The essentials at a glance
- About nine out of ten cost items in a dental practice are fixed costs that do not decrease when you reduce your treatment time – a 20 percent reduction can lower your pre-tax surplus by nearly 60 percent.
- The economically viable path to fewer working hours is not through less treatment time, but through less administrative time: practice owners spend an average of six hours a week on bureaucracy.
- If you still want to reduce treatment time, you must increase revenue per treatment hour – for example, by reducing appointment cancellations and improving the conversion rate of treatment plans.
Friday, 3:30 PM. Your last patient has been seen, and daycare closes at 4:30 PM. Theoretically, you could leave now. Practically, there are still eleven incomplete charts, three treatment plans that haven't been followed up on, and Monday's medical history forms that still need to be scanned. So you stay – yet again. Just like the question you've been asking yourself for months: Couldn't this be done in four days?
The short answer: yes. But not the way most people try first.
Why is part-time work in your own practice so difficult financially?
Part-time work in your own dental practice is difficult primarily because the majority of practice costs are incurred regardless of your presence. Your team continues to be paid, rent is still deducted, treatment units and X-ray equipment continue to be depreciated, and the loan is still being repaid – regardless of whether you treat patients for five days or four.
The cost structure of an average practice shows just how pronounced this effect is. According to the Statistical Yearbook of the KZBV , approximately 43 percent of total operating expenses go toward personnel, 6 percent toward facility costs, 5 percent toward depreciation, and another 14 percent toward other operating expenses such as insurance, dues, maintenance, and IT.
All of these items are difficult to influence in the short term. Practically only material consumption truly fluctuates with treatment volume – and that accounts for only about 8 percent.
In other words: You can reduce your working hours. But you cannot reduce your costs to the same extent.
Calculation example: What happens with 20 percent less treatment time?
The following model calculation is based on the average values from the KZBV Yearbook (2023 data year) and is rounded to the nearest thousand. It assumes a practice with revenue (excluding external lab costs) of 677,000 euros and a pre-tax surplus of 215,000 euros. The team remains unchanged, rent and depreciation continue, and only material consumption decreases proportionally.
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In this model, one-fifth less treatment time costs nearly 60 percent of the surplus. The reason is always the same: every euro of lost revenue impacts profit almost entirely because there are hardly any corresponding cost savings.
Anyone seriously planning to work part-time needs to understand this math. It is the reason why "simply working one day less" so rarely works in your own practice – and why the real leverage lies elsewhere.
Where does your working time actually go today?
A significant portion of a practice owner's working time is not spent on patient care, but on bureaucracy: around six hours per week for each practice owner, plus an additional 2.5 hours per staff member.
These figures are provided by the German Dental Association. In an average practice, this adds up to more than 24 hours of treatment time lost every week.
This is the real takeaway for anyone considering part-time work: you are already spending six hours a week outside the treatment room. This time generates no revenue—but it costs you your personal time. By reducing it, you shorten your work week without cancelling a single appointment.
Typical time-wasters found in almost every practice:
- Treatment documentation: What isn't recorded during the treatment has to be added later in the evening—often incompletely, which can also impact billing.
- Patient intake: Printing, distributing, collecting, scanning, filing, and shredding medical history forms.
- Treatment plan follow-ups: Tally sheets, reminders, and phone calls that nobody enjoys making.
- Billing and incoming payments: Creating and sending invoices, checking incoming payments, and sending reminders.
How can you reduce your working hours without losing treatment time?
Working time can only be reduced without losing revenue in one area: tasks that are not patient care. Every hour of documentation, intake, or follow-up that is automated shortens your week one-to-one—without a single appointment being missed.
This is where Nelly comes in as your partner for the digital patient journey. Three components work together seamlessly:
The AI documentation listens in the background during treatment, contextually filters out medically relevant information, and creates structured documentation that you simply review and approve. The data is then automatically transferred back to your practice management system. No dictating, no typing—just treat and approve.
The AI Treatment Plan Agent handles the follow-up of treatment plans: plans are sent digitally directly from your practice management system, summarized in plain language, and patients are automatically reminded via WhatsApp. This eliminates the need for the follow-up calls that currently tie up your team week after week.
The digital patient intake moves medical history forms, privacy policies, and consent forms to your patients' smartphones, either before their appointment or via a QR code in the waiting room. Upon arrival, all documents are already available digitally. Printing, scanning, and filing are completely eliminated.
In total, automated documentation and plan follow-up can save around 40 percent of your time. Based on the six hours of bureaucracy in a typical owner's week, that’s a good two hours you get back without changing anything in your appointment book. Add in the 2.5 hours per staff member, and the impact for the entire practice is even greater.
Learn more here: https://www.getnelly.de/ki-assistenz
What working time models are available to you as a practice owner?
As a resident dentist, there are several models available to reduce your personal presence without closing the practice. Which one fits depends less on the legal structure and more on who provides treatment in your absence.
- Partial admission: According to § 19a Para. 2 of the Admission Ordinance for Contract Dentists you can limit your service mandate to half by submitting a written declaration to the admission committee. That is the formal framework—though it does not answer the economic question from the first section.
- Employed dentist: The only way to maintain treatment capacity while you treat fewer patients yourself. Factor in the additional management and administrative effort: hiring someone does not automatically shorten your work week.
