England has 743 more NHS dentists than before the pandemic, but fewer for every 100,000 people

How many dentists does the NHS have? The official answer is a head count. Each year the NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA), which processes every claim for NHS dental treatment in England, counts the dentists who delivered at least one unit of NHS dental or orthodontic activity in the year. One check-up is enough. Its figures for the year to March 2026 were published on 27 August 2026. They give the count for England, for each NHS region and for each integrated care board (ICB), the NHS body that plans and buys dental services for an area, and they divide each by the Office for National Statistics' population estimate to give dentists per 100,000 people.

NHSBSA's own summary of those figures gives the England count, the England figure of 43 per 100,000 people and the names of the two boards with the highest and lowest figures. Those findings are NHSBSA's. What this study adds, from the same published tables, is the comparison with 2019/20 for England and for every region and board, the size of the double counting that separates board figures from the national one, and the count set beside the NHS work actually delivered. Nothing has been re-estimated. The counts, the populations and the rates are NHSBSA's own.

Three points matter when reading them. First, “NHS dentist” here means a dentist who did any NHS work in the year. Most dentists in England do a mix of NHS and private work, and a dentist who saw one NHS patient counts the same as one who saw NHS patients all week. The figures do not count full-time NHS dentists, dentists taking new NHS patients, or dentists who work only privately. Second, England's figure and the board figures are not on one scale, for the reason set out in section 2. Third, the boards are the 42 that existed in 2025/26. On 1 April 2026, 12 of them, Norfolk and Waveney and Hertfordshire and West Essex included, were abolished and replaced by six larger boards. The figures describe the boards as they were, because that is how NHSBSA published them.

1. England: 743 more dentists than in 2019/20, and fewer for every 100,000 people

In the year to March 2026, 25,419 dentists did NHS work in England, 764 more than the year before and the most in any of the seven years NHSBSA's tables cover. The Office for National Statistics puts England's population at 58.8 million in mid-2025. That is 43.2 dentists for every 100,000 people, or one for every 2,315.

In 2019/20, the last year before the pandemic, there were 24,676. The count is up by 743, or 3.0%. The population grew by 4.6% over the same period, so the number for every 100,000 people is lower than it was: 43.2 against 43.9, a fall of 1.5%. As a sum, it would take about 400 more dentists doing NHS work to give today's population the 2019/20 figure. That is arithmetic on a head count. It is not an estimate of how many dentists England is short of, and it does not predict anything.

Five years before 2025/26 is 2020/21, when there were 23,733. That was the first year of the pandemic. Routine dentistry stopped for part of it and the count fell by 943 in a single year. Measured from there, the count is up 7.1% and the number for every 100,000 people is up 2.5%, from 42.1. A comparison that starts in 2020/21 flatters the present, so 2019/20 is the starting point used here, with 2020/21 given beside it.

More dentists do NHS work than in 2019/20, but fewer for each 100,000 people

The number per head reached its lowest point, 41.9, in 2023/24, and has risen in both years since. In 2025/26, 2,323 dentists did NHS work who had done none the year before, the most in any of the six years NHSBSA gives that figure for. 1,559 who did NHS work in 2024/25 did none in 2025/26, the fewest since 2021/22.

2. The 42 boards: from 33.6 to 68.9, with 49.6 in the middle

Board figures are not on the same scale as England's. A dentist who works under contracts in two boards is counted once in each, and only once in England. Add up the 42 boards and you get 30,303 dentists, 19.2% more than England's 25,419. So board figures run higher than the national one, and only 9 of the 42 are below England's 43.2. The yardstick for a board is the middle board, which had 49.6 dentists doing NHS work for every 100,000 people in 2025/26.

Norfolk and Waveney had 33.6, the fewest of the 42 boards. Hertfordshire and West Essex had 68.9, 2.1 times as many. Put the other way round, that is one dentist doing NHS work for every 2,980 people in Norfolk and Waveney and one for every 1,451 in Hertfordshire and West Essex. A board whose dentists often hold a second contract in the board next door will show a higher figure than one whose dentists do not, and the tables do not say how much of any board's figure that is. Search for a board by its name, or type a council or town inside it, to read its figures.

Dentists doing NHS work for every 100,000 people, by integrated care board, 2025/26

Six of the ten boards with the fewest are in the South West, two are in the East of England and two in the Midlands. Four of the ten with the most are in London. Deprivation does not explain the order. Across the 42 boards we found no relationship between how deprived a board's population is and how many NHS dentists it has per head (rank correlation 0.07, where 0 is no relationship).

A board's figure reflects where dentists hold NHS contracts and how many people live there. It is not a score for the board, for its dentists or for its patients.

