What empty chairs cost a dental practice in a year
A quick way to put a dollar figure on no-shows and late cancellations
The average dental practice had a 4% no-show rate in 2023, down from 7% in 2022, according to Henry Schein One's 2024 industry report on more than 2,500 US practices. The same report put the average cancellation rate at 12%, while the top 10% of practices kept each near 1%.
I work the front desk at a pediatric dental office, and I built Chairside, a patient app for dental practices, along with a calculator that turns those percentages into dollars. I wrote this article with help from an AI writing assistant, and the math below follows that calculator.
The math
Take a small practice that sees 16 patients a day, five days a week, for 50 weeks. That's 4,000 appointments a year.
At the 4% average no-show rate, 160 of those appointments go empty. If an average visit produces $250, the practice loses $40,000 in production and about 120 chair hours a year, assuming 45-minute slots.
Count late cancellations that nobody fills and the empty-chair rate can climb toward 10%. At 10%, the same practice loses $100,000 and about 300 chair hours.
Production per visit varies with procedure mix and region, so treat these as an example and plug in your own numbers.
One number stands out
The average practice in the report confirmed 44% of its appointments. The top 10% confirmed 87%. Confirming gives a patient who can't make it a chance to say so ahead of time, which turns a silent no-show into a slot the front desk can still fill.
Chairside puts each practice's aftercare and visit prep on the patient's phone, with an is-it-urgent guide that routes to the front desk and a link to rebook. Patients open it from a QR card at checkout, with no app store and no patient data stored on the practice's servers.
Run your own numbers
The no-show calculator at chairside-for-dentists.pages.dev takes about 30 seconds with your own appointment count, no-show rate and production per visit. It shows the yearly production lost, the empty chair hours, and what cutting no-shows by a third would recover.
There's also a live patient demo on the same site, and practices can start with a 60-day pilot.
No-show, cancellation and confirmation figures from Henry Schein One's 2024 Industry Report, as reported by Becker's Dental Review.