New Dental Subscriber Sales: Interpreting Market Signals

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Author

Yuliya Esipov
Associate Research Director, Workplace Benefits Research
LIMRA and LOMA

March 2026

In a business landscape increasingly shaped by data, analytics have become the backbone of strategic decision making across every industry. The workplace dental benefits market is no exception. With more than two decades of LIMRA data at our disposal — thousands of data points capturing the natural surges and slowdowns of group dental sales — we are uniquely positioned to break down the core market performance trends.

Enrollment Pattern

A review of two key metrics — group size and the number of corresponding subscribers — shows that the group dental market follows a cyclical enrollment pattern. The first‑quarter effective date typically reflects the results of large employers’ fall enrollment cycle, making it a standout period for bigger groups. In contrast, small group enrollments tend to be more evenly distributed across the remaining quarters of the year. With larger employers utilizing the fall benefit enrollment cycle and driving the market during the first‑quarter effective date, it’s no surprise that more than half of all new subscribers are captured in this period. As a result, first‑quarter performance carries significant weight and often serves as a key indicator of year-end results.

To test this hypothesis, let’s narrow our lens to 2017 – 2025, a period marked by significant economic challenges caused by COVID and uneven post-pandemic recovery. This time frame offers a clear window into how performance patterns respond to underlying market dynamics. We can assess how reliably first‑quarter results predict full-year performance and whether that predictive relationship shifts when broader macroeconomic forces intervene.

For this task, we examined the relationship between first‑quarter sales and year-end new subscriber sales from 2017 to 2024. We then applied the historical relationship between first-quarter and year-end results to estimate the projected year-end sales for 2025, using the first-quarter 2025 new subscriber results as the basis for the forecast. Across the 2017 – 2024 period, the data reveal a consistent pattern: With the notable exception of 2020, year-end new subscriber totals are overwhelmingly determined by first‑quarter performance. Subsequent quarterly swings rarely alter the trajectory established in the first quarter, underscoring the outsized influence of first-quarter sales.

The atypical pattern observed in 2020 is consistent with expectations tied to the enrollment cycle described above. This cycle sees most high‑volume activity tied to first‑quarter effective dates, but the groundwork —planning, contracting, underwriting, budgeting, and operational prep — is laid in the preceding quarter. From this perspective, both employer group activity and new subscriber counts had already begun to slow during the 2019 fall enrollment period — well before the onset of the pandemic. This suggests that the market was entering a consolidation phase independent of the pandemic.

The pandemic disproportionately affected small businesses, and the overall 2020 new subscriber growth failed to keep pace with the expected curve. Absent the pandemic, 2020 year-end results would likely have resembled the patterns seen in 2017 – 2018 and would have represented a reset from the robust growth of the first quarter of 2019.

Viewed through these lenses, the first‑quarter 2025 performance aligns with that same consolidation pattern. The 7% decline in new group dental subscribers represents a meaningful pullback from the unusually strong start in the prior year, which saw a 15% increase. In other words, the early 2025 decline reflects cyclical normalization rather than fundamental market contraction.

Conclusion

When we bring all the elements that we discussed together, we can reliably conclude that the first‑quarter new subscriber sales serve as a dependable foundation for forecasting year‑end performance. The stability of this relationship is not incidental. It reflects a recurring pattern in the enrollment cycle, in which early-year activity reliably sets the trajectory for the months that follow, driven by the large employer fall benefit enrollment cycle that precedes it. Moreover, with the incorporation of the currently available third-quarter 2025 data, the strength and clarity of this linear relationship become even more materially pronounced.

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