The honest answer first
There is no single number, and anyone who gives you one without asking about your practice is guessing. Daily production for a general associate swings enormously with things that have nothing to do with skill:
- Payer mix. The same crown produces very different figures in a fee-for-service office and a heavy PPO one.
- Procedure mix. An associate doing molar endo and implants produces multiples of one doing mostly hygiene checks and single-surface restorations, on the same day and the same effort.
- Schedule control. If someone else fills your column, your production is substantially their work, not yours.
- Hygiene attribution. Some offices credit the associate for exams in hygiene, some do not. This alone can move a daily figure by a thousand dollars or more.
- Years out. Speed and case acceptance both compound over the first several years.
Which is why "$3,000 a day" or "$5,000 a day" circulate as facts and are close to meaningless without the rest of the sentence.
What the published data actually says
The most commonly cited source for dentist income in the US is the ADA Health Policy Institute, which publishes average net income for non-owner general dentists. Collection-rate norms come from published dental billing benchmarks: well-run practices collect roughly 96% to 99% of adjusted production, with the industry average nearer 91% to 94%.
Those are real figures and they are useful as a frame. What they are not is a like-for-like comparison with you, because they average across practice types, regions, years of experience and payer mix. Any cohort figure you see, including in cuspd, is a modelled reference point rather than a survey of associates exactly like you, and should be read that way.
The number that actually helps you
Not the benchmark. Yours, measured properly and over enough time to mean something:
- Production per day, and how it moves by weekday
- Production per visit, which separates "I saw more people" from "I did more dentistry"
- Visits per day
- Production by procedure, so you can see what actually carries your schedule
- Your effective percentage, so you know what any of it turned into
Those five make questions answerable that a benchmark never can. Is Tuesday genuinely worse or does it just feel that way? Is the second office worth the drive? Did the new schedule help? Would dropping a plan cost me anything real? Should I be asking for more, and what do I say when they ask why?
Why almost no associate has these
Because the practice software belongs to the practice, the reports stop when you leave, and nobody hands an associate a running record of their own work. Building one by hand in a spreadsheet works for about three weeks.
cuspd is that record: a few minutes at the end of a day, and the per-day, per-visit and per-procedure figures build themselves, with your own numbers placed next to modelled cohort reference points that are labelled as exactly that. Look at a real associate's year in the demo, no account and no card.