2% of 2015. A DSO manages some or all non-clinical functions, marketing included.
26.5%
Of dentists within ten years of dental school are DSO affiliated, against 14.4% at 11 to 25 years and 9.1% beyond 25 years. The consolidation is concentrated in the next generation of practice owners.
73% vs 85%
Of dentists owned their practice in 2023, down from 85% in 2005. 34% now practice solo, while 11% are in practices with 100 or more locations.
ADA Health Policy Institute ·2025
The marketing consequence: an independent practice is increasingly competing for the same local searches as multi-location groups with centralised budgets and centralised content.
WHAT PATIENTS SAY IN PUBLIC
The complaint that is a reputation problem
204,751
US dentists whose public patient reviews were analyzed in the only large-scale study of its kind. Higher ratings tracked with shorter wait times, and the recurring negative themes were discomfort and ethics concerns such as high-pressure sales and unnecessary treatment.
Journal of Medical Internet Research ·2020
Six years old and the only peer-reviewed analysis of US dentist reviews at scale. The ethics theme is the one worth acting on: it is a trust problem, and trust is what the profession otherwise has in surplus.
80% / 89%
Of consumers are more likely to use a business that responds to every review, and expect owners to respond at all. 42% are unlikely to use a business that ignores its reviews entirely.
BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey, 1,002 US adults ·2026
Cross-industry, not dentistry, and BrightLocal sells reputation software. No independent body measures review response expectations for dentistry specifically.
HOW OLD IS THE EVIDENCE
Every figure, by the year its study was published.
Marketing pages quote statistics without dates because the dates are usually embarrassing. This is the distribution for the 7 figures above, oldest 2020, newest 2026. Where a column is short, that year simply produced less research worth citing.
CHECKED AND REJECTED
Claims about dental practices we could not verify.
These circulate widely. We went looking for the original study behind each one and could not find it. They are listed here so nobody repeats them, including us.
“Gallup’s latest poll rates dentists at 59% for honesty and ethics”
Usually attributed to Gallup, cited as current
The figure is real but comes from fieldwork conducted in December 2023 and published in January 2024. Dentists were not among the professions rated in the following year’s poll at all, and the 59% appearing in that table belongs to military officers. Cite the year the fieldwork happened.
“92% of consumers trust word of mouth over advertising”
Usually attributed to Nielsen
Traceable, and too old to use. It comes from Nielsen fieldwork conducted in August and September 2011, published 2012, across 56 countries. It measures trust in recommendations from friends and family rather than a head-to-head against advertising, it is global rather than US, and it is fifteen years old.
“Studies show patients choose a dentist primarily by search, or primarily by insurance network”
Usually attributed to Various dental marketing surveys
No ADA, HPI, CDC, KFF, Pew or peer-reviewed source measures how Americans choose a dentist by channel. Every survey in circulation is run by a company selling into dentistry, and none publishes a sampling frame or weighting we could check. The honest position is that this is unmeasured.
Plain answers.
Dentists are already trusted. Why would a practice need PR?
The trust belongs to the profession, not to your practice, and it is not evenly held. Gallup rates dentists at 59% for honesty and ethics, fourth of 23 professions, but that splits to 70% among college graduates and 53% among non-graduates, one of the largest education gaps of any profession measured. Being trusted as a category does not make you findable or distinguishable as a practice.
What does DSO consolidation have to do with my marketing?
It changes who you are competing with for the same local searches. DSO affiliation among US dentists has more than doubled since 2015 to 16.1%, and among dentists within ten years of school it is 26.5%. Practice ownership has fallen from 85% in 2005 to 73% in 2023, and 11% of dentists are now in groups with 100 or more locations. An independent practice is increasingly competing against centralised marketing budgets, which makes local distinctiveness the asset.
What do patients actually complain about publicly?
Discomfort, and ethics. The only large-scale peer-reviewed analysis of US dentist reviews, covering 204,751 dentists, found the recurring negative themes were discomfort and ethics concerns such as high-pressure sales and unnecessary treatment. The second one is a reputation problem rather than a clinical one, and it is the one that erodes the profession’s trust advantage.
Does responding to reviews matter?
The available evidence says yes, though it is cross-industry rather than dental. BrightLocal found 89% of consumers expect owners to respond to reviews, 80% are more likely to use a business that responds to every one, and 42% are unlikely to use one that ignores them. BrightLocal sells reputation software, and no independent body measures this for dentistry, so treat it as directional.
WHERE ALL OF THIS CAME FROM
6 sources, listed in full.
Ordered by how many figures on this page each one carries. Every link goes to the organization that ran the study, not to a summary of it.
Want to know where you stand?
We run a free audit showing exactly which dental practices get named by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Mode for the queries your buyers use, and where you sit.