Most people asking how long Invisalign takes have already decided they want their teeth straight, and what they actually want to know is whether they will be done before the wedding, the holiday or the photos. The honest answer is somewhere between about four months and a bit over a year, and which end of that you land on comes down to two things: how far your teeth have to travel, and how many hours a day the aligners are really in.
So how long does Invisalign take?
At Designer Smiles most cases fall into four plans, and a plan is really just a count of aligners with a name on it. That count is your calendar: each aligner is worn for a set number of days before you swap it for the next, so your treatment lasts the number of trays multiplied by the days each one stays in. Nothing more mysterious than that.
| Plan | How long it runs | The kind of case it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Invisalign Lite | Four to six months | Small gaps, mild crowding, a bite that is fine or nearly fine |
| Invisalign Moderate | Six to nine months | Crowded teeth, gappy teeth, a mild overbite or underbite |
| Invisalign Comprehensive | Nine months and more | Severe crowding, significant gaps, a bigger bite correction |
| Invisalign Complex | The longest of the four | The most involved cases, needing the most aligners |
You do not have to guess which row is yours. The consultation is free, and it starts with a 3D scan of your face and teeth that becomes a model of your own teeth moving stage by stage into their finished position, on screen, while you watch. Your months come off that plan, and so does your price. The plans are set out with their prices on our Invisalign page.
Why is one person done in five months and another still going after a year?
Teeth sit in living bone, and when a gentle, steady push is put on a tooth, the bone just ahead of it quietly dissolves away while the bone behind it fills back in. The tooth walks through the jaw at a pace that biology sets, and you can no more hurry that than you can hurry a plant.
So the first thing deciding your months is distance. A tooth that needs nudging into line has a short walk ahead of it; a tooth that has to come round from behind its neighbour has a long one. The second is how many teeth are going anywhere at all, because a whole arch of crowding is a lot of small walks at once, and the series runs as long as the slowest of them.
The third is the kind of movement, which is the one people never think of. Tipping the crown of a tooth is the easy case. Spinning a rounded tooth on its own axis, or shifting a whole root rather than just the top of it, is slow and patient work. That is why very large rotations are often better done with a fixed brace, and why your dentist says so at the consultation rather than at month ten. Add a bite correction and you are asking for more stages again, because the teeth have to arrive in the right place and meet each other properly when they get there.
One thing moves the start line rather than the finish line: gum disease and decay are treated before any tooth is moved, because teeth travel best through healthy gums. And when the trouble is the size or the position of the jaws themselves rather than the teeth sitting in them, aligners cannot correct it at all, and the honest answer is a referral.
What does the short end look like? Adam Khan, reviewing us after finishing with Dr Aadam, says his treatment “took around 20 weeks”. That sits at the Lite end of the range, and it is his mouth rather than yours; the scan is the thing that puts a number on your own.
What twenty to twenty-two hours a day means for your timeline
Here is the part that decides most people’s finish date, and the lovely thing is that it belongs entirely to you.
Twenty-two hours in means two hours out, and two hours is three meals and your toothbrush. The aligners come out to eat and to drink anything other than water, then go straight back in after a rinse or a brush. That is the whole discipline.
Why so exact? Because an aligner only pushes while it is on the teeth. Take it out for an evening and the push stops, and teeth in the middle of a move start easing back the way they came, like a door you have been holding open swinging shut when you let go. Do that a few evenings a week and the next tray arrives at teeth that are not where it expected them, so it will not seat properly. A tray that is not seated is not moving anything.
Under twenty hours a day the plan runs late, and further under that it can stall. This is what your reviews are for: you change trays at home on the days your dentist sets, and come in at intervals so the movement is checked against the plan while any drift is still small. The fix is usually small too, and it is your dentist’s call at that review rather than yours at home. Ground that is still missing at the end can be picked up in a refinement.
If you look at twenty-two hours and quietly think that it is not you, say so out loud at the consultation. A fixed brace works whether you are feeling disciplined that week or not, because it never comes out, and being told that straight is worth more than being sold aligners.
Most people worry about this far more than they need to, though. The rhythm is automatic inside a week: out with the tray, in after the brush, and then you stop thinking about them at all.
What are Invisalign refinements, and why do they add a few weeks?
When you reach the last aligner in your series, your dentist compares where your teeth actually are with where the plan said they would be by now. Often those two pictures agree. Sometimes one tooth has not quite arrived: a stubborn canine that turned most of the way round, or a gap that closed to a hair rather than to nothing.
A refinement is the short extra series of aligners made to finish that off, planned from where your teeth are at that point. Prediction is the honest word for the first plan. It is a very good forecast built from a scan, and the teeth are the ones who decide, because every mouth’s bone remodels at its own speed.
Refinements usually add weeks rather than months, because a handful of extra trays worn for the usual days each comes to a handful of weeks. Think of the decorator going back over the edges once the walls are done: the finish is the bit everyone actually looks at.
Two things make one more likely: wear time that slipped, which brings us back to those twenty-two hours, and a plan that asked for ambitious movements to begin with. It is a fair question to ask how refinements are handled in your own plan, and a fair thing to want in writing beside your price.
When will you actually see a difference?
Sooner than you fear, later than you would like, and almost never on the day you go looking for it.
Each aligner moves your teeth by a fraction of a millimetre, because small steady movements are kinder to teeth than big ones. The trouble is that nobody can see a fraction of a millimetre, and your own face is the worst place to look for one, because you see it every morning and stop noticing it.
The change tends to arrive all at once instead. One evening the tray comes out and the gap you have been staring at for years is visibly smaller, and you go hunting for an old photo to check you are not imagining it. Other people usually get there before you do.
Your starting position is saved in the 3D scan from day one, a far more reliable memory of your old teeth than yours is. And because the plan on screen runs stage by stage, you can ask at your fitting which aligner number your front teeth land straight on. That turns “when will I see something” into a date on the calendar.
And then the retainers, for good
Here is the part of the timeline nobody puts in the headline. The straightening has an end date. Keeping it does not.
When the last aligner comes off, retainers are made so the teeth stay where the plan put them. Ours are removable and worn at night, and a set comes free with every plan; a replacement set later is £150 per arch.
The reason is worth knowing, because “wear it forever” sounds like a chore until you see what it is doing. The fibres holding each tooth in its socket stretch as the tooth travels, and they spend a long while wanting to pull it back where it came from. Teeth drift gently all through life too, brace or no brace, which is why people arrive at Designer Smiles with front teeth that were straightened when they were fifteen. A night retainer is the cane you tie a young tree to, except that with teeth you never quite untie it.
So how much is Invisalign a month?
That depends on which plan the scan puts you in and how you choose to pay, and both get settled at the same free appointment.
Prices here start from £999 for Invisalign Express, seven aligners for minor movements or a little relapse after a brace. Lite is £2,195, Moderate is £2,495, Comprehensive is £2,895 and Complex is £3,295, and each of them includes the consultation, the scans, the plan on screen, the reviews along the way, free tooth whitening once the teeth are straight and a free set of removable retainers. The scan sets how many aligners your teeth need, and that number sets which figure is yours.
0% finance through Tabeo over up to twelve months is available on every plan, arranged at the consultation once your price is known. 0% means nothing is added on top, so the monthly amount is simply your plan divided by the months it runs over. There is no monthly figure printed here for a good reason: the only honest one comes out of your own plan, and you will be looking at it in writing before you agree to anything.
If you want your own number of months, that is what the free consultation is for. It ends with your own teeth in their finished position on a screen in front of you, with the calendar beside them.
