Dental Earnings and Expenses Estimates, 2020/21

The results within this publication relate to full-time and part-time self-employed primary care Principal and Associate dentists with registered NHS/Health Service activity during 2020/21. Dentists in different countries worked under different dental contracts:

England and Wales

• General Dental Services (GDS)
• Personal Dental Services (PDS)
• Mixed GDS/PDS or mixed GDS/PDS/Trust-led Dental Services (TDS)

Northern Ireland

• General Dental Services (GDS)

Scotland

• GDS and a registered Dental Surgeon (DS) number

This report considers only self-employed primary care dentists who performed at least one NHS Unit of Dental Activity (UDA) and/or one NHS Unit of Orthodontic Activity (UOA). This is the equivalent of one Item of Service and/or one Orthodontic Item of Service, in Northern Ireland and one Course of Treatment and/or one Course of Orthodontic Treatment in Scotland.

• Dentists with no self-employment income
• Dentists who performed only private dentistry

Also excluded from the England and Wales dataset:

• Provider Only dentists (who undertake no dental activity).
• Dentists working solely under a TDS contract.

The report provides a detailed breakdown of the allowable expenses results. For each expense category, results are shown in monetary terms and as a percentage of the total expenses.

• Office and general business expenses include general administrative costs as well as legal and professional costs.
• Interest expenses include almost all types of interest; however, this category excludes a small amount of interest for businesses (which in this report are self-employed primary care dentists) where turnover is less than £85,000 for the year, which is included in the Other category.
• The Other category includes a variety of expenses, including laboratory costs, materials costs, advertising and business entertainment costs, bad debts, alternative finance payments, interest (for businesses where annual turnover is less than £85,000), and expenses for those businesses where a more detailed breakdown is not available.

Costs incurred by self-employed primary care Principal dentists for using Associate dentists to deliver some NHS/Health Services work on their contract may be included in different expense categories, depending on the person completing the Self Assessment tax form. It is thought that such costs of Associate dentists are likely to be included in the Other category on most Principal dentists’ tax forms, but in some cases these costs could be included in the Employee category.

The expenses figures may also be affected by the way in which reimbursement for specific overheads are recorded on a dentist’s Self Assessment tax return.

A number of factors make comparisons between years difficult, including changes to the dental population and the sample used to produce this report.

Analyses for subgroups with low population counts must be treated with caution, as changes in the sample size can have very noticeable effects on the averages.

Further detailed information on some of the elements of dental expenses in England, Wales and Scotland – laboratory costs, materials costs and non-clinical staff wages – has been provided by the National Association of Specialist Dental Accountants and Lawyers and is included in Annex A.

Taxable Income and total expenses, from 2010/11 to 2020/21, in both cash and real terms for Principal and Associate dentists can be found in the accompanying Power BI visualisation. Cash (or Nominal) terms refers to the historic amount; real terms is calculated using Gross Domestic Product (GDP) deflators published by Her Majesty’s (HM) Treasury as at June 2022 to adjust for inflation. (This can be accessed at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/gdp-deflators-at-market-prices-and-money-gdp).

Since 2020/21 is used as the base year, the cash and real terms amount in 2020/21 are identical.