Has the CMA introduced new rules for private dental practices?

No. The CMA is conducting a market study and its final report is due by March 2027. It could recommend regulatory changes, issue guidance or take other action, but practices should distinguish current obligations from possible future outcomes.

Does a mixed dental practice have to say it is mixed on its website?

The GDC's advertising guidance says practice publicity must make clear whether a practice is NHS, mixed or wholly private. The same guidance requires information to be accurate, current and not misleading.

Do private dental practices have to publish fees online?

The CMA study has not created a new fee-publication rule. Its consumer guidance says dental professionals should provide clear price information on websites, in practice leaflets and in reception areas. It advises patients to look for costs such as consultations, fillings, extractions, radiographs and hygienist treatment, using ranges where the final fee varies. Practices should take advice on the exact regulatory requirements that apply to them and ensure published prices are accurate.

What is the most useful conversion measure for a private dental practice?

Enquiry volume alone is not enough. Track the percentage of enquiries that become assessments, assessments that produce treatment plans and treatment plans that become accepted care. This shows where patient confidence or practice process is breaking down.

What Does the CMA Private Dentistry Review Mean for Your Dental Practice Website?

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) review hasn’t created new website rules for dental practices, but with the final report due in March 2027, we can already see useful direction. Patients need clearer information about prices, treatment choices, practice status and what happens when something goes wrong.

For mixed practices, this is bigger than a compliance tidy-up. The same information the CMA wants patients to see is the information a reluctant private patient needs before they feel comfortable booking. A clearer website can improve trust, make first conversations easier and give the practice better evidence about where the patient journey is breaking.

What is the CMA reviewing in private dentistry?

The CMA is studying how well the UK private dental market works for consumers. Its scope includes access, patient choice, treatment prices, business practices, competition, complaints and regulation. The study launched on 5 March 2026, published an update on 17 July, and must report by March 2027.

According to the CMA’s launch announcement, private dental services accounted for 69% of the market in 2025. The private market was valued at £8.4 billion in 2023 to 2024, and one in five people in Great Britain used private dental care in 2024.

While this is still a market study, and not a verdict, the CMA says possible outcomes include recommendations to government, direct action and/or new guidance. There is, however, a clear question running through all this: can a patient understand their options, likely costs and route to redress early enough to make an informed choice?

Why transparency matters more when private dentistry is the backup plan

A patient moving into private dentistry is not always shopping for an upgrade. The CMA cites a 2024 General Dental Council survey in which 36% of people who turned to private care said they could not get NHS treatment at all, 31% could not get it quickly enough and 25% said their practice or dental professional had stopped offering NHS treatment. Only 18% said they preferred private care.

Those figures overlap, but the pattern is plain. A large part of private demand is being created by restricted NHS access rather than a sudden national enthusiasm for boutique dentistry.

The pressure is particularly visible in Northern England. On 13 August 2026, DentistAlert reported that 17% of monitored NHS practices in both Yorkshire and the Humber and the North East were accepting new adult patients, compared with 34% across England. DentistAlert draws from NHS.uk status data and warns that published availability can lag what is happening on the ground, so the figure should be treated as a dated access indicator rather than a perfect census.

This creates a different private patient. They may be frustrated, uncertain about price and unfamiliar with private treatment. They need to know whether the practice is mixed or private, how quickly they can be seen, what the first appointment costs and what happens after it. A homepage full of polished smiles and vague promises does not answer any of those questions.

The commercial lesson is quite useful: transparency and persuasion are not opposing jobs here. Clear information is part of the reason a patient chooses the practice.

What information should a dental practice website show now?

Existing GDC guidance already requires far more than a treatment menu and a telephone number. The CMA study may sharpen the focus on consumer information, but practices do not need to wait until 2027 to fix obvious gaps.

Under the GDC’s guidance on advertising, practice information must be accurate, current and not misleading. Publicity should use clear language, support claims with facts and state whether the practice is NHS, mixed or wholly private.

For a practice website, the GDC also says the following should be displayed:

The practice name, geographic address, email address and telephone number.
For each dental professional mentioned, their relevant qualification, country of qualification and GDC registration number.
A link to the GDC website or the GDC’s contact details.
The practice complaints procedure and the relevant escalation route, including the relevant NHS body for NHS treatment and the Dental Complaints Service for private treatment.
The date the website was last updated.

That is the current regulatory floor. The CMA’s patient guidance adds a practical view of what patients are being told to look for: prices, opening hours, treatment availability, reviews, written treatment plans and alternative options.

A useful website audit therefore goes beyond asking whether the mandatory details exist. It asks whether a nervous patient can find and understand them without ringing reception to translate the site.

What should a mixed practice make especially clear?

A mixed practice should remove ambiguity around NHS and private care. The patient needs to understand the practice model, which routes may be available and what they are agreeing to pay for before the clinical conversation becomes complicated.

Five areas deserve a close look.

1. Practice status and access

State clearly that the practice is mixed. Explain whether it is accepting new NHS patients, new private patients or both, and keep that information aligned across the website, NHS.uk and the Google Business Profile.

Avoid wording that suggests a patient must choose private treatment to access clinically necessary care when an NHS route is available. The CMA’s patient guidance says people should be able to ask what can be provided on the NHS, what is private, the likely cost and when each route could begin.

