Production bonus

A production bonus is a payment triggered by hitting a specific production or collections goal, layered on top of an associate's base percentage or a team member's regular wage, designed to reward performance above a defined baseline rather than simply compensating for hours worked. It can apply to an individual dentist or hygienist, or to the whole clinical team collectively when the goal is a practice-wide number.

The design detail that determines whether a production bonus actually motivates or eventually breeds resentment is whether the target moves as the practice grows. A bonus threshold set once and never revisited becomes trivially easy to hit as production naturally rises over the years, at which point it stops functioning as an incentive and starts functioning as an expected part of the paycheck: the exact entitlement trap that undermines most long-running bonus structures.

Reviewing and resetting production bonus targets on a regular cadence, tied to the practice's actual current numbers rather than a figure set years ago, keeps the bonus meaningful as an incentive instead of letting it quietly become a fixed cost the practice can no longer really afford to remove.