3. Since 2019/20: lower in most boards, and by 10% or more in 12

On NHSBSA's figures, 28 of the 42 boards had fewer dentists doing NHS work for every 100,000 people in 2025/26 than in 2019/20, and 14 had more. In 20 boards there were fewer dentists outright.

Small changes in a board's figure are not safe to read, for two reasons. The double counting between boards is not constant. Outside the pandemic year it has added between 19.1% and 21.1% to the boards' total, and it added 21.1% in 2019/20 against 19.2% in 2025/26. That alone can move a board's figure by up to 1.6% without any dentist starting or stopping NHS work. And NHSBSA notes that some 2019/20 records were assigned to a board afterwards, from the latest commissioner of the contract. With the double counting held at its 2025/26 level, 24 boards are lower than in 2019/20, not 28. The four that change are Birmingham and Solihull, South Yorkshire, Surrey Heartlands and West Yorkshire, each of them down by less than 1% on the published figures.

So this study sets aside any change of less than 2% either way. On that reading, 23 boards have fewer NHS dentists per head than in 2019/20, 11 have more and 8 have moved too little to say. In 12 boards the fall is 10% or more, and that number is the same with the double counting held constant. And 16 boards are lower than in both 2019/20 and 2020/21, so their fall does not depend on which year it is measured from.

NHS dentists per 100,000 people in 2019/20 and in 2025/26, board by board

Eight boards have more dentists doing NHS work than in 2019/20 but fewer for each 100,000 people, which is the position England is in. In five of those the fall per head is under 2%.

Measured over five years, from the pandemic year 2020/21, the count is up in 32 boards and the number per head is up in 26. It is down in 16, and every one of those is also down on 2019/20.

The boards with the fewest are mostly the ones where the figure has fallen furthest. All ten of the boards with the fewest NHS dentists per head have fewer than in 2019/20, and eight of the ten largest falls are among them. Somerset is down 24.6%, Northamptonshire 22.2% and Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly 21.0%, and each of the three is also down by more than 10% on 2020/21. South East London is up 11.4% and Hertfordshire and West Essex 9.8%. In 2019/20 no board had fewer than 40 dentists doing NHS work for every 100,000 people. In 2025/26, four did.

The South West stands out. It has the fewest NHS dentists per head of any region, 40.5, and the largest fall since 2019/20, 13.8%. It is the only region with fewer per head than in 2020/21 as well. All seven of its boards have fewer per head than in 2019/20, each by more than 2%. London and the North West are both up 4.3%, and the South East is down 5.9%. The other three regions are down by between 1.3% and 2.3%. Region figures are counted the way board figures are. The seven regions add up to 27,355 dentists, 7.6% more than England, so five of the seven sit above England's 43.2. That double counting was 8.5% in 2019/20, and with it held at its 2025/26 level the three smaller falls come to between 0.5% and 1.6%.

4. A head count is not the amount of NHS dentistry

The count says how many dentists did some NHS work. Three things show why it should not be read as capacity.

Full-time equivalents are far fewer. NHS England runs a separate workforce collection, a survey that practices providing NHS care must complete. The National Audit Office reported its first results. They suggest that in March 2024, in practices providing some NHS care, there were 10,539 full-time-equivalent general dentists providing NHS care. NHSBSA's head count for 2023/24 is 24,307. The two are counted differently and should not be divided one by the other, but the scale of the difference is the point.

Less NHS activity for each dentist counted than in 2019/20. The same NHSBSA publication counts the NHS work itself in units of dental activity, where a check-up is one unit and a crown twelve. England delivered 79.7 million units in 2019/20 and 76.8 million in 2025/26, 3.7% fewer, with 3.0% more dentists counted. Dividing each year's units by the same year's head count gives 3,231 units for each dentist counted then and 3,021 now, a fall of 6.5%. This is an average over everyone in the count. It does not show that any dentist is working less. It falls if more of the dentists counted do a small amount of NHS work beside their private work, and the head count cannot tell those apart. If anything, 6.5% understates the change. The last days of 2019/20 were cut short by the first lockdown. And since November 2022 the more complex fillings, extractions and root treatments have earned five or seven units where they earned three, so the same work scores higher than it did. Scored the old way, the 2025/26 total would be about 5.3 million units lower. The 2025/26 units also include work led by dental therapists and hygienists, who are not in the dentist count.