2. Useful fee information

Publish the cost of common entry points and routine treatments, including a consultation, examination, radiograph, filling, extraction and hygienist appointment where applicable. If a treatment varies, a realistic range is more useful than an unexplained “from” price.

Add the details that prevent avoidable friction. Say what the consultation includes, whether a deposit is required, when it is refundable and whether the fee is credited against treatment. If finance or a membership plan is mentioned, explain what it covers and keep the wording aligned with the relevant FCA and advertising requirements.

3. Treatment choice

Explain the first step without implying that one treatment is suitable for everyone. The GDC requires marketed treatment to remain conditional on a satisfactory assessment, with appropriate consent and a discussion of the available options.

Good service pages help the patient prepare for that discussion. They explain who the treatment may suit, the assessment involved, broad cost considerations and plausible alternatives without trying to diagnose the reader through a browser.

4. The people providing care

Name the clinicians, show their GDC numbers and describe qualifications accurately. Terms that imply specialist status have specific restrictions. A clinician with additional training can describe that training and relevant experience without quietly promoting themselves onto a specialist list they are not on.

Real team information also does a commercial job. A patient who has been pushed into private care by access problems wants to know who they will meet and whether the practice feels credible before paying for a first appointment.

5. Complaints and redress

Don’t hide the complaints route in a PDF graveyard. The website should explain how to raise a concern with the practice and where a patient can go next if the response does not resolve it.

The CMA is explicitly examining complaint and redress mechanisms. Clear complaints information does not invite complaints. It shows that the practice has a process and is prepared to be accountable.

How does website transparency connect to conversion?

Clear consumer information gives a practice better conversion data because it reduces avoidable uncertainty before the enquiry. Once the patient journey is measured in stages, the numbers can show whether the problem sits in visibility, first contact, consultation, treatment presentation or follow-up.

Chris Barrow’s four KPIs for dental business owners include conversion across four stages:

New patient enquiries → assessments or consultations → treatment plans issued → actual sales

Putting the CMA and Barrow signals together produces a useful diagnostic.

Where the number falls	What to investigate first
Search or website visits → enquiries	Practice status, fee clarity, treatment information, trust signals and the next step
Enquiries → assessments	Response time, call handling, deposit explanation, appointment availability and ownership of follow-up
Assessments → treatment plans	Clinical suitability, whether options and costs are explained clearly, and the treatment co-ordination process
Treatment plans → accepted treatment	Patient understanding, written information, time to decide, affordability, follow-up and whether expectations were set accurately

This is an inference, not a CMA framework. The CMA is examining consumer choice; Barrow is describing practice management. Together they show why “we had 40 enquiries” is not enough information to run the business.

A high enquiry count with weak assessment bookings may indicate that the website created interest but left too much uncertainty for reception to resolve. Strong assessment numbers followed by weak acceptance may point towards unclear options, costs or follow-up. The figures do not diagnose the practice on their own, but they tell the Principal Dentist where to look.

Could better transparency affect dental practice value?

No one can responsibly claim that adding a fee page will increase the sale price of a dental practice. The more defensible connection is that buyers increasingly value businesses whose earnings, pricing practices and operating systems can be evidenced.

Christie & Co’s July analysis found that the CMA study had not reduced buyer appetite. Offer volumes in the first five months of 2026 were in line with the same period in 2025, while aggregate offer value was about 43% higher. However, Christie & Co said average deal time had moved from 7.6 months to 8.8 months as diligence and scrutiny increased.

That sits alongside a buoyant sales market. Dental Elite’s 2026 Goodwill Report coverage put the average completed transaction at £1,383,637, the highest in the report’s ten-year history. Independent buyers accounted for 69% of transactions, and mixed practices achieved the highest average price by practice type at £1,042,399.

Website clarity is one small part of a much larger governance picture. Still, for a mixed practice that may represent a seven-figure asset, keeping pricing, clinician information, complaints routes and service descriptions accurate is hardly wasted admin. It supports the same discipline buyers expect elsewhere: clear records, defensible claims and fewer unpleasant surprises.

What should Principal Dentists do before the CMA reports?

Don’t wait for a new rulebook, and don’t panic-redesign the website around guesses. Use the study as a prompt to test whether the current patient journey is clear enough under the rules and guidance that already exist.

Start with this review:

Check that the site says whether the practice is NHS, mixed or wholly private.
Compare website, Google Business Profile and NHS.uk information for contradictions.
Publish useful prices or ranges for common treatments and explain deposits.
Review every clinician page for qualifications, GDC numbers and specialist wording.
Explain the assessment, treatment plan, and decision process in plain English.
Put the complaints route somewhere a patient can find it.
Add a visible “last updated” date and assign someone to review key pages quarterly.
Track enquiries through assessments, treatment plans and accepted care.

The first seven checks improve the information available to patients. The eighth tells the practice whether that information, and the process around it, is helping people move forward.

The practical takeaway

The CMA review is likely to produce a great deal of commentary before March 2027. Principal Dentists do not need to chase every headline. The useful response now is to make the patient journey easier to understand and easier to measure.

For mixed practices, that work is particularly important because the next private patient may not be choosing an upgrade. They may be trying to solve an access problem. Clear status, clear prices, clear options and a clear next step give that patient something rather more useful than another promise of “exceptional care”.