- Joint practice: Two owners share fixed costs, coverage, and vacation planning. The impact on work-life balance is significant, as is the need for coordination.
- Concentrated treatment days: Three long days often provide more noticeable relief in daily life than five shortened ones. For childcare, predictable days off are usually more valuable than finishing work early.
- Fixed coverage arrangements: A binding agreement with a colleague nearby costs nothing as long as it isn't needed—and it saves your practice operations when a child gets sick.
How can you generate more revenue in fewer treatment hours?
If you want to reduce your treatment time while maintaining your surplus, you must generate the same revenue in the remaining time. Specifically: if you treat ten percent less, you need about eleven percent more revenue per treatment hour. That sounds like a lot. In most practices, exactly this potential is lying around unused.
The biggest levers:
- Reduce appointment cancellations: Every missed appointment is a paid-for but unrealized treatment hour. With reduced availability, every cancellation weighs twice as heavily because you can hardly reschedule it.
- Reduce downtime between treatments: A tighter appointment structure with a clear allocation of prophylaxis and practitioner times often achieves more than any additional hour.
- Consistently delegate tasks: Anything your team is legally permitted to handle does not belong in your treatment time.
- Increase the conversion rate of treatment plans: The most underestimated lever by far: between 50 and 70 percent of all treatment plans in practices are never implemented. Not because patients aren't interested, but because follow-up gets lost in the daily grind.
This is exactly where the dual benefit of the Nelly AI Plan Agent comes in. It relieves your team of manual follow-up while simultaneously increasing conversion: the AI creates an understandable summary of every plan in simple language, patients can sign with a single click and select their payment method, including installment options. All plans are visible to the entire team, including status, plan value, and patient assignment.
For a practice with reduced treatment time, this is the decisive calculation: you treat fewer hours—but you no longer lose revenue to plans sitting in a drawer.
Learn more about it here: https://www.getnelly.de/produkte/ki-plan-agent
How can you balance having children with running your own practice?
Balancing children and a private practice is possible, but data shows that female dentists are currently achieving this primarily by delaying the point at which they establish their practice.
At what age do female dentists open their own practice?
The Dental Practice Investment Monitor from the IDZ and apoBank provides a clear picture for 2024:
- Average age at initial practice establishment: 37.6 years for women, 35.7 years for men.
- Primary age range for starting a practice: 57.4 percent of female founders were between 35 and 44 years old.
- Early establishment: Only about 30 percent of women established their practice before the age of 35, compared to a good 40 percent of men.
For the majority of female dentists, establishing a practice falls exactly into the life phase when starting a family and childcare also take place.
Why is the establishment of a practice being delayed?
A study by the Institute of German Dentists involving 622 newly established dentists shows how closely family planning and the timing of starting a practice are linked:
- For those with children, there is a 9.9-year gap between receiving their license and establishing a practice.
- Without children, it is 6.6 years.
- 43 percent have taken at least one extended break related to pregnancy and childcare.
The gap of a good three years is primarily due to career breaks taken during employment – for many, opening their own practice only follows afterwards.
What models do female dentists with children use?
41 percent of respondents are categorized by the study into a flexibility-oriented model – predominantly female dentists with children whose family planning is complete. They specifically focus on flexible working hour models and a good work-life balance when running their own practice.
Respondents organize downtime in three ways:
- Reduced treatment hours during phases with high childcare needs.
- Practice holidays during school breaks, planned well in advance.
- Professional locum arrangements, sometimes in cooperation with colleagues from neighboring practices.
What does this mean for your practice planning?
Self-employment is not an obstacle to work-life balance, but potentially the more flexible path: you determine opening hours, appointment structures, and team composition yourself.
The only decisive factor is that your practice is economically positioned in such a way that reduced treatment time does not automatically mean reduced income. This is exactly why you need the levers from the previous sections.
Conclusion: Don't work less, work differently
Part-time work in your own dental practice rarely fails due to a lack of will, but almost always due to the cost structure. Anyone who simply cuts treatment time loses a disproportionately high amount of profit – the calculation example shows this clearly. Those who instead tackle administrative time first and simultaneously increase revenue per treatment hour regain real hours without paying the price for it.
Therefore, do not start with the appointment book, but with the question of how many hours of your week currently take place outside the treatment room. These hours are the part of your working time that you can reduce without anyone noticing – except you.
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FAQs about part-time work in a dental practice
Can I work part-time as a contract dentist?
Yes. According to Section 19a (2) of the Dental Practitioners Admission Ordinance (Zahnärzte-ZV), you can reduce your service commitment to half by submitting a written declaration to the admissions committee. However, the decisive factor from an economic perspective is not your license, but your cost structure: staff costs, rent, and depreciation continue regardless of whether you are only treating patients part-time.
How much profit do I lose by reducing my treatment hours?
A disproportionate amount. Since about nine out of ten cost items in a dental practice are fixed, any decline in revenue impacts profit almost entirely. In a model calculation based on average KZBV figures, a 20 percent reduction in treatment time lowers pre-tax surplus by nearly 60 percent.
Is working part-time as a practice owner even worth it then?
Yes, if you cut back in the right areas. Practice owners spend about six hours a week on bureaucracy rather than patient care, plus an additional 2.5 hours per employee. By reducing this share through digital processes, you can noticeably shorten your work week without losing treatment time and, consequently, revenue.
