Type “dental implants cost” into a search bar and you get a fog of figures, each one quoted as if it settled the matter, and none of them telling you what is actually inside it. So here is the whole story, from the dentist’s side of the chair: what a single implant costs today, what the money buys, and the handful of things that move the number up or down for your mouth.
How much does a dental implant cost in the UK?
At Designer Smiles in Solihull, a single implant with its crown starts from £1,700 on today’s fee guide. The figure for your own mouth depends mostly on your bone: a 3D scan shows whether there is enough to hold the implant, and building it up first is priced separately. The consultation is free.
Here is every line of the fee guide that touches an implant, as it stands today:
| What it is | Today’s price |
|---|---|
| Implant consultation | Free, held with a refundable deposit |
| CBCT scan, the 3D x-ray the plan is built from | £125 |
| Single implant, including the crown | From £1,700 |
| Bone grafting, where the bone is thin | From £350 |
| Sinus grafting, per sinus | £1,150 |
| The alternative: a bridge, per unit | From £400 |
| The alternative: an acrylic denture, per jaw | From £332.10 |
Now, a table answers “how much” and leaves “why” hanging, and the why is the interesting part. So let’s open the thing up.
What are you actually paying for?
Think of a fence post. You could push a post into soft earth and it would stand there, more or less, until the first windy night. Or you could dig a hole, set the post in concrete, wait for the concrete to go hard, and then hang the panel. The second fence costs more, takes longer, and stays up for decades.
An implant is the second fence. The post is a small titanium screw placed in your jaw where the tooth’s root used to be. The concrete is your own bone, which grows onto the titanium over the following months until the two are joined. And the panel is the crown, the part you can see, made to match the teeth either side of it.
So the price is really several things added together. There is the planning, which starts with that 3D scan, because a plan is only as good as the picture of the jaw it is built on. There is the implant itself, a piece of titanium made to medical standards. There is the surgery itself. There is the crown, made for your mouth and nobody else’s. And there is the dentist’s time, spread across several visits and several months while the bone does its slow, quiet work.
Here is the line in our price that matters most when you start comparing: the £1,700 figure includes the crown. That sounds obvious, and yet it explains a lot of the gap between two quotes for “one implant”. An implant without its crown is a fence post with no panel. You cannot bite on it, and the crown is a real chunk of the bill.
Why does the “from” price go up for some people?
“From” means the simplest version of the job: one tooth, healthy gums, and enough bone to hold the implant as it is. Plenty of people are exactly that, and that is their price.
The thing that moves it, more than anything else, is bone. Bone is a use-it-or-lose-it material. While a tooth sits in it, every bite gives the jaw a little squeeze, and the jaw keeps itself strong. Take the tooth away and that squeeze stops, so over the years the bone in the gap slowly shrinks, a bit like a muscle you stop using. A tooth lost last month usually leaves plenty. A tooth lost ten years ago may have left a ridge too thin or too shallow for an implant to grip.
That is what the scan is for. It shows the bone exactly as it is, so nobody has to guess. If there is enough, the “from” price holds. If there is not, the bone is built up first with a graft, which starts from £350.
The top back teeth have their own version of this. Above them sit the sinuses, the air spaces behind your cheekbones, and when a back tooth has been gone a while, the bone between the gap and the sinus can get quite thin. Lifting the sinus floor and adding bone underneath it is a sinus graft, £1,150 per sinus today. It is a bigger job than an ordinary graft, which is why it carries a bigger figure, and it only comes up for those upper back teeth.
Either kind of graft also adds time, because the new bone heals before the implant goes in. So the scan settles your price and your timeline at once, which is rather nice: you know both before you decide anything.
What if more than one tooth is missing?
Here implants get cleverer than people expect: you rarely need one implant for every missing tooth.
One implant carries one crown. Two implants, though, can carry a bridge of several teeth between them, the way two pillars hold up a whole stretch of road. So three missing teeth in a row might be two implants and a bridge, and a whole jaw can be held on a small number of implants carrying the full set. That is why nobody can price several teeth by multiplying the single-tooth figure; the plan decides how many implants there are, and the scan decides the plan.
There is a middle road too, for people who wear a denture and are tired of it moving: an implant-retained denture. The denture clips onto implants in the jaw, so it stays put when you eat and talk, and it still comes out to be cleaned. Because it needs fewer implants than a fixed set of teeth, it usually sits between an ordinary denture and fixed teeth in cost. Each of these is planned and priced from your scan.
Does it cost more to see a specialist?
Usually, yes, and it helps to know why.
In the UK, any dentist registered with the General Dental Council can place implants once they are trained and competent to do it. Specialists are dentists with years of further training in one area, such as oral surgery, listed on the GDC’s specialist lists, and a specialist practice generally charges more because you are paying for that extra training.
A straightforward single tooth rarely needs one. Where a case is complex, referral is part of good care, and we may suggest a specialist where that is appropriate. The GDC register is public, too, so you can look any dentist up by name before you sit in their chair.
Can you get dental implants on the NHS?
Only in limited circumstances, such as after certain cancers or injuries, and then through a hospital referral rather than a high-street practice. For almost everyone, implants are private treatment.
What the NHS does offer for a gap is a bridge or a denture. Both come under Band 3, £332.10 today, and nothing at all if you qualify for free NHS dental care. If an NHS practice can see you, that route is worth pricing beside ours, and we would rather you knew it was there. Privately, both are in the table above; a bridge holds onto the teeth either side of the gap, so closing one gap usually means more than one unit. The NHS charges beside ours are set out on their own page, along with who qualifies for free treatment.
Why are some quotes so much cheaper?
A low number can simply mean a practice with lower costs. The difference, when there is one, is usually in what the number leaves out, so the honest way to read a cheap quote is to ask what is inside it.
Is the crown included, or is it priced separately? Is the scan included? What happens if the bone needs grafting? What make of implant is it? That last one sounds fussy, and it matters: every implant system has its own parts, and whoever replaces the crown years later needs to know what sits underneath.
Going abroad is the same sum with the distance added. Implants in Turkey usually cost less up front, often a good deal less, and the surgery there can be perfectly good. What the price leaves out is the years afterwards: the check-ups, the crown’s eventual replacement, and someone within reach if the gum around the implant gets sore or the crown works loose. Many UK dentists will not take on remedial work on an implant they did not place, because they do not know what was used or how. So weigh the whole ten years, not the first week. The same honest comparison for crowns, veneers and bonding is on our Turkey teeth page.
Is the money worth it over the years?
Implants look better the longer you look. The titanium post is expected to last decades, often a lifetime, while the crown on top wears like any crown and typically needs replacing after ten to fifteen years, a much smaller job than the implant. The tooth never leans on its neighbours, either, so they are left alone. What keeps it going is what keeps your own teeth going: clean gums, hygiene visits, and no smoking.
How do you find out what yours will cost?
You book the free consultation, and you get the scan. That is genuinely the only way to a real figure, because the price of an implant is written in your bone, and the scan is how anyone reads it.
At the consultation you are told what the treatment involves for your case, how long it should take and what it costs, before you decide anything. If an implant is not the right answer for you, a bridge or a denture is, and all three sit on the same fee guide so you can see them side by side. What an implant is, who it suits and how the treatment runs is all on the implants page. A membership plan takes 10% off treatment, and it is worth asking about the practice’s 0% finance through Tabeo at the same visit.
Designer Smiles is at 4 Manor Square in Solihull, B91 3PX, on 0121 709 3821. Come and see your own jaw on the screen: it is a fascinating thing to look at, and it is the moment the fog of figures turns into one clear number.
