Cost

Dental Lab Cost Estimation: Pricing Crowns, Aligners, and Custom Cases

The six cost buckets behind every milled crown and printed appliance, how to assemble a defensible quote, and where estimates quietly lose money.

Cost per unit in a digital dental lab stacks up from six buckets: material, machine time, direct labor, tooling and consumables, scrap and remake recovery, and allocated overhead. A single milled crown that a lab sells for 45 to 90 dollars typically carries 22 to 38 dollars of true cost once every bucket is loaded. Quoting from material alone is the fastest way to lose money. The Material Cost per Appliance and Custom Case Turnaround Cost calculators exist to keep every bucket visible. This guide walks the money, not the formulas, so you can price work that actually clears margin.

A 98 mm multilayer zirconia disc runs 40 to 90 dollars and yields about 14 crowns, so blank material lands at 3 to 6.50 dollars per crown before scrap. Print resins run 60 to 180 dollars per liter, so a 25 mL arch model consumes 1.50 to 4.50 dollars. Thermoform aligner sheets cost 1 to 3 dollars each. Sinter, glaze, and stain add 0.50 to 1.50 dollars in materials per crown. Wash alcohol at 8 to 15 dollars per gallon adds a few cents per print but climbs fast at volume. The Material Cost per Appliance calculator rolls these into one per-unit figure.

Amortize equipment as an hourly rate, then multiply by cycle time. A 5-axis wet mill costing 90,000 dollars over a 5-year, 3,000-hour-per-year life carries roughly 6 dollars per hour in depreciation, and loaded with power, service contracts, and spindle reserve, an all-in rate of 18 to 35 dollars per hour is realistic. At 22 minutes per crown, that is 6.60 to 12.80 dollars of machine time. Milling burs are the sneaky line: a 3-bur set at 55 dollars lasting 40 crowns is 1.40 dollars per crown, and running them dull is what quietly drives your remake count up.

Direct labor is loaded rate times minutes, not wage times minutes. A designer at 28 dollars per hour wage loads to roughly 40 dollars with payroll, benefits, and idle time, so 9 minutes of CAD design is 6 dollars per crown. Polishing and finishing add 5 to 12 minutes of technician time; the Polishing Labor calculator converts that to 3.50 to 8 dollars per unit at a 42 dollar loaded rate. Model pouring, plating, and boxing on the analog side still bill 4 to 9 dollars. Labor is usually the single largest bucket, 35 to 50 percent of loaded cost.

Scrap and remakes are a cost multiplier, not a rounding error. If your remake rate is 5 percent and each remake burns 100 percent of the original material, machine, and labor plus expedited shipping, add roughly the full unit cost times the remake rate to every job: a 30 dollar unit at 5 percent carries 1.50 dollars of embedded remake cost. Field remakes cost more than internal rejects because you have already paid to ship and you eat a rush reprint. Track this with the Remake Rate calculator and load the result into every quote as a line, not a hope.

Allocate fixed overhead, rent, software seats, sinter furnaces, sterilization, and admin over billable units. A lab with 32,000 dollars monthly overhead producing 1,600 units spreads 20 dollars per unit, which often shocks first-time estimators. Build the quote bottom up: material plus machine plus labor plus tooling plus consumables plus remake allowance plus overhead equals cost, then apply target margin. For a crown that is 4.50 plus 9.00 plus 9.50 plus 1.40 plus 0.80 plus 1.50 plus 20.00, about 46.70 dollars of cost; at a 35 percent margin you quote near 72 dollars. The Custom Case Turnaround Cost calculator assembles this stack per case.

Aligner and appliance economics differ because cost is per step, not per unit. An in-house printed aligner step costs 8 to 18 dollars fully loaded across model print, thermoform, trim, polish, and bag, so a 24-step dual-arch case is 380 to 860 dollars of production cost against retail case fees of 1,500 to 4,000 dollars. Surgical guides carry sterilization cost that crowns never see: pouching, sealing, and validated cycles add 6 to 14 dollars and 20 to 40 minutes per case, which the Sterilization Packaging Workload calculator captures. The Aligner Build Cost calculator steps through print, form, and finish per stage.

Estimates fail in predictable ways. Costing at wage instead of loaded rate understates labor by 35 to 45 percent. Pricing the whole disc to one crown, or the reverse, assuming zero scrap, both distort material. Forgetting bur, resin-vat, and build-plate wear hides 1 to 3 dollars per unit. Leaving remakes out of the quote quietly converts a 30 percent margin into 22 percent at a 6 percent remake rate. The fix is a standing per-unit cost sheet that every calculator feeds, reviewed quarterly against actual disc counts, resin liters, and technician hours, so quotes track reality instead of last year's guess.

Published 2026-07-02.