OBJECTIVES: According to the burden disease calculated by Ramirez et. al. (2005), in Colombia dental cavities represented the third disease with most DALYs for both genders in all age groups. Also, the Ministry of Health and Social Protection (2012) reported that dental cavities were a leading cause of morbidity in 2011 with 1.360.619 occurrences in the health system. Because of this, we decided to determine the economic cost of dental cavities in Colombia from the third-payer and patient perspectives for year 2011. METHODS: We used the official SISPRO data to get information regarding the number of visits per patient who had dental cavities. To calculate the monetary costs, we assumed that a treatment was provided to every patient who visited the dentist according to the national dental cavities guideline, all related costs were obtained from the SOAT fare manual 2011 reported by the government. We multiplied the treatment cost for each patient by the total number of dental visits to obtain the third-payer cost. We calculated from the patient´s perspective the lost output as a result of a reduction of productivity due to dental cavities, using DALYs, multiplied by the 2011 current GDP divided by the working-age population. RESULTS: The Economic impact for 2011 was USD 67.018.016. This is the result of adding the third-payer cost of USD 56.234.161 plus the patient cost of USD 10.783.855.  CONCLUSIONS: With this first approximation to the economic impact of dental cavities the government can design cost-effective oral health policies to reduce its prevalence for Colombia’s population. The cost of dental cavities represents 0.02% of 2011 current GDP, this means that on average there is an expenditure of USD 1.46 for each Colombian citizen to treat dental cavities.  Those numbers shows the importance to generate permanent public policies to improve the Colombians´ oral health.