What is a good overhead ratio for medical practices?

Overhead ratios vary by specialty because of staffing intensity, supply consumption, and procedure mix — but the specialty-by-specialty tables circulating online mostly trace back to nothing you can open. We publish only what we could verify on a page carrying the digits. General dentistry: ZenOne puts overhead at 60–65% of collections and treats anything above 70% as a problem, breaking it down as staff 25–30%, clinical supplies 4–6%, facility 6–10% and marketing 4–7%. Dermatology: FTI Consulting reports 72.9% of net revenue for medical dermatology and 75.1% for cosmetic — worth sitting with, because cosmetic carries the heavier operating-expense load, which is the opposite of what most owners assume when they add an aesthetics line. Physical therapy: U.S. Physical Therapy Inc. reports 80.8% of net revenue in clinic operating cost for FY2025 — salaries and related costs 59.1%, rent/supplies/contract labour/other 18.0%, depreciation 2.7% — leaving 19.2% gross profit before head office. That is a roughly 1,000-clinic operator, so read it as the cost structure of PT delivery at scale; a single-site owner does not carry the 8.9% corporate line beneath it, and should expect to sit lower. Public-company filings are the most under-used free benchmark in outpatient healthcare: a listed pure-play has to publish its cost structure by line, audited, every year, which is more than the paid surveys give you. For primary care, internal medicine, orthopedics, cardiology and OB/GYN there is no listed pure-play and MGMA's survey sits behind DataDive, so we will not restate figures we cannot link you to. What still works without a benchmark is the direction of travel: your own ratio measured the same way every month, broken down by category. A 5 percentage point reduction in overhead on a $5M practice is $250K of additional owner profit, and that arithmetic holds whatever your specialty median turns out to be.