Dental Patient Financing Platforms: A Buyer's Guide

Dental patient financing is one of the highest-leverage revenue tools available to a practice right now—and one of the most underused. According to Synchrony-funded research, average treatment acceptance hovers around 47% across the industry, and 63% of patients say they’d move forward with care if a payment plan were on the table. Synchrony, as the issuer of CareCredit, has a commercial interest in financing adoption—but the directional finding is consistent with broadly reported industry experience. That gap is recoverable revenue sitting in your schedule.

This guide is for practice owners, DSO administrators, and office managers evaluating financing platforms. It covers how the business model works, what the real costs look like, and how to compare the two platforms that dominate most shortlists.

Why the Numbers Make This Urgent

National dental expenditure reached $189 billion in 2024, per the ADA Health Policy Institute—but out-of-pocket spending is rising faster than private insurance coverage. Private dental insurance spending grew just 2.3% from 2023 to 2024; patient out-of-pocket spending grew 3.3%. At the same time, 13% of the U.S. population reported cost barriers to dental care in 2023, compared to only 4–5% for other healthcare services.

The pressure hits practices from both sides. According to a DentistryIQ analysis, reimbursement rates have lagged significantly behind inflation in recent years—though readers should note that DentistryIQ articles reflect editorial analysis rather than primary research, and the underlying methodology for any specific figures cited in that piece is not independently documented. Overhead is up, collections are harder, and the patients who most need care are the most likely to walk away from a treatment plan. A Synchrony-funded study found that 92% of respondents would consider delaying dental treatment due to rising costs—and nearly 44% of those who skipped a recommended procedure said it led to additional dental problems down the line. As with the acceptance-rate figures above, these findings come from research commissioned by a vendor with a financial stake in the results, and should be weighed accordingly alongside independent sources.

None of this means financing is a silver bullet. It’s a tool. Used well, it converts accepted-but-unpaid treatment plans into scheduled appointments and same-week payments. Ignored, it quietly allows accounts receivable to age past 90 days—a point at which, per industry convention cited in Dental Economics, collection probability drops meaningfully. Note that the specific benchmark figure often cited (below 50% collection probability past 90 days) appears in practitioner-facing editorial content rather than a formal peer-reviewed study; treat it as a widely referenced rule of thumb rather than a precisely validated statistic.

Understanding the Cost Structure

Before choosing a platform, understand what you’re actually paying. The two main models are:

Dependent (third-party) financing — The patient applies for a credit product through a third-party lender (CareCredit, Sunbit). The lender pays the practice directly, often within one to two business days, and takes on all repayment risk. Practices pay a “discount fee” of roughly 6–8% of the transaction value. That fee is higher for longer promotional periods (0% for 12 months costs more than 0% for six).

In-house payment plans — The practice collects installments directly, often via recurring ACH or card-on-file. No discount fee, but you absorb all default risk and the administrative overhead. This model works for high-trust, established patient relationships, not as a scalable front-desk tool.

Credit card processing, by comparison, runs 2.5–3.0% in dentistry. Third-party financing costs roughly twice as much—but the trade-off is immediate payment and zero collections exposure. Whether that’s worth it depends on your current AR aging and average case size. For practices with large restorative or implant cases ($3,000+), the math usually favors a financing partner.

The Two Platforms Worth Evaluating

For most practices, the real decision is between CareCredit and Sunbit. They’re not the same product.

CareCredit (Synchrony)

CareCredit has operated in dental financing for more than 35 years and is accepted by over 285,000 healthcare providers—including, per Synchrony’s own figures, roughly 80% of U.S. dental practices. That ubiquity matters: many patients already carry the card or have used it elsewhere.

The platform’s biggest recent development is PMS integration. CareCredit is now the preferred financing solution across Planet DDS platforms (Denticon and Cloud 9), and through a partnership with Intelibly, it can surface a financing invitation the moment a patient requests or schedules an appointment—well before they’re sitting in the chair. Patients can check pre-qualification with no hard credit pull, and practices receive payment in as little as two business days.

Synchrony reports over 40 active integrations with healthcare software vendors. If your practice software is already in that network, setup friction is low. If it isn’t, you’re likely looking at a standalone card workflow—functional, but less streamlined than a native integration.

Sunbit

Sunbit is the faster-growing challenger: over 10,000 dental practices in roughly three years, by the company’s own account. Its buy-now-pay-later model lets patients finance $50 to $20,000 over 6 to 72 months via a 30-second application with no hard credit check. Sunbit reports an approval rate above 85%—a figure that makes the tool practical as a routine offer to every patient at checkout, not just the ones who look like they’ll qualify.

When a patient is approved, the practice receives immediate payment. Sunbit owns the repayment relationship entirely. Sunbit’s own marketing materials highlight one DSO, Areo Dental Group, as a case study: the vendor reports that the group treated 551 additional patients in a year using Sunbit, achieved an 88% approval rate, and generated over $775,000 in incremental revenue. These figures are vendor-reported, have not been independently verified, and should be treated as illustrative of the platform’s potential rather than audited outcomes—but they are consistent with the approval-rate math Sunbit publishes more broadly.

The most relevant integration for practices evaluating modern PMS stacks is Sunbit’s connection to CareStack, which surfaces financing options inside the scheduler, treatment planning module, and checkout—without requiring staff to leave the software. Automatic ledger updates on approval remove a manual step that often gets skipped.

PMS Integration Is Now the Deciding Factor

Both platforms work as standalone card or app-based products. But the real efficiency gain—and the trend defining purchasing decisions in 2025—is financing that lives inside your practice management workflow. If you’re also evaluating your broader tech stack, see our guide to the best dental practice management software for context on which PMS platforms currently have the deepest financing hooks.

Practices that haven’t integrated financing into their scheduling and checkout flows are leaving a workflow gap that costs both time and case acceptance. Text-to-pay is a related signal: one cited example saw a practice collect more than $350,000 within two hours of a bulk text campaign. Payment friction at every touchpoint—appointment confirmation, checkout, post-visit billing—compounds over time.

How to Choose

If your practice already uses a PMS in Synchrony’s integration network and your patient base skews toward patients who may already hold a CareCredit card, CareCredit is the path of least resistance. The brand recognition and existing patient familiarity are real advantages.

If you’re running a high-volume general or restorative practice where front-desk confidence in approval rates matters—or if you want to offer financing to patients across the credit spectrum without staff having to triage who’s “likely to qualify”—Sunbit’s approval rate and no-hard-credit-check model gives your team a cleaner script.

Practices doing both high-volume general dentistry and larger elective cases sometimes run both. That’s a legitimate strategy, not just hedging. The administrative overlap is minimal when both tools are integrated into the PMS, and different patient profiles respond to different products.

What you shouldn’t do: rely on “we offer CareCredit” as a passive sign in the waiting room. Financing that isn’t embedded in the treatment presentation and checkout workflow, with staff trained to offer it consistently, generates a fraction of the lift of an active, integrated program.