What UK dentists actually charge

Private dentist prices, treatment by treatment

One line per treatment: the median published price, then the range between the cheapest tenth and the dearest tenth. Open any line for the full distribution and the NHS charge for the same work.

“From £X” is not a lower price

Practices advertise 10,070 of their prices as a “from” figure, which reads like the cheap end of the market. It is not. On 13 of the 18 treatments here, the middle “from” price sits within a tenth of the middle firm price, and on 9 of them it sits above it. The word buys the practice room to quote higher after the examination, not you a discount.

What the NHS charges instead

NHS dentistry in England has three prices, whatever the work turns out to be. The obstacle is finding a practice taking NHS patients, not the charge.

Charges apply in England; Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland set their own. From nhs.uk, read on 11 August 2026.

How these prices were measured

• Every figure comes off a practice's own public fee page. Nothing is a survey, an estimate or a model.
• One price counts once per fee page. A chain's branches all carry the group's list, and counting each branch would let one price list decide the market.
• Prices written as "from £X" are counted separately, not mixed in. That figure is the cheapest case a practice leads with, and it reads the market low.
• Prices covering a whole arch or a full set of teeth are left out of a per-tooth figure, because they sit at the top of every distribution.
• Only the 10th percentile, the median and the 90th are published. The extremes of a scraped corpus are where a mis-read price lands, and no single row can move a percentile.
• Lines that name a different job are dropped per treatment. Re-cementing a crown is not the price of a crown, and an extra whitening syringe is not the price of whitening.

Questions people ask

How much does a private dentist cost in the UK?

It depends entirely on the treatment, which is why this page lists all 18 of them. A check-up has a median published price of £65, a filling £159, a crown £750 and a single implant £2,500.

Where do these prices come from?

From the practices themselves. 39,049 prices were read from 1,481 public fee pages across 983 UK practice websites on 10 August 2026. Nothing here is a survey or an estimate.

Why is the NHS charge so much lower than the private price?

The NHS charge is a fixed patient contribution set by government, not what the treatment costs to provide. It also covers a whole course of treatment rather than one item. The private figures on this site are what a practice charges per treatment.

Is a quote above the median a bad deal?

Not on its own. Half of all published prices are above the median by definition. The useful test is whether the quote clears the dearest tenth, and whether it covers the same work: materials, lab fees and follow-up appointments are where two quotes for the same treatment separate.