Answer · The Practice
What should chiropractic overhead look like?
Before a target percentage, know the three lines that usually dominate.
Doctors ask for a healthy overhead number. Useful stewardship starts simpler: in most practices, the three largest expense categories are staff, marketing, and rent. If those three are unclear, a single “overhead %” will not tell you what to fix.
This page is category literacy: enough to see your practice more honestly. Model-specific ranges, staffing design, and what “healthy” means for your numbers belong in a coaching conversation, not a public formula.
Category 1
Staff salaries
Usually the largest line, and the easiest to misread if you only look at take-home pay.
- Chiropractic assistants
- Office manager
- Associate doctor
- Contract and temporary help
- Bookkeeping
- Payroll taxes and benefits
Category 2
Marketing & promotion
Not only ads. Internal and external events belong here too: the spend that builds lifetime value.
- Screenings
- Print and radio
- Internal event cost
- External event cost
Category 3
Rent
Fixed, visible, and often treated as destiny. It only makes sense relative to the model the space is meant to serve.
- Facility / lease cost for the practice
What this is not
It is not a published scoreboard of “good” percentages. Those targets only help when they sit beside your model, collections, and calling, and when someone can help you interpret them without turning stewardship into anxiety.
Marketing spend is one of these three categories. If that line is the one keeping you up at night, start with the three legs of the marketing stool, then come back to overhead as a whole.