$214 out of pocket on the average dental visit: MEPS as a dental data source

What it says#

The Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, which began in 1996, is a set of large-scale surveys of families and individuals, their medical providers (doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, etc.), and employers across the United States. It is run by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and its Household Component is co-sponsored with the National Center for Health Statistics. There are two major components: the Household Component, which collects from families and individuals and is supplemented by data from their medical providers, and the Insurance Component, a separate survey of employers.

Dental sits inside the Household Component. MEPS collects information on the nature of any dental care visit, the type of dental care provider, the treatments and services performed, and prescribed medicines. Dental expenditures include all direct payments by individuals, private insurance (including TRICARE), Medicare, Medicaid, and other sources such as the Veterans Administration, Workers' Compensation and miscellaneous public sources. Dental visits are reported as event-level records in the Dental Visits file, and summarized to the person level on the Full Year Consolidated file.

The newest dental year is 2024. MEPS HC-254B, the 2024 Dental Visits public use file, was released in May 2026, a year after HC-248B carried 2023. Its documentation prints worked estimates that are useful on their own. Using the 2024 person weight, the file yields 361.3 million dental visits, of which 310.7 million excluded zero-payment events; 86.0% of dental visits carried expenditures greater than zero. Mean total payments per visit were $462, or $537 once zero-payment events are dropped. Mean out-of-pocket payments, the self or family variable, were $214 per visit, or $249 excluding zero-payment events. Private insurance paid a mean 49.7% of total expenditure per visit on that same basis.

The documentation runs the same numbers for hygienist visits separately. Where the person saw a hygienist, mean total payments per visit were $300 ($309 excluding zero-payment events), mean out-of-pocket payments were $102 ($105), and private insurance covered a mean 57.7% of the total.

For trend, the most recent dental statistical brief is #555, published March 2024 and covering 2019 through 2021 for the population aged 2 and older. The number of people using dental services fell from 149 million in 2019 (46.7% of that population) to 131 million in 2020 (40.8%), then recovered to 143 million in 2021 (44.2%). Total dental expenditures fell 16.1% in 2020 against 2019 ($108 billion versus $129 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars) and were not significantly different from 2019 by 2021. Total dental visits fell 19.0% in 2020, with April 2020 down 81.9% against April 2019. Average annual expenditures per person with any dental visit did not vary significantly across the three years: $864, $829 and $887 in constant 2021 dollars.

Who it applies to#

MEPS describes the U.S. civilian noninstitutionalized population, so it describes patients rather than practices. For an owner, that makes it the cleanest free answer to two questions a vendor will otherwise answer for you: what a dental visit costs nationally, and how much of that the patient pays out of pocket.

It does not describe your town, your fee schedule or your payer mix, and it is not a production benchmark. The dollar figures are payments received by providers from all sources, not charges; the file carries total charge separately. Statistical Brief #555 also draws a boundary worth knowing: it counts visits to any type of dental care provider in an office-based setting, including general dentists, hygienists, technicians, surgeons, orthodontists, endodontists and periodontists, and excludes urgent care, emergency departments and inpatient hospitals.

The known weakness is self-report. MEPS notes that dental utilization is reported by household respondents and is subject to recall bias, and that unlike office-based physician visits, dental expenditure information is not supplemented through the Medical Provider Component. Treat the levels as good national estimates and the year-over-year direction as the more reliable signal.

What changed#

The 2024 Dental Visits file, released May 2026, replaced 2023 as the most recent dental year. The dental statistical brief series has not been updated past #555 on the MEPS dental topics page, so the published dental analysis still stops at 2021 even though the microdata now runs through 2024. Anyone who wants 2022 through 2024 dental utilization has to run the public use files rather than read a brief.

Where the source is#

MEPS lives at meps.ahrq.gov and everything here is free. The survey background page describes the components and the 1996 start. The dental topics page lists every dental publication in reverse chronological order and describes what the dental records contain. The data files section carries the public use files themselves along with their documentation PDFs, and the HC-254B documentation is where the 2024 worked estimates quoted above are printed. Statistical Brief #555 is a nine-page PDF. Restricted files and the Insurance Component microdata are not public; those require an AHRQ Data Center or Federal Statistical Research Data Center project.