How does your accounts receivable stack up against other dental practices? Most dentists have a rough sense that their AR could be better — but without benchmarks, it's hard to know whether you're slightly below average or seriously hemorrhaging revenue.
This guide covers the key dental AR benchmarks for 2026, what they mean, and where denial rates fit into the picture.
The Core Dental AR Benchmarks
1. Denial Rate: Target Below 5%
The industry benchmark for first-pass claim denial rate is under 5% for high-performing dental practices. The average across US dental practices sits closer to 8–12%, with some practices running as high as 15–20%.
Every denied claim costs you twice: once in the lost payment, and again in the staff time to work it. At an average claim value of $450 and 15 minutes of rework per denial, a practice billing $1M/year can spend $30,000+ annually on denial follow-up alone.
A denial rate above 8% is a signal that something is systematically wrong — usually eligibility verification gaps, coding errors, or timely filing misses.
2. Days in AR: Target Under 30
Days in AR (also called Days Outstanding) measures how long it takes to collect from the time of service. For dental practices:
- Under 25 days: Excellent
- 25–35 days: Average
- 35–50 days: Below average — investigate
- Over 50 days: Action required
High days in AR typically indicate one of three problems: slow claim submission (should be same-day or next-day), payer adjudication delays (contact your clearinghouse), or stalled denial follow-up.
3. Percentage of AR Over 90 Days: Target Under 15%
This is the "aging" benchmark. If more than 15% of your outstanding AR is over 90 days old, you have a structural problem. Many of those claims are already lost — payers have adjudicated and denied them, appeals windows have closed, or the patient has gone out of reach.
Benchmark targets:
- 0–30 days: 50–60% of total AR (healthy — these are current claims in adjudication)
- 31–60 days: 15–20% (acceptable — pending or recently adjudicated)
- 61–90 days: 10–15% (needs attention — follow up immediately)
- Over 90 days: Under 15% (anything above this is a recovery problem)
4. Collection Rate: Target 95%+
Your net collection rate measures how much of your collectible revenue you actually collected. Note: this is different from your gross collection rate. You're measuring against allowed amounts (what payers agreed to pay), not billed charges.
A net collection rate below 95% usually means you're leaving real money on the table — through written-off denials that were actually appealable, missed patient balances, or expired timely filing windows.
5. First-Pass Resolution Rate: Target 90%+
First-pass resolution is the percentage of claims paid correctly on the first submission without any follow-up. This is the ultimate measure of front-end billing quality. World-class revenue cycle teams achieve 95%+. The average dental practice is around 80–85%.
Every claim that doesn't pass on the first try represents a rework cycle: identify, correct, resubmit, and wait. First-pass resolution improvements have the highest ROI of any revenue cycle initiative.
The Hidden Cost: Unworked Denials
Here's the number most practices don't want to calculate: what percentage of your denied claims are actually worked?
For the average practice, it's about 60%. The other 40% — usually small-dollar denials or late-identified older claims — get written off without any attempt at recovery.
At a denial rate of 10% on a $1M billing practice, that's $100,000 in denied claims. If 40% are never worked, that's $40,000 written off every year. Often for administrative reasons, not clinical ones.
Use our cost calculator to run this math against your actual numbers.
What's Driving the Decline in First-Pass Rates?
Several industry-wide trends are making clean claim submission harder:
Payer complexity is increasing. Delta Dental alone has 39 independent operating companies, each with slightly different rules for bundling, attachments, and timely filing. A claim that passes at Delta Dental of California may fail at Delta Dental of New York.
Prior authorization is expanding. More payers are requiring pre-authorization for procedures that historically didn't need it — crowns, periodontal surgery, implants. Staff often don't know when an auth is required until they see the denial.
ERA/835 complexity. As more practices move to electronic remittance, the volume of CARC/RARC codes they need to understand has grown. A practice receiving 200 remittances per week might see 50 unique CARC combinations. Without a fast reference system, working denials becomes slow and error-prone.
Red Flags: When to Take Action Now
Don't wait for a full AR analysis to act. These are signals of immediate problems:
- More than 5 denials per day from a single payer — suggests a systemic issue (credentialing, NPI, plan change)
- CARC 29 (timely filing) appearing regularly — your submission workflow is broken
- CARC 16 (missing information) above 3% of claims — your front-end eligibility or data capture is failing
- CARC 4 (filing window) combined with CARC 252 (attachments pending) — claims are sitting too long waiting for documentation
- Days in AR trending upward three months in a row — act before it compounds
Building a Benchmark Dashboard
The most effective practices track these five metrics weekly, not monthly:
- New claim denial rate (this week's submissions)
- Denial work rate (what % of last week's denials have been worked)
- AR aging snapshot (% in each bucket)
- Days in AR
- Net collection rate (monthly trailing average)
Most PM systems can generate these reports. If yours can't, ask your software vendor — or consider building a simple tracking sheet.
The Bottom Line
Knowing your benchmarks is the first step. Acting on them is the second. Most of the revenue loss in dental AR is not due to payer unfairness — it's due to systematic gaps in denial follow-up that compound quietly over months and years.
The practices that outperform benchmarks share one trait: they treat denial management as a proactive discipline, not a cleanup activity.
Want to see what your denial backlog could be costing you? Run the calculation →