Teeth inflation: Here’s how much the ‘Tooth Fairy’ is leaving kids per tooth in 2025

U.S. parents currently pay their children nearly four times as much per lost tooth as in the late 1990s - but recent polls indicate that American households have started biting into the amounts kids get from the ‘Tooth Fairy’.

How much does the Tooth Fairy pay per tooth in 2025?

According to a survey conducted by Delta Dental, the average sum paid to U.S. children after the loss of a baby tooth has fallen from $5.84 in 2024 to $5.01 in 2025.

This is the second year in a row that the Tooth Fairy’s payouts have decreased in the country, per the dental benefits provider’s Original Tooth Fairy Poll. In 2024, the company says, the average price of a baby tooth slipped to $5.84 from $6.23 in 2023.

“Historically, the Original Tooth Fairy Poll has typically mirrored the economy’s overall direction, tracking with the trends of Standard & Poor’s 500 Index,” Delta Dental said in a press release issued late last month. “However, since 2023, the value of a lost tooth has gone in a different direction.”

For the purpose of its poll, Delta Dental splits the U.S. into four regions: south, west, northeast and midwest. In the latest survey, conducted across two weeks in January on 1,000 parents of children aged six to 12, the only region that witnessed an increase on 2024’s going rate was the south: from $5.51 to $5.71.

Most children’s baby teeth normally loosen and fall out from the age of six, per Elise W. Sarvas, a board-certified pediatric dentist for the Mayo Clinic. Also known as primary teeth, baby teeth drop out to make way for the child’s permanent, adult teeth. “By age 13, most children have all their adult teeth,” Sarvas says.

How much did parents pay per tooth at the end of the 1990s?

Delta Dental first began polling Americans on the amounts they give their children per lost baby tooth in 1998. At that time, parents in the U.S. were found to be paying around a quarter of today’s price: an average of $1.30 per tooth.

When did the Tooth Fairy tradition start?

As far back as the 13th century, CBS’s Jeff Wagner notes, there appears to have been a Norse tradition of parents giving children a small amount of money for their first lost baby tooth.

According to the American dental practice Advanced Children’s Dentistry, a 1908 article in the Chicago Tribune is the earliest record of U.S. kids leaving a tooth under their pillow overnight so that the Tooth Fairy - i.e. their parents - can exchange it for a reward.

Advanced Children’s Dentistry quotes the Chicago Tribune’s “Household Hints” section as saying: “Many a refractory child will allow a loose tooth to be removed if he knows about the Tooth Fairy.

“If he takes his little tooth and puts it under the pillow when he goes to bed the Tooth Fairy will come in the night and take it away, and in its place, will leave a little gift.”

In 1927, the concept’s popularity then began to grow in the U.S. when Esther Watkins Arnold released the short story The Tooth Fairy: Three-act Playlet for Children.

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