What Dentistry Can Learn from Veterinary and Optometry in Canada’s Private Healthcare Market
Dentistry, veterinary medicine, and optometry share more in common than many realize. All three professions are predominantly private healthcare professions in Canada. All three rely on regulated clinicians, privately funded facilities, and fee-for-service models that sit largely outside the public healthcare system. And all three have attracted increasing attention from private equity (PE) and institutional buyers.
Yet despite these similarities, the way each profession performs financially — and the risks and opportunities facing practice owners — differs in important ways. Understanding these differences helps us better assess where our profession sits today and where it may be headed.
Operational Differences
Dentistry remains almost entirely funded by private pay and third-party insurance, with limited but expanding public coverage. Veterinary medicine is overwhelmingly private pay, with pet insurance growing but still secondary. Optometry occupies a hybrid position: some medically necessary services may be publicly funded, but most revenue flows through private insurance and out-of-pocket spending.
For all three, this private-pay structure creates flexibility and upside, but also exposes practices to consumer behaviour and economic conditions.
Veterinary practices derive revenue from pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, and pet care products. Optometry combines clinical services with optical retail, including eyewear and contact lenses. Dentistry, by comparison, remains more centred on treatment delivery itself.
This distinction matters. Product-driven revenue can enhance margins, but it also increases sensitivity to economic cycles — something dentists are somewhat insulated from relative to optometry. We may face challenges with increasing saturation but much of what we do remains recession resistant because of its necessity.
What the Market Values
Across private healthcare businesses, buyers and lenders tend to focus on the same fundamentals:
- Predictable cash flow
- Sustainable profit margins
- Competition and saturation
- Practice operations and lender risk
- Cost of borrowing
- Long-term trajectory of the profession
- The role of consolidation and PE
Profit margins after overhead and clinician compensation of roughly 20% are considered healthy across dentistry, veterinary, and optometry. The difference is not whether these margins are achievable — it is how consistently they can be maintained.
Dentistry’s greatest strength is the routine, non-discretionary nature of care. Hygiene, diagnostics, restorative treatment, and recall programs create steady demand that persists regardless of economic conditions. While certain elective care fluctuates, the core of dentistry remains essential healthcare.
This consistency supports predictable cash flow and explains why dentistry continues to attract strong buyer demand from both PE groups and hands-on owner-operators. As mentioned earlier, among the three professions, dentistry achieves strong margins more consistently, largely because revenue is driven by care delivery rather than discretionary retail products.
Veterinary: Demand Exceeds Supply
Veterinary medicine currently operates in a different environment. Pet ownership has increased, and clients are more willing to spend on animal health, but the supply of veterinarians has not kept pace. This undersupply supports utilization and pricing power, contributing to strong and consistent profitability. At the same time, veterinary practices face real operational constraints. Recruitment and retention of veterinarians and staff remain significant challenges, limiting growth even when demand is strong.
Optometry: Solid Care, Variable Retail
Optometry delivers essential clinical services, particularly for an aging population. However, profitability is more heavily influenced by optical retail. Eyewear and contact lenses are more discretionary and face growing competition from opticians, online platforms, and big-box retailers. As a result, optometry remains a strong profession clinically, but profit consistency is less predictable than in dentistry.
Private Equity and Consolidation
Although the data is not widely available, it seems that private equity participation varies across the three professions in and around 10 – 15% of the market for dentistry, 15% for veterinary practices, and roughly 5 – 10% of optometry practices.
Dentistry faces a unique challenge: strong profitability alongside increasing competition, especially in urban centres. Higher dentist density and declining patient-to-dentist ratios have created localized saturation. This puts pressure on fees, marketing spend, and margins for practices that are not operationally optimized. Veterinary medicine faces undersupply rather than saturation. Optometry sits somewhere in between, with regional variation and competitive pressure concentrated in optical retail.
Rising borrowing costs have sharpened these realities. Today, lenders and buyers care less about headline revenue and more about how efficiently and consistently care is delivered when evaluating risk.
The outlook for Canadian dental practices remains very strong. Consolidation is here to stay, but owner-operators remain highly competitive and everpresent. Not every seller wants to commit to the requirements of an investor buyer. Further, there are hundreds to thousands of dentists out there whose dream to own their own practice one day is but one practice away from being realized.
