Dentistry was one of the first industries to be reshaped by 3D printing in healthcare, and most patients never noticed. A decade ago, virtually no dental practice owned a printer; today, one in seven does.
Scott Dunham, VP of research at AM Research, has spent over a decade tracking the numbers. He also has family ties to two dental practices in Kentucky, which gives him, as he put it, “a little look behind the scenes.” He presented findings from the firm’s 2025 market study at our AMA: Healthcare 2025 conference, drawing on what is now the eighth edition of one of AM Research’s longest-running reports.
The industry he describes has moved past adapting general-purpose printers for dental use and is now deep into building tools for specific types of care, iterating on what already exists rather than launching new categories. That might read as the market slowing down. Dunham does not see it that way.
“The innovation cycle is really strong,” he said. “We’re really getting into a new phase of that cycle where we’re getting into mature, care-specific solutions. These companies are really putting in a lot of effort to help dental care overall.”
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The Shifting Economics of Dental 3D Printing
AM Research puts the global dental 3D printing market at roughly $5.2 billion as of 2024, with a forecast approaching $10 billion by 2033. Most of that value today flows from laboratories and production centres printing parts at volume on behalf of other businesses, and that will remain true.
But the gap between lab-based and in-office printing is narrowing faster than most expected, with around 15% of dental practices in the United States now owning and operating a 3D printer on site.
“The penetration rate, there’s still lots of room for growth,” Dunham said. “It’s not crazy high but certainly 15% is very respectable, especially compared to a decade ago.”
Nothing illustrates the pace of that growth more starkly than what has happened to the price of entry. In 2015, accounting for jetting systems and large SLA machines, the average selling price of a dental 3D printer sat around $65,000. Today it is just over $10,000, and for the photopolymerization printers that now dominate the category, the drop has been even steeper, falling by more than half over the same period.
“A lot more of the market has been able to be served by what once was a very expensive system,” Dunham said. “We’re getting the same level of value and production throughput and quality in much less expensive systems. We’re able to point to the dental sector specifically and say additive manufacturing technologies can revolutionise entire industries and they can become significantly cheaper and better. It just takes time.”
The materials market reflects the same trajectory. UV-curable resins account for around 89% of the value of dental 3D printing materials sold today, covering everything from the thermoforming moulds used to shape clear aligners to denture bases to temporary restorations.
Ceramic and filled composite resins make up a smaller slice, used for permanent and semi-permanent crowns and bridges where material consumption is low but margins are high. Metals, primarily cobalt chrome and titanium, sit at a modest share and are expected to hold somewhere between 6 and 9% through the forecast period.
Clinical Ambition Meets the Workforce Crunch
Within those materials, the activity breaks down across three treatment areas that Dunham uses to organise the market: orthodontics, prosthodontics, and implantology. By sheer volume of printed parts, orthodontics leads, driven almost entirely by the clear aligner market.
But prosthodontics, covering crowns, bridges, and dentures, becomes far more significant when you shift from counting parts to counting the revenue generated by laboratories printing on behalf of other businesses. It is also where some of the most technically ambitious work is concentrated right now.
The denture space in particular has drawn serious investment. 3D Systems has developed a monolithic denture solution combining their NextDent 300 3D printer with materials for both the denture base and the teeth, producing an entire denture set in one continuous piece.
Stratasys is pursuing something similar, and a company called Meyerson has also been involved. Most of this work is built around jetting technology, though some companies in the traditional vat photopolymerization space are attempting it too, which Dunham described as technically complex and worth watching.
“This is really driving a lot of interest on the prosthodontics side,” Dunham said. “It’s in the early stages of adoption, but this is really going to take dentures in general to a whole new level, not just within the context of 3D printing but within the context of dental care. These are really exciting.”
The aligner market tells a similar story of a technology being pushed well past its original ceiling. Carbon, which built its dental presence largely around aligner thermoforming moulds, recently introduced Lucentra, a combination of new materials, hardware tweaks, and software changes that produces aligners that are optically cleaner and have improved properties over what came before. It is incremental by design, and that is precisely the point.
“The base is there,” Dunham said. “Now we’re getting into even more automated and better dental parts through this kind of development process.”
What is also driving this push has nothing to do with clinical ambition. “Labour shortages, changing demographics within the workforce, this has really become one of the main driving factors,” Dunham said. “Automated and digitised production processes, 3D printing is really kind of the leading area of that today.”
Formlabs has leaned into this directly with a version of its Form 4 3D printer bundled with hardware that automates significant portions of the post-print process, reducing the number of hands needed to keep a lab running.
It is a telling sign of where the pressure points are in an industry that, for all its technical progress, is still asked to do more with less, and it colours the way Dunham responds to a comparison that comes up often in this space.
Craniomaxillofacial (CMF) surgery is frequently held up as the area where additive manufacturing has gone deepest in healthcare, and dentistry is often asked why, despite its head start, it has not gone as far. Dunham thinks the comparison misses something important about what dental care is actually up against.
“There’s more competition that we’re fighting against,” he said. “CMF is very significant and very serious in most cases, whereas dental care has a routine element to it as well, and a cosmetic element.”
Subtractive digital processes, milling and machining, have been embedded in dental labs for years and are not going anywhere. In CMF, additive largely stands alone. In dentistry, it has to earn its place every time.
That tension, between what 3D printing can do and what incumbent processes already do well enough, is probably the most honest way to understand where the dental market sits right now. The growth is real, the technology is genuinely improving, and the economics have shifted dramatically in a decade. What the next decade will test is whether the clinical outcomes catch up with the hardware.
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