Why is a private extraction so much more than the NHS charge?

The NHS charge is a fixed contribution set by government, not the cost of the work. Privately, the same treatment sits at a median of £215 across 269 practices, and it covers one tooth rather than a course of treatment.

How much is a surgical extraction?

Fee pages that separate simple from surgical put the surgical price well above the simple one. The split is shown above, measured on the practices that publish both.

UK price guide · read 10 August 2026

How much does a tooth extraction cost in the UK?

The median published price for having a tooth taken out in the UK is £215. That is the middle of 522 prices read off the fee pages of 269 practices on 10 August 2026. One in ten publish under £110 and one in ten publish over £450.

A simple extraction lifts out a tooth that is fully through the gum. A surgical extraction cuts the gum to reach a tooth that is broken at the gum line or still buried, and every fee page that separates the two prices the surgical one higher.

The published market, end to end

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

£110

1 in 10 charge less

£215

Median

£450

1 in 10 charge more

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

Been quoted a price? See where it sits.

Type a figure to compare it against 522 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 tooth, split by type
Type	Cheapest tenth	Median	Dearest tenth	Prices read
Simple extraction	£108	£164	£295	133
Surgical extraction	£180	£300	£497	166
Molar	£130	£208	£450	32

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

Simple or surgical. The two are separate lines on most published fee lists.
Which tooth. Molars have more roots and cost more than an incisor on the fee pages that break it down.
Who does it. A referral to an oral surgeon prices above the practice's own dentist.
Whether the socket is filled after. Socket preservation is billed on top where it is offered.

“From £200” is not a discount. 872 practices advertise this treatment as a “from” price, and the middle of those headline figures is £200 against a median firm price of £215. 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.

An extraction on the NHS is Band 2, one charge however many teeth come out in the same course of treatment.

Privately, the same work has a median published price of £215.

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 is a private extraction so much more than the NHS charge?: The NHS charge is a fixed contribution set by government, not the cost of the work. Privately, the same treatment sits at a median of £215 across 269 practices, and it covers one tooth rather than a course of treatment.
How much is a surgical extraction?: Fee pages that separate simple from surgical put the surgical price well above the simple one. The split is shown above, measured on the practices that publish both.

How these prices were measured

This page rests on 522 prices for having a tooth taken out, 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.