Jaw surgery statistics: volumes, nerve injury, relapse and satisfaction

You have probably already seen the photos: a wider jaw, a sharper profile, a before-and-after caption that quietly skips the months of recovery between the two frames. Now you are searching statistics because a good angle is not the same thing as a safe operation.

The short answer is uncomfortable but useful: jaw surgery is usually successful in the sense that most patients report satisfaction, yet nerve symptoms, infection, hardware removal and skeletal relapse are not footnotes. The cleanest pooled estimate puts one-year neurosensory disturbance after sagittal split osteotomy at 21%.

This page separates what is measured from what is merely repeated online. It is not a recommendation or a clinical tool; it is a map of the evidence.

Key numbers

• 10,345 U.S. inpatient orthognathic stays were recorded in 2008, excluding day surgery. Source
• 61% of cases in a national surgical-quality database were outpatient, so inpatient totals undercount the volume. Source
• 21% of sagittal split patients had neurosensory disturbance at one year in a 2026 meta-analysis. Source
• 17.3% of patients in a Swedish registry had a postoperative infection by twelve months. Source
• 18.7% had relapse greater than 2 mm in a 2026 pooled review. Source
• 87.6% was the pooled satisfaction estimate in that review. Source
• $47,348 was a 2008 mean inpatient hospital charge, not a modern quote. Source

Table of contents

• How many jaw surgeries are done?
• Who gets jaw surgery?
• How often does the nerve stay numb?
• What else goes wrong, and how often?
• How much of the movement comes back?
• Are patients satisfied afterwards?
• Does it work for sleep apnea?
• What does it cost?
• What we could not verify

How many jaw surgeries are done?

There is no official U.S. total for jaw surgery, because the datasets count different care settings, not the whole country. The best national inpatient count is 10,345 hospital stays in 2008, which leaves out day surgery entirely.

That omission matters. In a national surgical-quality sample, 61% of 674 cases were outpatient and the mean stay was 0.9 days, so any inpatient-only number undercounts the volume. Germany recorded 11.1 procedures per 100,000 person-years, and Sweden performs 900 to 1,000 a year.

Caveat: these sources use different years, inclusion rules and care settings, so they cannot be added together.

Who gets jaw surgery?

Jaw surgery is not primarily a young man's procedure. U.S. inpatient records were 61.4% women with a mean age of 26, and another sample was split evenly by sex.

The procedure mix varies too. One analysis found 59.2% Le Fort I alone, 14.4% bilateral sagittal split osteotomy and 26.4% double-jaw surgery, while another found 48% single-jaw, 40% double-jaw and 5.5% triple-jaw. If your concern is visual rather than functional, our weak jawline guide separates skeletal structure from soft tissue.

Caveat: the pediatric-hospital dataset excludes patients under 12 and may under-represent adults in their twenties and thirties.

How often does the nerve stay numb?

Persistent sensory change is this operation's central trade-off. A 2026 meta-analysis put neurosensory disturbance at 21% one year after sagittal split osteotomy, and the Swedish registry reported 40.4% after bimaxillary surgery, 35.4% after single-jaw mandible and 15% after single-jaw maxilla surgery.

How you measure changes the answer. One review found one-year impairment of 12.8% when tested objectively and 18.4% when patients reported it, against 63.3% and 83% at one week.

The literature is uneven: 26% of studies did not state an incidence, and 36% did not test the nerve before surgery. We think the popular “less than 1%” figure does not hold for lower-lip and chin sensation.

Caveat: the Swedish registry lacked twelve-month follow-up for 55.9% of eligible patients.

What else goes wrong, and how often?

Longer follow-up catches events that a thirty-day database misses. In 674 U.S. cases there were zero deaths within 30 days, 0.7% returns to theatre, 0.7% readmissions and 4.3% any complication. At twelve months, the Swedish registry found 17.3% infection, 13.1% hardware removal and 7.5% re-operation.

For lower-jaw surgery, a 59-study meta-analysis reported 9.6% infection, 11.2% hardware removal and 2.3% bad splits per osteotomy, and a Berlin audit found transfusion in 0.6% of 669 operations.

Caveat: “complication” covers a wide range of severities and does not mean permanent disability.

How much of the movement comes back?

How much comes back depends on which movement you had. Maxillary advancement is comparatively stable, while mandibular setback and downward maxillary movement are not: up to 50% of setbacks move more than 2 mm afterwards, and up to 20% move more than 4 mm.

One framework found 80% of patients had little or no maxillary landmark change in the first year, 20% moved 2 to 4 mm and almost none moved further. A 2026 review reported 87.3% stability, with 18.7% relapsing above 2 mm.

Change can continue after the first year. Mandibular length decreased in 25% between one and five years after advancement, and a setback meta-analysis found 5.53 to 9.07 mm of planned movement and 0.2 to 2.26 mm of forward drift at one year.

