The Top 10 (and Bottom 5) Cities for Dental Lab Technicians in 2022

AUREMAR / STOCK.ADOBE.COM

If the Internet has given us nothing else, we can at least be entertained for the seemingly never ending supply of top 10 lists it provides. Some lists are, of course, better than others.If there’s a topic out there that you’re interested in, you can be reasonably certain that there is a top 10 list to support it. The best lists have some sort of objectivity – that is, they are not just lists reflecting one person’s opinion. That is what we strive for in our annual top 10 cities for dental lab technicians.

We started by looking at the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’s data which gave us the top-earning cities in America. But the cost of living varies depending where in the country one lives. For instance, things like food, housing, and discretionary spending are more expensive in San Francisco, California than they are inCharleston, West Virginia. As such, we added the AdvisorSmith Cost of Living Index as a factor in the calculations.

However, there is more to life than just making money (nationwide, dental lab technicians earned an average of $39,090 in 2021). That’s when we started adding such factors as overall economy, public safety and so forth.

Our complete list of metrics is:

• Annual Wage
• Cost of Living Index (this is a ratio comparing the cost of living in a certain area to the national average. Some areas are more expensive to live in than others, so the lower the COLI, the less expensive it is to live in an area.)
• 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 a total of75,200 dental lab technicians in 2020.

In addition to BLS, we refined our rankings from personal finance website Wallethub.com, U.S. News & World Reports’s Healthiest Communities study, and data from Centers for Disease Control for life expectancy, by state.

We compiled all the rankings and then honed the list from there. Whoever got the lowest score earned the highest position on the list; whoever got the highest score, well, we talk about them also.

With no further ado…

Top Ten

Bottom Five

With any top 10 list, there is a natural inclination to ask, “If those are the best places to live and work, where are the worst?” We scrolled to the end of the list to present the following: