Is a private crown better than an NHS one?

The difference is choice of material rather than quality of work. Privately you can pick an all-ceramic crown for a back tooth; on the NHS, metal is the standard there.

How much is a crown on a front tooth?

Front teeth are done in ceramic to match the neighbours, so the ceramic figure above is the one to use rather than the overall median.

Why did my dentist quote more than the median?

Published prices run £485 to £1,150, so a quote above the median is common rather than wrong. Ask which material it is and whether a post or build-up is included, since those are the two lines that move it.

UK price guide · read 10 August 2026

How much does a dental crown cost in the UK?

The median published price for a crown in the UK is £750. That is the middle of 619 prices read off the fee pages of 303 practices on 10 August 2026. One in ten publish under £485 and one in ten publish over £1,150.

A crown is a cap made in a lab and cemented over a tooth that has broken or been weakened, often after a root canal. The material decides the price, and the lab bill inside that price is why a practice cannot discount it far.

The published market, end to end

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

£485

1 in 10 charge less

£750

Median

£1,150

1 in 10 charge more

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

Been quoted a price? See where it sits.

Type a figure to compare it against 619 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 crown, split by type
Type	Cheapest tenth	Median	Dearest tenth	Prices read
Ceramic, zirconia or E-max	£575	£745	£952	203
Porcelain bonded to metal	£450	£600	£849	87
Metal or gold	£450	£695	£1,080	160

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

The material. All-ceramic, zirconia and E-max sit above porcelain bonded to metal on most published lists.
Which tooth. A front tooth has to be matched to the ones beside it, and some practices charge more for that.
Whether the tooth needs a post or a build-up first. Both appear as separate lines.
Same-day milled crowns, which some practices price above the lab-made version.

“From £774” is not a discount. 1,010 practices advertise this treatment as a “from” price, and the middle of those headline figures is £774 against a median firm price of £750. The word buys the practice room, not you.

On the NHS

Band 3

£332.10

in England, whole course

Everything in Bands 1 and 2, plus crowns, bridges and dentures.

A crown on the NHS is Band 3. NHS crowns on back teeth are usually metal, and a tooth-coloured crown may not be offered at that charge.

Privately, the same work has a median published price of £750.

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

Is a private crown better than an NHS one?: The difference is choice of material rather than quality of work. Privately you can pick an all-ceramic crown for a back tooth; on the NHS, metal is the standard there.
How much is a crown on a front tooth?: Front teeth are done in ceramic to match the neighbours, so the ceramic figure above is the one to use rather than the overall median.
Why did my dentist quote more than the median?: Published prices run £485 to £1,150, so a quote above the median is common rather than wrong. Ask which material it is and whether a post or build-up is included, since those are the two lines that move it.

How these prices were measured

This page rests on 619 prices for a crown, 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.