Why does a white filling cost more?

It takes longer. The tooth must stay dry, the resin goes in in layers, and each layer is cured and shaped. Amalgam is packed in one go.

Is one NHS charge cheaper than several private fillings?

If you need three or four fillings at once, the single Band 2 charge is well below the private total. For one small filling the gap narrows.

UK price guide · read 10 August 2026

How much does a filling cost in the UK?

The median published price for a filling in the UK is £159. That is the middle of 604 prices read off the fee pages of 231 practices on 10 August 2026. One in ten publish under £90 and one in ten publish over £283.

A filling repairs a hole left by decay. White composite is bonded in and shaped in the mouth; amalgam is the silver material used on back teeth for decades. Nearly every private fee page prices white above silver.

The published market, end to end

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

£90

1 in 10 charge less

£159

Median

£283

1 in 10 charge more

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

Been quoted a price? See where it sits.

Type a figure to compare it against 604 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 filling, split by type
Type	Cheapest tenth	Median	Dearest tenth	Prices read
White composite	£105	£169	£280	320
Amalgam	£80	£114	£184	106
Large or multi-surface	£120	£215	£324	133

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. White composite costs more than amalgam on published lists.
How many surfaces of the tooth are involved. Bigger fillings are their own line.
Which tooth. Front teeth are matched for shade and sometimes priced higher.
Whether the tooth needs a lining or a build-up first.

“From £150” is not a discount. 1,159 practices advertise this treatment as a “from” price, and the middle of those headline figures is £150 against a median firm price of £159. The word buys the practice room, not you.

On the NHS

Band 2

£76.60

in England, whole course

Everything in Band 1, plus fillings, root canal treatment and extractions.

A filling is Band 2 on the NHS, one charge however many teeth are filled in the same course of treatment. Amalgam is standard on back teeth there.

Privately, the same work has a median published price of £159.

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 does a white filling cost more?: It takes longer. The tooth must stay dry, the resin goes in in layers, and each layer is cured and shaped. Amalgam is packed in one go.
Is one NHS charge cheaper than several private fillings?: If you need three or four fillings at once, the single Band 2 charge is well below the private total. For one small filling the gap narrows.

How these prices were measured

This page rests on 604 prices for a filling, 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.