Dental Cleaning Cost in 2026: National US Price Benchmark

How we anchored the 2026 numbers

Start with the gap, because it explains the shape of this page. The ADA Health Policy Institute Survey of Dental Fees was once the standard percentile reference for every CDT procedure code. It no longer exists. In the ADA's own words: "The Council on Dental Practice elected to discontinue the Survey of Dental Fees in 2023 and it has been removed for download, due to a change in law eliminating safe harbor disclosure." The ADA adds that it is forbidden by federal law to set or recommend fees. There is no ADA-published fee survey covering 2024, 2025 or 2026, and no other body publishes a national replacement.

So rather than manufacture a national average and present it as survey data, this page is built on figures that are genuinely published and that you can open yourself. There are three. The first is state Medicaid fee schedules: every state publishes what it actually reimburses a dentist per CDT code, and that is the hard floor of what a participating practice accepts. The second is the VA Outpatient Reasonable Charges tables, a federal per-code charge schedule VA uses when it bills a third-party insurer, reissued each calendar year with a companion ZIP-level geographic adjustment table. The third is the handful of chains that publish their own cash fee schedules: Comfort Dental posts a full reduced fee schedule per state region, so its $110 regular fee for a cleaning is a real retail data point rather than someone's estimate of one.

Two national series track the direction of travel rather than the level: the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index for dental services, and the BLS OEWS wage data for dental hygienists (29-1292). Hygienist wages are the largest single input cost in a cleaning appointment, so they are the cleanest leading indicator of where fees are heading.

One source we deliberately do not reproduce: FAIR Health Consumer is the best dental cost lookup in the country, giving charge and allowed benchmarks for any CDT code in your own ZIP from a database of billions of claim lines. Its terms of use restrict it to personal consumer use, so we link to it and tell you to run your own code and ZIP rather than lifting its figures into our tables. It is free, it takes about a minute, and for your own appointment it beats any national figure on this page.

Where this page gives a planning range rather than a published fee, the inputs are named beside it so you can redo the arithmetic yourself. For a quote on a real appointment, always call the practice.

2026 published fee reference points by CDT code

A dental invoice lists services by their CDT procedure code, not by plain-English name, so the cleanest way to sanity-check a treatment plan is code by code. Because no national fee survey exists, the table below does not state a national average. Instead it gives two figures that are genuinely published, per code, and that bracket what a self-pay patient is likely to be quoted: what a state Medicaid program actually reimburses a dentist, and what the federal government charges when it bills an insurer for the same procedure. Your quote should normally land between the two columns, nearer the right-hand one in a high-cost metro.

On a standard PPO the first five codes in that table are the routine visit, and the cleaning, the recall exam and one set of bitewings a year are normally covered at 100%. The filling sits in the basic-services tier and the crown in the major tier, both with coinsurance, and a crown usually carries a separate buildup or core charge on top. Sources, both pulled directly from the source documents on 26 September 2026. Medicaid column: Michigan Department of Health and Human Services Dental Fee Schedule, January 2026 (revised 11 March 2026), shown as a worked example of one state; rates differ by state, and for D1110 run from $45.45 in New York to $62.14 in Michigan across the schedules we checked. The ADA keeps a free directory of all 50 state Medicaid dental fee schedules if you want your own. VA column: VA Outpatient Reasonable Charges, Table I, v5.26 (January to December 2026), the nationwide charge before VA applies its ZIP-level geographic adjustment. For the codes tied to gum treatment and cleanings we publish dedicated pages: D4341 scaling and root planing, D4342, D4346, D4910 periodontal maintenance, and D4355 debridement.

