One in three dental practices in England belongs to a group of three or more

Who owns the dental practice on your high street? The name over the door does not always say. A practice with a local name can belong to a company with hundreds of others, and a practice with a company name can belong to the dentist who works in it. The public registers do say, if you join them up. We took every dental practice on the Care Quality Commission's register in England and traced each one to its owner, then counted how many practices each owner holds and where.

Three terms are used throughout, and each has a fixed meaning.

A practice is one dental practice at one address. The register lists providers, so a single practice can appear on it twice, for example under a partnership and under the partners' company. We count it once.

An owner is whoever sits behind the practice once the registers are joined: the provider registered with the CQC, the brand the CQC records several providers under, or the parent company that Companies House shows holding a majority of the provider.

A group is an owner with three or more practices in England. A large group has 10 or more, a small group 3 to 9. An owner with one or two practices is an independent.

This is a count of who holds what. It says nothing about how any practice is run, and nothing here should be read as a judgment on groups or on independents.

Every figure describes one moment: the register as it stood on 14 October 2026, with the owner of each company read from Companies House on 12 November 2026. Nothing here measures change over time.

1. One practice in three belongs to a group

England has 10,177 dental practices on this count, held by 6,563 separate owners. 3,339 of the practices, 32.8%, belong to a group. 2,502 (24.6%) belong to one of 55 large groups, and 837 (8.2%) to one of 202 small groups. The remaining 6,838 (67.2%) are independent.

Most practices belong to an owner with only one

The most common kind of owner is the smallest. 5,774 practices, 56.7% of the total, belong to an owner with no other practice, and a further 10.5% to an owner with two. At the other end, four owners hold 200 or more practices each, and between them they hold 12.6% of all the practices in England.

2. The ten largest owners hold one practice in six

On our count the ten largest owners hold 1,695 practices, 16.7% of the total and 68% of all the practices in large groups. The three largest hold 10.4%. Each group is given the name it is generally known by, with the name the CQC register records it under in brackets where the two differ. The largest is mydentist, which the register records as IDH Dental: 377 of its 441 practices carry the mydentist name on the register. The counts are practices in England only, as the registers stood on the two dates above.

These are our counts from the registers, and none of them is a group's own figure. They cover England only and one day. They count a practice once however many times it is registered, and they count everything a group has registered as primary dental care, an orthodontic or referral centre included, as a practice. A group's own total usually covers the whole of the UK, and sometimes Ireland. mydentist's website says it has over 500 practices across the UK, against the 441 we count in England. Bupa Dental Care told the Competition and Markets Authority in 2026 that it runs more than 360 practices across the UK and the Republic of Ireland, against our 300 in England. Colosseum Dental's website says it has over 78, against our 79. Envisage Dental's website says it has 90 across the UK, against our 91 in England, so our count is a little above its own.

Rodericks Dental Partners is shown as a range. It told the Competition and Markets Authority in 2026 that it runs 224 practices across England and Wales, 15 of them in Wales, which leaves 209 in England. We count 223 on the register. The registers do not show why the two differ, so the table gives both, and the totals in this section use our count.

The last three owners in the table are within three practices of each other, so their order means little. What the list does show is how quickly it falls away: the tenth owner has 55 practices, about one for every eight the largest has.

3. Council by council: from 8.8% to 65.7%, much of it chance

Every council with 10 or more practices is on the chart below. Search for one to read its figures: the share of its practices in large groups, in small groups and independent, how much its largest single owner holds, and how many owners it has.

Share of each council's dental practices that belong to a group

In the middle council 33.8% of practices belong to a group, and eight councils in ten sit between 19.8% and 48.4%. A council with a dozen practices moves eight points when one of them changes hands, so the ends of the chart are small places. The tables below therefore keep to the 205 councils with 20 or more practices, and give the number of practices beside every percentage. Among those councils the share runs from 8.8% to 65.7%.

Read both tables with chance in mind. We dealt the group practices out at random across the councils 500 times, keeping each council's number of practices. Chance alone put the lowest of these 205 councils at about 10% and the highest at about 57%, and spread the middle 80% of them over 19.8 points. The real figures are 8.8%, 65.7% and 27.1 points. So councils do differ by more than chance, but not by much more. 27 of the 205 sit further from the England figure than chance would put a council one time in twenty, where chance alone would give about 10. A council's place in either table can turn on two or three practices, and a council a few points above or below England is not unusual.

The same test on all 285 councils on the chart gives the same answer: chance alone spreads the middle 80% of them over about 23.5 points, and the real spread is 28.6 points.

4. In the middle council the largest owner holds 9.1% of the practices

A second question is how much of a council's dentistry sits with one owner. For each council we took the owner with the most practices there and worked out its share. In the middle council that is 9.1%, and in 158 of the 285 councils it is under 10%. A council has a median of 29 practices and 25 owners.

In 34 of the 285 councils no owner holds more than one practice, so there is no largest owner to speak of. In the rest, the largest owner is a large group in 160, a small group in 15 and an independent in 17, and in 59 the joint largest owners are of different kinds. In 16 councils one owner holds a fifth or more of the practices, and in 8 a quarter or more. Larger councils have a smaller largest owner: the share falls as the number of practices rises (rank correlation -0.49), because one owner would need many more practices to hold the same share of a big place.

The table below keeps to councils with 20 or more practices and gives the number of practices behind each share, because chance matters here too. In a council of 20 practices an owner with four holds a fifth of them, so a high share can rest on one or two practices. No owner is named beside a council anywhere in this study.

5. London has the lowest group share, and the most deprived neighbourhoods the highest

By region the group share runs from 24.2% in London to 41.4% in the South West. London stands apart: 24.2% of its practices belong to a group, against 35.1% in the rest of England, and only 13.9% to a large group.

The group share is also higher where deprivation is higher. Placing each practice by the deprivation of its own neighbourhood, 42.1% of practices in the most deprived tenth of neighbourhoods belong to a group, against 30.1% in the least deprived tenth. Most of that difference is in large groups, 33.1% against 23.6%.

The share of practices in a group is highest in the most deprived neighbourhoods

The pattern holds with London left out, 42.7% against 30.6%. It also holds inside eight of the nine regions when the most deprived fifth of neighbourhoods in a region is set against the least deprived fifth. The exception is the North East. Council by council it is weaker. The most deprived fifth of councils have 36.0% of their practices in a group and the least deprived fifth 31.1%, and across councils the link between deprivation and group share is modest (rank correlation 0.22). These are associations, not causes. The registers do not say why groups hold more practices in some places than others, and this study offers no reason.

What to do about it

If you own a practice, look up your council. The file gives the number of practices, the number of owners and how much the largest one holds. That is the make-up of the market your patients choose from. When a patient searches for a dentist in your town, several of the listings they see may belong to one owner, and Practice Radar's map marks which. If you are thinking about expanding or selling, the same row tells you how many groups are already present in your area.

If you run several practices, check your own share council by council. Where you hold a fifth or more of an area's practices, some of your practices are competing with each other in local search. Give each one its own listing, its own reviews and its own page, so that they do not cancel one another out.

If you are choosing where to open or buy, the council file gives a first read of the area: how many practices there are, how many separate owners, and whether one of them already holds a large share. Set it beside the number of people in the area and how they search, which our search index covers town by town.

If you report on an area, the figures say who owns the practices, and no more than that. They do not say whether a practice takes NHS patients, what it charges or how good it is. A council's figure rests on a small number of practices, which the file gives beside every percentage, so a difference of a few points from England or from a neighbouring council is within what chance gives. The register is public: anyone can look up a practice on the CQC website and see the provider it is registered to.

How we did this

The register. The Care Quality Commission's care directory of 14 October 2026 lists every registered location in England with its provider. We took the 12,297 locations whose service types include dentist, and from CQC's Syndication API, read on 23 October 2026, added each location's type and, where CQC records one, the brand its provider trades under. We kept locations registered as primary dental care. We left out 323 run by NHS trusts, community dental services and community interest companies, 114 dental services inside prisons and other secure sites, and 60 registered as another type of service. That leaves 11,800 registrations.

From registrations to practices. The CQC registers providers, not buildings. A practice whose partners also trade as a company, or which has changed hands and kept an earlier registration, is on the register more than once. Counting registrations would count such a practice twice. So registrations at the same postcode were folded into one practice where their names agree once the words every practice uses and the words of the address are taken out, where the names are entirely such words and the street address is the same, where the two names are the same word for word, or where the same provider, brand or owner holds both at the same street address. 1,623 registrations were folded into another, leaving 10,177 practices, 1,478 of them with two or more registrations. A practice with several registrations is given to the registrant with the most registrations in England.

Owners. Practices are joined into one owner in three steps. First, practices registered to the same CQC provider. Second, providers that CQC records under the same brand. Third, provider companies that Companies House shows under the same parent. For the third step, each provider with a company name was matched to Companies House by its exact name, taking only a single active company: 4,473 of 4,594 matched. For each one we read the register of people with significant control, from the snapshot Companies House published on 12 November 2026, which holds the register to the end of the day before. We followed every company that holds more than half of the shares or votes, or the right to appoint the board, up through any UK company above it. A parent's company number was accepted only where the name on the register matched, and a parent recorded without a number was looked up by its exact name among the companies already read. 1,711 provider companies have such a parent. The CQC's brand for a provider is not always brought up to date when a practice company changes hands. Where Companies House showed that a provider had passed to a different group, or that the group named by its CQC brand had ceased to control it, which happened for seven providers, Companies House was followed. Providers that are individuals or partnerships, 4,206 of the 8,800, are not companies and were joined only through the CQC's own records.

Councils. Each practice was placed in a lower-tier council by its postcode, through the ONS National Statistics Postcode Lookup of August 2026. Two practices had no usable postcode and are in the England figures only. 11 councils have fewer than 10 practices, Ashfield, Bolsover, East Cambridgeshire, Fenland, Forest of Dean, Isles of Scilly, Maldon, Melton, North Warwickshire, Rossendale and Torridge. They hold 77 practices between them and are pooled in one row of the file: 41.6% of those practices belong to a group.

Deprivation and region. Each practice's neighbourhood is its 2021 lower-layer super output area, with its tenth on the English Indices of Deprivation 2025. Council deprivation is the average score for the council on the same index. Regions are the nine ONS regions.

Controls we ran. The headline depends on three choices, so we moved each. Where the lines are drawn: counting an owner with two practices as a group as well gives 43.3%, and starting groups at four gives 29.8%. How owners are joined: on CQC providers alone, 23.6% of practices are in a group of three or more. Adding CQC brands gives 29.7%, and adding Companies House parents gives the 32.8% used here. Counting a parent with a quarter to a half of the shares as an owner as well gives 33.1%, joining companies controlled by the same individual 33.3%, treating every provider registered at the same practice as one owner 33.1%, and not looking up by name a parent recorded without a number 32.4%. How registrations are folded: counting every registration as a practice gives 34.2%, folding only where the names agree 32.9%, and folding every registration at one street address 33.2%. Leaving out the services that share an address with another owner's practice, described below, gives 32.5%. Every version that traces owners through Companies House is between 32.4% and 34.2%, with groups starting at three. So one in three holds for a group of three or more under one owner, traced through both registers. It does not hold for a different meaning of group: starting at two it is more than four in ten, on CQC providers and brands without Companies House it is three in ten, and on CQC providers alone it is about a quarter. As a check on the Companies House data, the owners read from the bulk snapshot were compared with the same companies read from the Companies House API on the same day: 1,401 of 1,401 agreed.

How this relates to our earlier study. Our study of independents and groups on Google Maps found groups of 10 or more running 31% of the practices near the places it searched. That figure and the 24.6% here measure different things. The earlier one counted every registration within 2 miles of 700 town and city centres and averaged across those places, weighting each by its map results. It was not a share of all England's practices. Counted the same way as that study, with every registration as a practice, groups of 10 or more hold 27.0% of registrations across the whole of England. Counting each practice once, as this study does, gives 24.6%.

What this is not. It is not a measure of quality, price or NHS provision. It does not count patients, dentists or surgeries, so a large practice and a small one each count once. It cannot join two practices owned by the same individual where neither registration says so, so some small groups will be counted as independents. Around Harley Street, where one building can hold several separate clinics, a few practices will have been folded together. A service that one provider runs inside another's practice under its own name counts as a practice of its own. 392 practices share a street address with a practice of a different owner, and 115 of those are named as an out-of-hours, oral surgery, orthodontic or other visiting or specialist service. Five of the 115 belong to the ten largest owners, and no council with fewer than 100 practices has more than three of them. Leaving all 392 out gives 32.5% in a group for England, and leaving out the 115 gives 32.4%. In a council they can matter more. Leaving the 115 out moves the group share of a council with 20 or more practices by 6.7 points at most, and it changes the figure for five of the 20 councils in the two ranked tables, by 5.0 points at most. And it is one day's register.

Questions we get asked about this data

How many dental practices in England are owned by groups?

3,339 of 10,177, or 32.8%, belong to an owner with three or more practices, on the CQC register of 14 October 2026 with owners read from Companies House on 12 November 2026. 24.6% belong to an owner with 10 or more. The ten largest owners hold 16.7% of all practices.

How can I tell who owns my dental practice?

Search for the practice on the CQC website. Its page names the provider it is registered to. If the provider is a company, Companies House shows who controls that company. This study does not list individual practices.

Why does a group's count here differ from the number on its website?

We count practices in England only, on one day, registered as primary dental care, and we count a practice with two registrations once. A group's own figure may cover the whole UK, may be rounded, and may count its sites in a different way. Our counts are read from public registers and are not a group's own figures.

For editors

The data is free to reuse with attribution to Practice Radar, under Creative Commons BY 4.0. Sources: the Care Quality Commission's care directory of 14 October 2026 and Syndication API, Companies House's register of people with significant control (snapshot of 12 November 2026), and the ONS National Statistics Postcode Lookup. The council file, who-owns-your-dentist-by-council-2026.csv, has one row per council with its ONS code, region, number of practices, the share in large groups, small groups and independents, and the share of the largest owner. No practice, provider or owner is named in it, and it ranks only the 205 councils with 20 or more practices. The figures are a count of ownership on those dates. They are not a measure of quality, price or NHS provision, and they do not measure change.

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