The top 10 best cities for dentists in 2019

Dentists spend four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on dental school. And while there has to be some level of humanity and wanting to help people involved, nobody wants to do it just for the sheer altruism of it. Sure, dentists want to make money-the more the better-but just as important is living a good life, and a lot of that comes down to where the doctor practices. Dentists can set up shop anywhere in the country, but some communities are better than others. To that end, we compiled a list of the 10 best cities in the country for dentists.

We started by looking at data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which gave us the top-earning cities in America (BLS reported data for 444 cities in 2017). However, there’s more to life than making money (general dentists earned an average of $158,120 in 2017). That’s when we started adding such factors as the overall economy, public safety, and so forth. Our complete list of metrics is:

• Annual wage
• Community health
• Education
• Economy
• Public safety
• Stress (including work-related, family-related, money-related, and health- and safety-related stress)
• Oral health
• Life expectancy

Included, where available, is information about the total number in that profession for the community. Nationwide, there were 153,500 dentists. We couldn’t, however, include that as a metric by which to compare because complete data for all the cities wasn’t available.

Trending article: Top 10 WORST states to be a dentist

In addition to BLS, we culled our rankings from personal finance website WalletHub.com, U.S. News & World Report’s Healthiest Community study, and the Journal of the American Medical Association’s study of longest life expectancy, by state.

We ranked each metric on a scale of one to 10, compiled them, and then honed the list from there. Whoever got the lowest score, earned the highest position on the list.

Click through the slides to find out the 10 best cities to be a dentist.