Wisdom-teeth removal, priced line by line from three published schedules

Nobody publishes what an American surgery charges

That is the first honest sentence on this page, and it shapes every number under it. On 24 September 2026 we searched for a free, public, primary source giving a retail United States price — an average, a band, anything — for having a tooth removed. There is none we could open and cite. Trade surveys of dental fees exist, behind membership and payment; we did not open one, so nothing from one appears here.

What is published, in full, for nothing, is the other half of the transaction: the maximum amounts public payers agree to pay a dentist for each kind of extraction. Three of those documents are read out below. Treat them as a floor under a conversation rather than as a quote. A private surgery sets its own fee, and a cash patient is very often asked for more than a state programme pays. We do not know how much more, we could not find a document that says, and inventing a multiplier would be exactly the kind of number that reads like a citation and is not one.

Three documents, seven lines

An extraction is not priced by which tooth it is. It is priced by how the tooth is sitting and how much work it takes to get it out — lifted whole, cut out, buried under gum, partly in bone, fully in bone. Wisdom teeth are the teeth most often sitting in the awkward positions, which is why the same page covers both. Each of those positions is a separate line on every schedule, and the line is chosen on the day, from the X-ray and from what the surgeon finds.

Read across any row and the spread is the story. The fully bony line is $116.81 in Illinois and $332.52 in Louisiana: the higher figure is not quite three times the lower one, for identical work described in identical words. Read down a column instead and the other story appears. In Louisiana the fully bony removal is about three times the simple one; in Illinois the gap between those two lines is $63.26.

Why one tooth has four prices on this page

Three reasons, all of them printed in the documents rather than inferred.

The state

Each programme sets its own maximums, and they are not close to each other. Nothing about the tooth changes between Springfield and Baton Rouge; the budget does.

The patient's age

Arkansas is the schedule that makes this visible, because it prints a separate row for each age group instead of one fee per code. A simple extraction is $72.20 on the adult row and $129.02 on the child row — the child line is $56.82 higher for the same words. The pattern holds along the whole series: the adult row is the lower one on every extraction line Arkansas prices.

A line that is simply missing

Illinois prices no complicated fully bony removal. We did not assume that from a gap in a table; we listed every oral-surgery code on the sheet — 36 of them — and the line is not among them, nor is the line for coronal remnants of a baby tooth. Louisiana and Arkansas both price the complicated line, at $376.41 and $306.85 respectively for an adult. When a schedule has no line for the harder version of a job, the harder version does not stop happening; it just has to be billed as something else or argued about afterwards.

Four wisdom teeth is four lines, not one price

None of the three schedules publishes a price for a case, a visit, a session or a set of four. Every one of them prices a tooth. So the only way to get from a schedule to a four-tooth figure is to multiply, and when we do that we say so.

Two warnings about that table. First, real cases are rarely four of the same thing: one tooth is often lifted out whole while another is cut out of bone, so a real bill mixes lines. Second, these remain payer maximums. The multiplication is exact; what it is exact about is what a state programme would pay, not what a private surgery would ask.

Being kept comfortable is billed separately, by the quarter-hour

This is where the arithmetic gets away from people. Sedation and general anaesthesia are not folded into the extraction line on any of these schedules. They are their own codes, and they are priced in fifteen-minute increments: one line for the first quarter of an hour, another for every quarter after it.

Two arithmetics follow from that table, and both are ours. An hour of deep sedation or a general anaesthetic comes to $1,138.48 in Illinois, because that schedule charges the same $284.62 for the first quarter-hour and for each of the three after it. The same hour in Louisiana comes to $448.24, because its first quarter-hour is $147.79 and the three that follow are $100.15 each. Neither document prints either total.

Arkansas is the odd one out again, and the absence is worth more than the figures. Its sedation lines — nitrous oxide, deep sedation, the first and subsequent anaesthesia increments, enteral sedation — appear only on child rows. There is no adult row for any of them. There is also no intravenous moderate-sedation line anywhere on the schedule, for any age: we listed all eight of its D9 codes to be sure. A schedule that prices an adult extraction but no adult sedation is telling you something about which part of the bill a patient is most likely to be handed.

What the fee is supposed to cover, and for how long

The three schedules above price the work. A fourth document, the Vermont Medicaid Dental Supplement of June 2026, is the one that says what the price is deemed to include, and we quote it for that rule rather than for its fees.

Vermont Medicaid is enforcing a 10 day global period for certain dental procedure codes. During the dental global period, any palliative treatment for pain is considered included in the payment for the primary procedure for that date and will not be reimbursed separately.

In plain terms: for ten days after the extraction, a visit whose purpose is to settle pain from that extraction is treated as already paid for. That is a payer's funding rule, not a promise any particular surgery has made to you — but it is a reasonable thing to ask about before the day, because the answer changes what a difficult week costs. The same document lists the extraction lines at a frequency of one per tooth per lifetime, which is only funny until you think about it.

Two smaller printed details worth knowing. Louisiana marks its extraction lines with a symbol meaning the claim has to name the individual tooth, so the paperwork is per tooth even when the appointment is not. And Arkansas states that it reimburses the lesser of the amount billed or its maximum, which is why a schedule maximum is a ceiling on the payer's side and never a floor under the surgery's.

Somebody has to say yes before the surgery, and it may not be you

Illinois prints a prior-approval column beside every fee, and the pattern in it is sharp. The two simplest lines — a tooth lifted out whole, and a tooth cut out — are marked as not needing approval. Every impacted-tooth line, and the line for removing leftover roots, is marked as needing it. In other words the cheap version of the surgery is waved through and the expensive version has to be argued for first, which is the opposite order from the one most people are braced for.

Louisiana handles it differently: its extraction lines carry no prior-authorisation mark at all, only the requirement to name the tooth. Its denture programme sheet, by contrast, marks the dentures themselves for prior authorisation — and that sheet is the subject of the most uncomfortable absence we found anywhere in this research. It contains 22 priced lines. We listed all of them. Not one is an extraction. An adult whose dental benefit is that programme has the denture funded and the removals that must happen first funded by nobody.

Vermont's supplement adds the third shape of limit: its adult programme is capped at $1,500 per individual per calendar year, and the benefit does not begin again until the new year starts. Pregnant adults are exempt from that cap and receive full benefits, which the document says in as many words. We have not multiplied that cap against any of the fees above, because they are other states' fees and mixing them would produce a number that looks like a finding and is not one.

If there is no coverage at all and the surgery has been quoted, a dental discount plan is one of the few levers that exists on a short timescale. They are sold by, among others, DentalPlans.com and Careington. Before buying one, two questions decide whether it is worth anything in your case: is the surgery that will do the extraction actually on that plan's list, and does the plan's fee list cover surgical extractions rather than only check-ups and cleanings. Ask the surgery first, not the plan.

What to take to the desk

1. Ask which line they expect to bill, in the code's own terms: lifted out whole, cut out, under gum, partly in bone, fully in bone. The answer sets the size of everything else.
2. Ask what happens to the price if the tooth turns out harder than the X-ray suggested, because two of these three schedules have a separate, higher line for exactly that and one of them has none at all.
3. Ask whether sedation is quoted separately and how it is timed. On these documents it is billed by the quarter-hour, and on one of them an hour of it outweighs the surgery.
4. Ask what a follow-up visit costs if the pain is worse on day three. One payer deems ten days of pain visits already paid for; your surgery may or may not work that way, and the time to find out is before.
5. Ask for the out-of-hours number, and write it somewhere that is not this website.

Once the surgery is booked, the useful reading stops being about money. The two pages people open next are when you can eat again and dry socket, or ordinary healing.