Is It Still Worth It After the OB3 Act?

What does the math suggest about borrowing private student loans for dental school? After the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill (OB3) Act, dental schools will be capped at $50,000 per year in federal student loan borrowing.That single shift means the math is far different from what it used to be.Here's what the math looks like under the new rules, how dental school ROI shakes out, and how much it's safe to borrow based on current economic prospects and our own reader data.Income as a dentist: Does it justify the student loans? Before you borrow six figures of dental school debt, you need to understand what dentists actually earn compared to the average student loan balance.  Here are the income stats from the 699 dentists in our 2025 salary survey of Student Loan Planner readers: PercentileDentist income10th$140,00025th$170,000Average$263,42175th$300,00090th$450,000 The average student debt reported in our survey for dental school was $419,167.

Keep in mind that the average income of $263,000 is from dentists who are a couple to a few years out of school, and there are practice owners in that number.If you're working as an associate employee rather than owning your own practice, your income would probably be more like the $140,000 to $170,000 range.The best way to compare ROI in this case is to look at what you would have earned with only a bachelor's degree — roughly $90,000 a year.Analyzing the ROI of dental school private student loan borrowing The cost of dental school depends on where you go.

Take a look at the YouTube video below showing a detailed analysis of borrowing for NYU’s dental school program (which represents any high-cost private school) vs.East Carolina University (representing a low-cost program).Dental school professional degree borrowing limits Dental schools will be capped at $50,000 per year borrowing limits for federal student loans.To see what that means in practice, compare two real programs: NYU's total cost of attendance is about $169,000 per year, and East Carolina University (ECU) comes in around $92,000 per year.

With a $50,000 federal borrowing cap, you'd need private student loans to cover the difference — and that gap is a lot more manageable at a school like ECU than at NYU.If prospective students can borrow up to $50,000 per year for dental school, only programs with direct costs of $80,000 or less will be economical for most students.That means attending a public dental school is likely still a good investment for the majority of future dentists who enroll.However, private dental schools with costs north of $100,000 per year could easily leave students without enough disposable income to live after graduation.

For example, if you're earning $170,000 a year as a new associate dentist and carrying NYU-level private student loan payments, you'd be living off of $20-something thousand a year.That's not realistic or possible, even as a dentist.How dental school borrowing used to work It used to be that you could take out federal student loans up to the full cost of attendance and repay just 10% of your income through income-driven repayment (IDR) plans, no matter how much debt you accrued.With that math, if you subtract 10% of your income as a dentist and it is more than what you would have made with a bachelor’s degree, then going to dental school made sense.

Since almost all dentists earn more after subtracting that 10% IDR payment than what they’d earn with a bachelor’s degree on average, almost all dental schools made financial sense under the old borrowing rules.Here's a quick example: Pretend you make $150,000 and lose $15,000 to IDR payments each year.That net income of $135,000 is more than most folks would make with a bachelor’s degree.So the $600,000 DDS degree from a private university made economic sense under this old model.

The problem is that this old model is dead and can’t come to the phone right now.The new model means most dentists need to pay back loans With new, lower borrowing limits, most dentists will need to plan to pay back their loans in full — and that completely changes which programs are worth the investment.If federal loans are capped at just $50,000 per year, IDR forgiveness will become mathematically irrelevant for most dentists.Paying 10% of income for 30 years would wipe out most of their student loan balance, leaving little left to forgive.

When looking at the math, low-cost dental school programs still make financial sense.At a school like ECU, your total debt after graduation would be around $430,000.You'd pay back federal loans through the Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) at 10% of your income, and then pay back private student loans on a 10-year repayment schedule.If you're an average-earning dentist, your after-tax income might be around $190,000, and after student loans, it's more like $140,000 — still significantly more than the roughly $70,000 to $72,000 you'd take home after taxes on a bachelor's-degree-only salary.

Many students could borrow modest amounts of private student loans through a place like Student Loan Planner that shows you rates from multiple lenders.But once you get above two times the expected income from your degree (for many dentists, that means projected debt above $400,000), the math doesn’t make much sense unless you want to get involved in the field for nonfinancial reasons or you’re willing to earn less to avoid needing to sit in front of screens in a boring office all day.Getting help with how to borrow for dental school If you need help figuring out how to best borrow for dental school, you can book a consultation with our team of experts at Student Loan Planner.We’d love to help you weigh the pros and cons of various options, discuss different borrowing strategies, and look at your long-term goals in helping you make the best decision for your potential career path as a dentist.