Caveat: bone movement, tooth compensation and visible facial change are three different outcomes that do not always agree.

Are patients satisfied afterwards?

Most patients say they are satisfied, with rates from roughly 70% to 87%. A review of eighteen studies found nearly 15% dissatisfied, and a 2026 pooled analysis estimated 87.6% satisfaction and a 32.4% complication rate.

Satisfaction is not the same as no regret, and no verified regret rate says whether patients would do it again. Screening matters too: a 2025 meta-analysis estimated 14.5% screened positive for body dysmorphic disorder, with low certainty from five studies.

Caveat: satisfaction depends on the questionnaire, the follow-up timing and what the patient originally wanted.

Does it work for sleep apnea?

For selected obstructive sleep apnoea patients, maxillomandibular advancement works as a breathing operation. One meta-analysis found an 80.1% mean reduction in the apnoea index, 85.5% surgical success and 38.5% cured, which is a different claim from cosmetic improvement.

This was not first-line treatment: 73.5% had already failed a previous operation. Beyond eight years, the mean index was 23.1 events per hour against 53.2 before surgery.

Larger advancements cost more in sensation. Lower-facial numbness was reported in 83.40% of cases, at 66.51% before one year and 32.73% beyond it, and hardware removal reached 21.99%.

Caveat: sleep-apnoea success is a breathing metric, not an attractiveness outcome.

What does it cost?

There is no defensible cash price for jaw surgery, only published figures that measure different things.

Insurance is separate from affordability. Aetna treats orthognathic surgery for unaesthetic facial features and isolated chin surgery as cosmetic, and its functional thresholds include an overjet of 5 mm or more, though policies differ.

Caveat: one analysis linked high-volume surgeons with 40% lower odds of an extended stay and $1,484.74 lower costs, which guarantees neither a quote nor an outcome.

What we could not verify

Several widely repeated claims did not survive checking. We could not find a peer-reviewed source for “double-jaw surgery has a 90%–95% success rate,” and the literature keeps satisfaction, stability and complications separate, not one success number.

We also could not verify a U.S. total including outpatient cases: the figures are inpatient-only, children's-hospital-only, registry-participant-only or society-member-only. No regret rate was verifiable either, since searches produced dissatisfaction evidence, not a proportion who would do it again. And “permanent numbness is less than 1%” does not hold for the inferior alveolar nerve, where pooled and registry figures are higher and some sub-1% claims describe another nerve.

How to cite this page

Use: Real World Appeal, “Jaw surgery statistics: volumes, nerve injury, relapse and satisfaction,” realworldappeal.com, September 2026, complete URL. Research links sit in the text; data checked 16 September 2026.

The bottom line

Jaw surgery is neither the forum catastrophe nor the gallery transformation. Most patients report satisfaction, but one-year sensory change affects roughly one in five sagittal split patients, complications accumulate after the thirty-day window, and relapse depends on the movement.

The before-and-after photo is the one number nobody publishes a rate for. It shows a result, not the probability of getting it, keeping it, or still liking it later. If you want a free first-impression perspective, use /test, with the caveat that it is not a clinical or scientific instrument.

Sources

• Venugoplan et al. (2012). “Orthognathic surgery hospitalizations in the United States.” Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery. Linked source
• Gupta et al. (2017). “Orthognathic surgery outcomes and costs.” Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery. Linked source
• Meisgeier et al. (2025). “Orthognathic procedures in Germany.” Scientific Reports. Linked source
• Pekkari et al. (2025). “Swedish National Register for Orthognathic Surgery.” Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery. Linked source
• Knoedler et al. (2023). “Jaw surgery outcomes in ACS-NSQIP.” Journal of Clinical Medicine. Linked source
• Bertagna, Van der Cruyssen & Miloro (2026). “Neurosensory disturbance after sagittal split osteotomy.” Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery. Linked source
• Verweij et al. (2016). “Complications after bilateral sagittal split osteotomy.” Journal of Cranio-Maxillo-Facial Surgery. Linked source
• Proffit, Turvey & Phillips (2007). “The hierarchy of stability in orthognathic surgery.” Head & Face Medicine. Linked source
• Uppada, Tauro & Senthilnathan (2023). “Patient satisfaction after orthognathic surgery.” Journal of Maxillofacial and Oral Surgery. Linked source
• Ebenezer, Ganesh & Vinayagar (2026). “Outcomes after orthognathic surgery.” Frontiers in Oral Health. Linked source
• Zaghi et al. (2016). “Maxillomandibular advancement for obstructive sleep apnea.” JAMA Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery. Linked source
• Camacho et al. (2019). “Long-term outcomes after maxillomandibular advancement.” Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery. Linked source
• Aetna (2026). “Clinical Policy Bulletin Number 0095: Orthognathic Surgery.” Linked source
• American Society of Plastic Surgeons (2024). “Plastic Surgery Statistics Report.” Linked source