No one likes going to the dentist, but unless you want to spend your life dealing with cavities, visiting the DDS should probably rank with death and taxes as inevitable.
Trips to the dentists are not known for being cheap either. Braces, root canals and crowns can set consumers back a pretty penny, even with insurance factored in. But the amount is by no means uniform across the country.
The experts at CareerTrends, a career research site by Graphiq, analyzed where trips to the dentist are the most costly. To do this, they used 2016 data from the Council for Community and Economic Research, which tracks cost of living differences across U.S. urban areas (defined as significant cities with a population over 50,000). Credio ranked each city by how much a trip to the dentist costs on average, also including the average cost of toothpaste and the dentists per 100,000 people for each city's county.
Unsurprisingly, dental work was most costly in cities in isolated Alaska, where toothpaste is an imported commodity and there aren't many dentists per capita. But the high cost of toothpaste didn't always coincide with the high cost of a dentist visit. In spite of being one of the largest cities in the world, New York City has the highest average cost of toothpaste in the ranking ($4.49), but only ranks as the No. 12 most costly city to visit the dentist. Middlesex-Monmouth, New Jersey, on the other hand, has an average cost of toothpaste of only $2.14, but ranks No. 13.
