7 Tax Deductions Dental Practice Owners Leave on the Table Every Year
Sam's List Editorial | 2026-06-23
7 Tax Deductions Dental Practice Owners Leave on the Table Every Year A $1.5M dental practice nets, on a good year, somewhere north of $350K to the owner. The owner pays tax on most of it. And every spring, a chunk of that tax bill exists only because nobody made a few elections that were sitting right there in the code. The deductions below aren't loopholes. They're standard dental practice tax deductions that generalist accountants skip because they don't know what a CEREC machine is or why you bought a third operatory. Here are the seven that quietly cost owners five figures a year. 1. The dental practice tax deduction with a deadline: Section 179 on operatory equipment Buy a $35,000 intraoral scanner, drop it into a chair, and you can expense the whole thing the year it's placed in service under IRC §179 . The 2026 limit is $2.5 million of qualifying purchases, phasing out after $4 million in total spend — so a normal practice never hits the ceiling. Here's the catch nobody mentions: §179 is an election . You have to claim it on the return for the year the equipment is placed in service. Miss the year, and you're stuck depreciating that scanner over five years instead of writing it off now. "Placed in service" means installed and ready to use — not the day you signed the financing paperwork. Buy in December, install in January, and it's a next-year deduction. 2. Bonus depreciation on big-ticket tech is back to 100% CEREC mills, cone-beam CT units, and soft-tissue lasers are exactly the kind of property that qualifies for bonus depreciation under IRC §168(k) . This one matters in 2026 because the number changed. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, 100% bonus depreciation was restored — permanently — for qualifying property acquired and placed in service after January 19, 2025. For a few years it was phasing down (80%, then 60%); a lot of advice still floating around online quotes those old rates. The math: a $120,000 cone-beam CT, placed in service in 2026, can be fully expensed in year one. At a 35% combined marginal rate, that's roughly $42,000 of tax deferred into the same year you wrote the check. Always confirm the current-year percentage before you cite it — but right now, it's 100%. 3. Hiring your college-age kids shifts income to a lower bracket Your 19-year-old can run the front desk over the summer, manage the practice's Instagram, or scan and file charts. Pay them a real wage for real work, and that wage moves out of your vetted bracket and into theirs — often near zero after the standard deduction. Two rules keep this clean. The work has...
