Lab fee percentage

Lab fee percentage is what a practice pays outside labs (for crowns, dentures, night guards and every other lab-fabricated item) divided by collections, and Ryan's healthy range is 8–10% of collections, wider than most other overhead lines because it genuinely varies with case mix: a restorative-heavy practice will run higher than a hygiene-heavy one without either being unhealthy.

What makes this line worth special attention is how disconnected the fee for a lab case often is from the fee charged to the patient. Many practices set the patient fee for a crown once and never revisit it even as lab costs rise year over year, which quietly erodes the margin on that exact procedure without ever appearing as a single dramatic expense. Decoupling the two (pricing procedures with an eye on the current lab invoice, not last decade's assumption) is one of the more overlooked profitability fixes available to a general practice.

Renegotiating with your lab, consolidating volume with fewer labs, or shifting appropriate cases to in-house digital fabrication are the other common levers; each is worth reviewing before assuming a high lab percentage is simply the cost of doing restorative dentistry.