2022-2026 year-over-year average

Since the ADA discontinued its fee survey, no public series reports the national average fee for D1110 year by year. The cleanest public measure of how fast dental prices are rising is the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index for dental services (series CUUR0000SEMC02, US city average). The table below shows that index's August-to-August change for the last four years, ending with the latest available print (August 2026, index 656.707, up 4.97% year over year), pulled from the BLS public API on 26 September 2026. The annual rate has been less steady than it looks from a distance: 5.30%, then 3.48%, then 4.15%, then 4.97%. Over the full four years from August 2022 the index rose 19.1%, a compound rate of 4.47% a year, so a cleaning that cost $100 in August 2022 costs about $119 today on the index alone.

Two caveats worth knowing if you compare this with another source. The series is not seasonally adjusted, so a single month can move without meaning much: the index actually fell 0.64% between July and August 2026. And there is no October 2025 observation at all, which BLS footnotes as unavailable due to the 2025 lapse in appropriations, so any twelve-month average that spans it is working with eleven months.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index, Dental services (series CUUR0000SEMC02, US city average, not seasonally adjusted), retrieved via the BLS public API, 26 September 2026.

2026 benchmark by metro

Geography moves the price more than almost anything else, and there is a published way to see by how much. The VA sets one nationwide charge per procedure code, then adjusts it by three-digit ZIP prefix using a table of geographic adjustment factors it reissues every year. Those factors run from 0.76 around Birmingham to 1.66 in midtown Manhattan, so the same D1110 cleaning is benchmarked at more than twice as much in one city as the other. The table below applies each metro's factor to the nationwide charge: $154.16 for a routine cleaning, $416.35 for a quadrant of scaling and root planing. Both source figures are published, each metro's factor and ZIP prefix are shown beside the result, and the multiplication is ours, so you can check any row or look up your own prefix.

Source: VA Outpatient Reasonable Charges, Table I (nationwide dental charges) and Table R (geographic adjustment factors by ZIP), both v5.26 covering January to December 2026, parsed 26 September 2026. The pair of factors shown is the Class I factor, which applies to D1110, and the Class II factor, which applies to D4341. This is what VA charges a third-party insurer, not what a private practice quotes a walk-in patient, so read it as a like-for-like measure of how much your city moves the price rather than as a retail price list.

For state-by-state detail with city averages and Medicaid context, see our full cost-by-state guide. For the six highest-population states we publish dedicated landing pages: California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania.

2026 cost by insurance type

Your insurance type is the single biggest determinant of what you actually pay out of pocket. The cell that says "$0 routine" for PPO insurance is not a typo; almost every employer-sponsored dental PPO covers two cleanings per year at 100% of the in-network allowed amount, with no copay and no deductible. The catch is that the second cleaning has to fall at least 6 months and 1 day after the first; insurers enforce frequency limits strictly. Skipping that window means you pay full price.

Deep-dive guides: with insurance, without insurance, Medicare, Medicaid. PPO and HMO patterns reflect the standard plan designs Delta Dental, MetLife, and Cigna Dental publish for their plans; your own explanation of benefits is the definitive number.

What pushed 2026 prices up

Three pressures combined to raise cleaning prices going into 2026. The first is dental hygienist wages. BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics put the median dental hygienist wage at $47.16 per hour, $98,100 a year (May 2025 OEWS, occupation 29-1292, checked July 2026), after several years of strong increases as practices competed for scarce hygienists. Hygienist labor is the largest variable cost in a cleaning appointment; when their wages rise, the appointment fee follows within 6 to 12 months because most practices reprice annually rather than continuously.

The second pressure is consumables and equipment. Single-use ultrasonic scaler tips, polishing prophy paste, fluoride varnish, sterilization pouches, and PPE have all risen in cost since 2022. Many practices buy through Henry Schein, Patterson Dental, or Benco; their wholesale catalogs are the reference if you want to track the line item. Each cleaning consumes a modest but real amount of consumables, and practices reprice annually to recover it.

The third pressure is malpractice insurance and rent. Commercial rent in dental-heavy submarkets (Manhattan, San Francisco, downtown LA) has risen faster than CPI; malpractice premiums have risen more modestly but cumulatively. These show up as gradual fee escalation in metro markets but barely affect rural rates. The net effect: the urban-rural gap is widening in 2026, not narrowing.