Boards with more dentists counted tend to have more NHS activity, but not in proportion. Across the 42 boards, more NHS dentists per head goes with more NHS activity per person (rank correlation 0.61, where 1 is a perfect match). That is an association between two measures. It does not show that one causes the other. Nine of the ten boards with the fewest dentists per head are also among the ten with the least NHS activity per person. At the other end of the range the two measures part. Hertfordshire and West Essex has 2.1 times as many NHS dentists per head as Norfolk and Waveney but had 35% more NHS activity per person, 1.39 units against 1.03. Units for each dentist counted ran from about 1,500 to about 3,200 across the boards, and the five boards with the most NHS dentists per head each delivered fewer units per dentist than the middle board's 2,561. Where the count is highest, many of the dentists counted do a smaller amount of NHS work under that board's contracts. Some of them will do the rest of their NHS work in a neighbouring board, where they are counted again.

One more group does not appear in the count at all. NHSBSA's tables say 2024/25 was the first year in which dental therapists and dental hygienists were permitted to lead NHS dental activity. 1,293 did so that year and 2,084 in 2025/26.

What to do about it

If you run a practice in one of the boards with the fewest NHS dentists per head, you are recruiting from a small pool. In all ten of those boards, fewer dentists do NHS work than in 2019/20. Plan for vacancies to take longer to fill than they used to. It is worth looking at what a dental therapist or hygienist could take on: 2,084 of them led NHS dental activity in 2025/26, 61% more than the year before, and none of them is in the dentist count. If a vacancy means you cannot deliver your NHS contract, tell your ICB when it happens, not at the year end.

If you are private or mixed in one of those boards, say plainly on your website and your Google listing whether you take new patients and what a first appointment costs. People who are looking for a dentist need that before anything else.

If you are in one of the boards with the most, a high count is not a sign that NHS dentistry is plentiful. It means many dentists each do some NHS work under the board's contracts, often beside private work or a contract elsewhere.

If you report on or represent an area, find your board in the chart, the table or the file. Quote the figure as dentists who did some NHS work, not as full-time NHS dentists. Compare your board with the middle board and with other boards, not with England's 43.2. Treat a change of less than 2% as no change. And check whether your board still exists under that name. The useful questions for an ICB are how many full-time-equivalent dentists its contracts have, which NHS England collects, and how much of the dentistry it commissioned was delivered.

How we did this

Source. NHS Dental Statistics for England 2025/26, published by NHSBSA on 27 August 2026 as Official Statistics, under the Open Government Licence v3.0. We used the workforce summary tables: table 1a for England's count, joiners and leavers, table 2a for England per 100,000 people, table 2b for regions and boards and table 3a for dental therapists and hygienists. Units of dental activity are from the same publication's activity files by contract location.

Who is counted. NHSBSA counts a dentist if they delivered at least one unit of dental or orthodontic activity on the NHS in the year, recorded on a claim form. Foundation dentists, who are in their first year after qualifying, are included. So are dentists in trust-led services where their work is claimed this way. Dental therapists and hygienists are not. It is a head count. It does not measure hours, sessions or whole-time equivalents, and it does not count private dentistry or NHS dentistry in hospitals.

Where they are counted. A dentist is counted in the board that commissions their contract, and the region is the board's region. A dentist with contracts in more than one board is counted in each, so the boards add up to more than England: 19.2% more in 2025/26, 21.1% in 2019/20 and 16.4% in 2020/21. The seven health and justice commissioners, which commission dentistry in prisons and other secure settings, appear in the table only from 2024/25, with 169 dentists that year and 178 in 2025/26. Their counts are not in any board's figure, and the table does not say where those dentists were counted in earlier years.

The boards. The figures are for the 42 integrated care boards of 2025/26. Twelve were abolished on 1 April 2026. Their areas now belong to six new boards, named Central East, Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk, Surrey and Sussex, Thames Valley, and West and North London, and part of Frimley's area went to Hampshire and Isle of Wight. England has had 36 boards since then. The search and the file use the 2025/26 names, and the file marks the twelve, which are:

• Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes
• Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire West
• Cambridgeshire and Peterborough
• Frimley
• Hertfordshire and West Essex
• Mid and South Essex
• Norfolk and Waveney
• North Central London
• North West London
• Suffolk and North East Essex
• Surrey Heartlands
• Sussex

Population. NHSBSA divides each count by the ONS mid-year population estimate for the year the NHS year starts in, so 2019/20 uses mid-2019. The exception is 2025/26. England's figure uses mid-2025, but mid-2025 estimates for boards were not out when the tables were published, so boards and regions use mid-2024. England's population grew by 0.39% between the two, so the 2025/26 figures for boards are a little higher than they would be on mid-2025 populations, and a board's change since 2019/20 covers five years of population growth where England's covers six. On the mid-2024 population England's own figure would be 43.4, not 43.2.

