Editorial Standards

A calculator that does the math right but starts from a wrong number is still useless to you. This page covers how we keep the numbers straight: where the ranges come from, what a "not dental advice" label is actually protecting you from, and what happens the moment a reader catches an error.

Building the price ranges

Every range in the calculator, single tooth through full mouth, comes out of one pricing model we built and maintain ourselves. It starts with the three parts that make up an implant bill, the post, the abutment, and the crown, priced separately against published US fee data, then layers in multipliers for bone grafting, sinus lifts, material choice, and a ZIP-code cost adjustment. That is the entire pipeline. We do not license a syndicated pricing feed, and we do not dress our own estimate up as an outside study.

Naming a source when we use one

Anything more specific than a range, an insurer's typical reimbursement, a CareCredit deferred-interest term, a dental-school tuition discount, gets its source named in the same sentence, not tucked into a footnote near the bottom of the page. No dentist, implant manufacturer, lab, or insurer pays us to shape a figure in their favor, and no practice buys placement inside a guide.

What the disclaimer actually rules out

Naomi Foster writes every guide on this site. She has never placed an implant, taken a dental X-ray, or evaluated anyone's bone density for a living, so nothing published here tells you whether your jaw can support a same-day implant or whether you need a graft first; only a dentist or oral surgeon who has examined you can answer that. When a guide summarizes healing timelines or success-rate figures pulled from clinical literature, it says so, and it says plainly when the evidence behind a claim is thinner than we'd like.

If you spot something wrong

Use the contact page and tell us what you think the correct number or source should be. Naomi traces it back to the original source before touching anything. A stale year or a typo gets fixed quietly. A change that moves a cost range or a clinical claim gets a visible note on that page explaining what changed and why, plus a refreshed "Updated" date at the top.

Where we draw the line