Why the tooth fairy’s going rate swung 17% in a year

By Eric, KindHow founder · Last reviewed August 2026

The short answer

Delta Dental’s own Original Tooth Fairy Poll reports the national average rising from $5.01 to $5.84 — a 17% jump in a single year — and its own methodology note explains why a swing like that is expected, not alarming: it’s a survey of 1,000 parents with a stated margin of error, not a census of every pillow in the country. sourced A national number moving 17% is well inside what sampling noise alone can produce. The regional breakdowns move far more, because each one is a smaller slice of the same 1,000 people.

The numbers, in the poll’s own words

Delta Dental states the survey’s own methodology directly: sourced

Conducted “between Jan. 5, 2026 and Jan. 15, 2026, among 1,000 parents of children ages 6 to 12. The margin of error is +/- 3%.”

And its headline finding for this year’s national average:

“the average value of a single lost tooth during the past year increased by 17% from $5.01 to $5.84.”

The four published regions moved by even more, in both directions: sourced

• Midwest — $5.27, up 52% year over year.
• Northeast — $6.45, up 41%.
• West — $5.99, up 5%.
• South — $5.89, up 3%.

Why the swings are the poll, not the price

A ±3% margin of error on the full 1,000-parent sample already means the national figure can wander by a few percent from wave to wave without anything real changing. Split those same 1,000 parents four ways by region and each regional figure is resting on roughly a quarter of the sample — a smaller group means a wider real margin of error, even though Delta Dental only publishes the one figure for the whole poll. house judgment— the sample size and national margin of error are the poll’s own; explaining why a quartered sample swings harder is statistical reasoning we’re applying to it, not a regional margin of error Delta Dental itself publishes.

The national figure’s own recent history makes the same point. Delta Dental’s published run goes $6.23 (2023) → $5.84 (2024) → $5.01 (2025) → $5.84 (2026). sourcedThat’s a fall of about 20% followed by a rise of 17%, landing back almost exactly where it started three years earlier. Consumer prices did not fall 20% and then climb 17% over that span — a poll bouncing around a real, slower-moving average did.

What this doesn’t mean

• It doesn’t mean the poll is unreliable or shouldn’t be trusted.A ±3% margin of error on 1,000 respondents is a normal, well-disclosed limitation for a poll of this size — the issue is reading a single year’s wobble as a trend, not the poll itself.
• It doesn’t mean the long-run trend is fake.Delta Dental’s own figures show a real rise from $1.30 in 1998 to $5.84 now — a 349% increase well ahead of general inflation over that span. Noise explains a single year’s swing; it doesn’t explain three decades of the same direction.
• It doesn’t mean the regional figures are useless.They’re still the only regional tooth-fairy data published anywhere — just noisier than the national number, and worth reading as a rough regional lean rather than a precise local average.

Sources

• Delta Dental — 2026 Original Tooth Fairy Poll — the national and regional figures, sample size and margin of error quoted above.
• Delta Dental — tooth fairy poll figures and history — the run of national averages back to 1998.

Informational only. This guide reports Delta Dental’s published poll figures and methodology and labels our own statistical reasoning as ours. It has no view on what your household should actually leave under a pillow. Last reviewed: August 2026.

More on how KindHow separates a source from a house call: the published methodology. Every guide is listed on the guides index.