One thing has not changed: corporate dental chains continue to offer low-priced new-patient bundles to acquire patients, and these often appear cheaper than independent practices on a per-cleaning basis. We cover the major chains on dedicated pages: Aspen Dental, Western Dental, Heartland Dental, Smile Generation (Pacific Dental Services), Bright Now! Dental (Smile Brands), and Gentle Dental (InterDent and 42 North Dental).

How to budget a 2026 dental cleaning

The honest budget framework depends on whether your visit will include just a cleaning, a cleaning plus exam, or a cleaning plus exam plus X-rays. The single most-undercounted line item on first-time-patient visits is the X-ray series. New patients typically need a bitewing set (D0274) or a full mouth series (D0210), and neither is cheap next to the cleaning itself: Michigan Medicaid reimburses $40.92 and $90.00 for them, against VA benchmark charges of $106.41 and $221.46. A "free new patient cleaning" promotion almost always charges separately for the X-rays and the comprehensive exam, which is how a headline of nothing becomes an invoice.

For a returning patient at the same practice on the same insurance, the typical 6-month cleaning visit covers the cleaning (D1110, 100% covered), the periodic exam (D0120, 100% covered), and bitewing X-rays once per year (D0274, 100% covered). The out-of-pocket should be $0 on a standard PPO. If you are seeing a charge, ask the front desk to itemize; the most common reason is that you crossed a frequency limit (your last cleaning was less than 6 months ago, or you already used your annual bitewing benefit).

For a self-pay patient with no insurance, a complete check is three codes: the cleaning (D1110), the exam (D0120) and bitewings (D0274). Add up the published figures for each and you get the bracket. On Michigan Medicaid's schedule those three come to $137.05. At Comfort Dental's published regular fees they come to $235, or $295 once its $60 office-visit fee is added. On the VA benchmark they come to $351.91. Those totals are our arithmetic on published line items, not prices anyone advertises as a package, but they frame the range well: budget somewhere around $200 to $350 for a full self-pay check in a typical metro, more in the most expensive ones. Cheaper routes exist, and each has its own trade-off in waiting time and appointment length: a community FQHC dental clinic on a sliding scale, an accredited dental school or hygiene-program clinic, or a corporate chain new-patient promotion. Our low-cost options guide covers each, and the chain pages carry each chain's current advertised offer. For state-specific Medicaid coverage, see our Medicaid page.

If you've not been to a dentist in 3+ years and have visible tartar, budget for the possibility of being quoted a full mouth debridement (D4355) before a normal cleaning can even be performed, or directly for scaling and root planing. Debridement is reimbursed at $118.29 on Michigan Medicaid against a VA benchmark of $296.60. Scaling and root planing is billed per quadrant, and that is where the bill escalates: at $170.00 Medicaid or $416.35 VA per quadrant, a patient needing all four quadrants is looking at roughly $680 at the Medicaid rate and $1,665 at the VA benchmark. See our scaling and root planing cost page and full mouth debridement page for those scenarios.

What to watch in late 2026 and 2027

Two policy items could shift cleaning costs in the next 18 months. The first is the ongoing expansion of dental therapist scope-of-practice in several states. Minnesota, Maine, Vermont, Michigan, Connecticut, Nevada, and Arizona have licensed mid-level dental therapists who can perform a defined set of procedures (including cleanings and some restorative work) under indirect dentist supervision; their hourly cost is lower than a hygienist's, which can translate into lower visit fees in expansion-state Medicaid clinics and FQHCs. Watch the Pew or Community Catalyst trackers.

The second is the continued growth of Medicare Advantage dental benefits. The large majority of MA plans now include some dental benefit, and allowances vary plan by plan and year by year. CMS has not added routine dental to Original Medicare, but the MA-side benefit creep effectively functions as expanded coverage for the senior population. Our Medicare cleaning page tracks per-carrier benefit allowances.

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