Why pay privately when the NHS charge is lower?

Because a great many practices are not taking new NHS patients. The private figure is what you pay when the alternative is a waiting list.

Is a new patient exam worth the extra?

It is longer and usually includes X-rays and a written treatment plan. Practices publish the two prices separately, and the difference is shown above.

UK price guide · read 10 August 2026

How much does a dental check-up cost in the UK?

The median published price for a dental check-up in the UK is £65. That is the middle of 1,099 prices read off the fee pages of 641 practices on 10 August 2026. One in ten publish under £40 and one in ten publish over £100.

A check-up is the examination itself. A first visit takes longer than a recall and costs more nearly everywhere, and X-rays are usually a separate line on the same fee page.

The published market, end to end

Every practice that publishes a price for a dental check-up is one tick on this line. Where the ticks bunch up is where the market agrees.

£40

1 in 10 charge less

£65

Median

£100

1 in 10 charge more

Each tick is one hundredth of the published market, for one appointment.

Been quoted a price? See where it sits.

Type a figure to compare it against 1,099 published prices.

Check a quote against any of the 18 treatments

What the range covers

Two quotes that look far apart are often two different treatments. These are the splits practices price separately, measured on the same fee pages.

Published prices for one appointment, split by type
Type	Cheapest tenth	Median	Dearest tenth	Prices read
New patient examination	£50	£75	£125	390
Routine examination	£40	£65	£99	807

A price can appear in more than one row where a practice names both, so the rows do not sum to the total.

What moves the price

New patient or returning. The first appointment is the dearer one.
Whether X-rays are included.
Whether the practice runs a plan, which bundles the exam into a monthly fee.
The dentist's seniority, where a practice lists more than one rate.

“From £65” is not a discount. 93 practices advertise this treatment as a “from” price, and the middle of those headline figures is £65 against a median firm price of £65. The word buys the practice room, not you.

On the NHS

Band 1

£27.90

in England, whole course

Examination, diagnosis and advice, plus X-rays and a scale and polish if the dentist decides you need one.

An NHS check-up is the Band 1 charge, which also covers X-rays and a scale and polish if the dentist decides you need one. Finding a practice taking NHS patients is the real obstacle, not the price.

Privately, the same work has a median published price of £65.

NHS charges apply in England; Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland set their own. Figures from nhs.uk, read on 11 August 2026.

What England, Wales and Scotland each charge for this

Questions people ask

Why pay privately when the NHS charge is lower?: Because a great many practices are not taking new NHS patients. The private figure is what you pay when the alternative is a waiting list.
Is a new patient exam worth the extra?: It is longer and usually includes X-rays and a written treatment plan. Practices publish the two prices separately, and the difference is shown above.

How these prices were measured

This page rests on 1,099 prices for a dental check-up, part of 39,049 prices read from 1,481 fee pages across 983 UK practice websites on 10 August 2026.

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.