US Dental Cost by City / Metro (2026)

⚠️ Version 2.0.0 — correction notice (13 July 2026). Version 1 of this dataset published per-state figures for braces and porcelain veneers that were not observed. An internal audit established that they were derived from the single-implant series by fixed multipliers (0.80× and 0.25× respectively, constant to four decimal places across all 51 jurisdictions). As a consequence, every procedure shared the same state ranking, and the “composite” Cost Index reduced algebraically to a function of the implant price alone. Those columns have been retracted and removed, and the index is renamed the Restorative Cost Index to reflect what it actually measures. Independently sourced data refutes the shortcut: orthodontic prices are uncorrelated with restorative prices across the 51 markets (Spearman 0.04) and cosmetic prices nearly so (~0.18), while restorative procedures (implant, crown, denture) are mutually coherent (0.93–0.96). A state that is cheap for implants is not therefore cheap for braces. What survives, and is now independently validated: the single-implant series is genuine. Its state ranking agrees with the ASQ360°/CareCredit Average Procedural Cost Study at a Spearman rank correlation of 0.945 (n = 51). If you used version 1, discard any per-state braces or veneer figure taken from it. Full account: realdentalcosts.com/en/data-corrections/ Observed average cash price of a complete single dental implant across 206 U.S. cities and metro areas for 2026, with the number of tracked dental clinics per city. v2 removes the per-city braces and veneer columns. Two independent proofs showed they were not observations: across the 206 cities they were near-fixed multiples of the city implant price (≈1.26× and ≈0.34×) — yet at state level the same ratios were 0.80× and 0.25×, so the two layers used mutually contradictory multipliers. Worse, 205 of the 206 cities carried a braces price above their own state’s average, which is arithmetically impossible for a genuine city-to-state aggregation. Only the implant series is observed, so only the implant series is published. Methodology: https://realdentalcosts.com/en/methodology/