London dental charges rise as everyday access tightens further
For patients using NHS dental surgeries in London, the cost of a routine visit has risen again just as many people are still struggling to secure an appointment, after a March 2024 ministerial statement confirmed that dental patient charges in England would increase by 4% from 1 April 2024, lifting the band 1 check-up from £25.80 to £26.80 and band 2 treatment such as fillings from £70.70 to £73.50.
Over roughly the same period, analysis for Parliament’s House of Commons Library in February 2025 showed that London had the highest rate of NHS dental activity being delivered against contract, with dentists in the capital carrying out 94.7% of the work they were commissioned to do in September 2024, even as national regulators reported that overall NHS dental activity in England in 2024/25 was still around 8% below 2019/20 levels.
Survey data underline how that mix of high activity and constrained capacity feels to patients on the ground, with the GP Patient Survey published in July 2024 reporting that 69.2% of respondents across England rated their experience of NHS dental services as good in fieldwork carried out between January and March 2024, while an earlier summary of the same survey for January to March 2023 recorded that only 47% of adults in London had even tried to obtain an NHS dental appointment in the previous two years, the lowest contact rate of any English region.
Cost pressures around London surgeries are feeding into choices about where to seek care, as a UK-wide public survey for the General Dental Council in early 2024 found that 42% of people receiving private or mixed dental treatment had only started using private options in the past three years, often in response to difficulty getting NHS appointments, alongside media reporting at the end of 2024 that highlighted steep rises in private fees for common procedures compared with 2022.
Those who do reach a dentist tend to report good clinical care but uneven experiences between groups, with an Office for National Statistics bulletin in September 2024 showing that 89.5% of adults in England who had seen an NHS dentist in the previous 28 days were satisfied with the care they received, yet satisfaction among Asian or Asian British patients, at 73.9%, lagged behind the 90.5% recorded for White patients, a gap that has particular relevance for London’s diverse neighbourhoods.
Day to day, that leaves high street NHS dental surgeries in the capital juggling fixed national charge levels, local cost-of-living pressures and rising demand from people who have delayed treatment, while patients weigh up whether a £26.80 band 1 check-up or a £73.50 band 2 filling fits within stretched household budgets, or look instead to private, mixed or overseas options when they cannot find an NHS appointment close to home.
Sources: DHSC written statement on NHS dental patient charges for 2024/25; NHSBSA and CQC dental statistics for 2019/20–2024/25; House of Commons Library briefing on regional NHS dental activity delivery rates, February 2025; NHS GP Patient Survey dental results 2023 and 2024; General Dental Council public attitudes survey 2024; ONS bulletin on experiences of NHS healthcare services, September 2024; UK media reporting on private dental fees in 2024–25.
