Dentists, General
What the pay figures show
- Two answers for dentists, general. Best paid: Alaska, at $230,990. Tax does not change that. Best off: North Dakota, at $181,634 once local prices count. Tax was not what separated them. Rent was.
- Alaska's $230,990 median for dentists, general survives the tax adjustment intact, so state income tax is not a differentiator in this occupation's geography. It does not survive price deflation: North Dakota takes the top position at $181,634. Housing is where regional price variation concentrates, which is why the reordering appears at this step and not the previous one.
Compare this career across states
Choose your filing status and local taxes, compare pay, and keep a shortlist.Compare wage and personal-pay outcomes by state, with selected resident local taxes and saved career choices.
Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$170,950
People doing it
124,390
Highest paid
$230,990
AK
Best off, really
$181,634
ND, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$86,250
Highest tenth
$319,630
Lowest, really
$98,902
ID
States with data
47
National average
$191,350
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
88.57%
ND, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Pay for this job is fairly steady around the country. Count tax and local prices and the states bunch closer still, from $98,902 to $181,634. For work like this, where you live changes your life more than it changes your pay.
- Roughly 124,390 people hold this job nationally, earning $170,950 in the middle. A solid, ordinary-sized job.
- Not every state reports this one. The figures here cover 47 jurisdictions, and the middle wage across them is $170,950. A state you do not see is one with no published number, not one paying nothing. Of those published, Alaska pays most.
- Geographic dispersion in dentists, general is moderate by national standards. Tax and price adjustment compress the distribution further, to a real range of $98,902 through $181,634. Where nominal spread is this contained, relocation decisions in the occupation turn on non-wage factors, because the wage differential does not survive the adjustments in a form large enough to drive them.
- 124,390 are employed nationally in dentists, general, placing it well inside the reported range without approaching the highest-headcount occupations.
- BLS publishes an occupational median for dentists, general in 47 jurisdictions, short of the full set. ⚠️ Absence reflects estimate suppression — small samples or disclosure rules — rather than absence of employment, so the state comparison above is over the published subset.
Pay band: Dentists, General
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $86,250 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $170,950 |
| Top tenth earn over | $319,630 |
| This salary | $170,950 |
Positions between the published tenth, quarter, half, three-quarter and ninetieth points are estimated by straight line.
Where these numbers come from
| BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 estimates, time-series bulk download (oe.data.0.Current) | as of 2025-05-01 |
|---|
Steps in Dentists, General
The national median for this job
$170,950around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $86,250 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $170,950 |
| Top tenth | $319,630 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Dentists, General, state by state
The national median for this job
47states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Wyoming · $123,830 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Alaska · $230,990 |
| Spread | $107,160 |
One dot per state that publishes this job. A missing state means suppressed data, not zero pay.
Best paid, and best off
The national median for this job
| Texas pays | $162,360 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $167,080 |
Median pay against the same pay once BEA price parities are applied.
Every state, three ways
Sorted by what the money is actually worth. "Kept" is take-home for a single filer after federal, FICA and state income tax. "Really worth" divides that by the state's own price level, so a dollar in each row buys the same thing. Tap a state to put your own salary into it. States BLS does not publish for this job are absent — that means no published figure, not no work.
| State | Median pay | Kept after tax | Really worth |
|---|---|---|---|
| ND | $220,660 | $160,877 | $181,634 |
| TN | $215,290 | $160,188 | $173,148 |
| AK | $230,990 | $170,702 | $167,824 |
| MO | $204,960 | $143,884 | $156,802 |
| NC | $207,000 | $146,332 | $155,442 |
| MN | $219,200 | $148,573 | $150,962 |
| GA | $206,760 | $144,187 | $149,109 |
| AR | $178,930 | $127,403 | $147,273 |
| ME | $209,200 | $142,387 | $146,644 |
| IA | $181,520 | $129,049 | $145,379 |
| VT | $204,960 | $140,387 | $145,276 |
| WI | $193,690 | $134,544 | $144,520 |
| NE | $179,750 | $126,650 | $140,137 |
| LA | $170,750 | $123,237 | $139,496 |
| AZ | $194,180 | $140,136 | $138,605 |
| SD | $158,140 | $119,355 | $135,484 |
| VA | $197,110 | $136,199 | $135,187 |
| WV | $170,370 | $120,800 | $134,563 |
| OK | $166,170 | $117,866 | $133,505 |
| OH | $167,410 | $121,803 | $132,666 |
| OR | $211,690 | $138,599 | $132,350 |
| IN | $166,650 | $120,285 | $130,483 |
| MT | $167,200 | $117,461 | $130,160 |
| MI | $169,930 | $120,442 | $127,879 |
| FL | $174,900 | $130,810 | $126,445 |
| NV | $162,200 | $122,130 | $125,933 |
| NH | $177,480 | $132,574 | $125,847 |
| TX | $162,360 | $122,239 | $125,793 |
| NM | $155,260 | $111,109 | $122,928 |
| PA | $163,390 | $117,927 | $120,951 |
| SC | $158,640 | $112,397 | $120,628 |
| MS | $143,660 | $103,803 | $118,915 |
| WA | $169,730 | $127,276 | $117,238 |
| NY | $183,060 | $126,059 | $117,127 |
| MA | $181,600 | $126,630 | $116,992 |
| CO | $166,240 | $118,285 | $116,672 |
| MD | $168,500 | $118,343 | $113,829 |
| RI | $161,560 | $115,371 | $113,764 |
| IL | $156,110 | $110,385 | $111,663 |
| NJ | $171,330 | $119,646 | $109,885 |
| KY | $134,160 | $98,386 | $108,753 |
| CT | $160,440 | $112,550 | $108,546 |
| WY | $123,830 | $95,904 | $105,565 |
| HI | $167,820 | $114,545 | $105,465 |
| UT | $133,320 | $96,457 | $101,532 |
| CA | $165,950 | $113,351 | $100,684 |
| ID | $124,190 | $90,421 | $98,902 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for dentists, general, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $170,950 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- Take-home figures for dentists, general assume one person filing alone, with no dependants and nothing going into a pension before tax. Any of those lowers the tax and raises what you keep, so treat these as the plain case rather than your case. Local city income taxes are not included either, and in a few states those matter. In Alaska, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $170,702.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for dentists, general. Inside any state, a big city costs far more than a small town, so this is a fair way to compare states with each other and a poor way to price a specific move. The wage figures and the price figures are also from different years. At the bottom of the range sits Idaho, on $98,902.
- All wage figures for dentists, general are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $170,950. Within-state dispersion typically exceeds between-state dispersion in this data, so an individual's expected wage is determined more by experience, sector and employer than by the state comparisons presented here.
- Take-home calculations for dentists, general assume a single filer with no dependants, the standard deduction, and no pre-tax retirement or HSA contributions. Each omitted item reduces taxable income, so the figures function as a lower bound on retained pay for this household shape; the highest such figure is $170,702, in Alaska. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- Real-terms results for dentists, general rest on statewide regional price parities, which average over intra-state variation that is itself larger than much of the interstate variation. They support comparison between states and not the pricing of an individual relocation; Idaho anchors the distribution at $98,902. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.