What we left out. NHSBSA also publishes a count for areas smaller than a board. At that level a dentist is placed by a correspondence address, not by the contract they work under, so an area that holds the address of a large provider can show a figure far above its neighbours'. Those figures are not a fair guide to the dentists working in a place, and none is used here. NHSBSA's counts of joiners and leavers for regions and boards are left out too, because they do not add up to the change in a region's or a board's count.

Controls we ran. Every rate NHSBSA publishes for England, the regions and the boards was recomputed from its own count and population and matched. The England totals in the detailed CSV file match table 1a in every year. Board changes since 2019/20 were recounted with the double counting held at its 2025/26 level, as section 3 sets out. The order of the boards is stable from year to year (rank correlation 0.98 between 2025/26 and 2024/25) and less so over six years (0.80 with 2019/20): only four of the ten boards with the fewest in 2025/26 were among the ten with the fewest then. We tested deprivation, using the population-weighted English Indices of Deprivation 2025 score of each board, and found no relationship. And we set the count against NHS activity per person and per dentist, in section 4. These are counts of every dentist with a claim, not a sample, so there is no sampling error and no confidence interval to report.

What this is not. It is not a count of full-time NHS dentists, of dentists taking new NHS patients, of all dentists including those who work only privately, or of dentists registered to practise. It does not show how easy it is to get an NHS appointment. And a board's figure counts dentists whose contracts are held there, not dentists who live there or the dentists its residents use.

Questions we get asked about this data

How many NHS dentists are there in England?

25,419 dentists did some NHS work in England in the year to March 2026, according to NHSBSA, 743 more than in 2019/20. That is 43.2 for every 100,000 people, down from 43.9. It is a count of every dentist who did any NHS work in the year. It is not a count of full-time NHS dentists or of dentists taking new NHS patients.

How many NHS dentists per 100,000 people does my area have?

Type your council or town into the search above the chart in section 2 to find its integrated care board, or open the file. Across the 42 boards of 2025/26 the figure ranged from 33.6 to 68.9, and the middle board had 49.6. Compare a board with the middle board, not with England's figure.

Has the number of NHS dentists gone up or down?

Up in number and down for each person. There were 25,419 in 2025/26 against 24,676 in 2019/20, a rise of 3.0%. The population grew by 4.6%, so the number for every 100,000 people fell from 43.9 to 43.2.

Why are board figures higher than England's?

Because a dentist who works in two boards is counted in both, but only once in England. The 42 boards add up to 19.2% more dentists than England has, so only 9 of them are below England's 43.2. Compare a board with the middle board, 49.6.

My integrated care board has a different name. Why?

Twelve of the 42 boards were abolished on 1 April 2026 and replaced by six larger ones. NHSBSA's figures for 2025/26 are for the boards as they were that year. Search for your council or town to find the board it was in.

Does a high figure mean it is easy to find an NHS dentist?

No. The figure counts every dentist who did any NHS work under the board's contracts, however little. Hertfordshire and West Essex has the most NHS dentists per head, but the NHS activity delivered there came to 2,023 units for each dentist counted, against 3,075 in Norfolk and Waveney, which has the fewest.

For editors

What is new here and what is not. NHSBSA has already published the England count of 25,419, the England figure of 43 per 100,000 people and the two boards with the highest and lowest figures. This analysis adds the comparison with 2019/20: 743 more dentists doing NHS work in England, but 43.2 for every 100,000 people against 43.9, with the change for every region and board, the South West down 13.8% and 12 boards down by 10% or more. All of it is worked from NHSBSA's published tables.

How to describe the figures. A dentist is counted if they did any NHS work in the year, however little, so please write “dentists who did NHS work”, not full-time NHS dentists. England's 43.2 and the board figures are not on one scale, because a dentist who works in two boards is counted in both. Set a board beside the middle board, 49.6, and beside other boards. Treat a change of less than 2% in a board's figure as no change. Twelve of the 42 boards were abolished on 1 April 2026, and the file marks them.

The data is free to reuse with attribution to Practice Radar, under Creative Commons BY 4.0. Source: NHS Business Services Authority, NHS Dental Statistics for England 2025/26, workforce summary tables, over Office for National Statistics mid-year population estimates. The file, nhs-dentists-per-100000-by-area-2026.csv, has one row for England, one for each of the 7 NHS regions and one for each of the 42 integrated care boards of 2025/26, with ONS codes and the councils each board covers.

Jack Henty, who compiled this analysis, co-owns Bollington Dental Practice in Cheshire and founded Practice Radar, which measures local dental markets for practices. He is available for interview.

Contact: hello@practiceradar.co.uk