Ask a buyer what kind of dental practice makes the most money and you will get a confident answer: private, obviously. For the 2024-25 financial year, the accountants’ own numbers say the confident answer was wrong. The average private, NHS and mixed practice finished the year within £4,759 of each other on profit — the tightest that gap has been in years. Here is what a practice actually earns, why the categories converged, and why the number everyone quotes is not the number a buyer should care about.
The kind of practice barely predicted the profit
Every year the National Association of Specialist Dental Accountants and Lawyers (NASDAL) pools anonymised figures from its member accountants — who between them act for more than a quarter of the UK’s self-employed dentists — and publishes the average net profit per principal for each type of practice. It is the closest thing the sector has to a real profitability benchmark, because it is built from filed accounts rather than asking-price surveys.
For 2024-25 — accounts with year ends up to 5 April 2025 — the three practice types landed almost on top of one another: £198,291 for private practices, £196,559 for NHS, and £193,532 for mixed. A spread of £4,759 between the most and least profitable category. A year earlier the same three types were £21,601 apart. The gap did not narrow gently; it collapsed.
Read the dumbbell and the story is in the arrows. Private practices had the furthest to travel — they came off a weak 2023-24 and rebounded about 22% to top the table. NHS practices, in gold, made the second-biggest jump, up 18.5%. Mixed practices, which had been the most profitable category the year before, gained just 5.5% and were overtaken by both. The three lines start scattered across £21,601 and finish bunched inside a slot barely a fifth as wide.
Why the NHS number jumped — and why not to bank on it
The most counter-intuitive line on the chart is the gold one, because it contradicts a belief the whole market runs on: that NHS dentistry is where the money isn’t. For this one year, the average NHS principal earned within about £1,700 of the average private principal. But the reason matters more than the number, and it is not that NHS demand surged.
NASDAL’s own commentary is specific about the cause. The recovery reflects the uplift to the UDA rate — the price the NHS pays per unit of dental activity — combined with practices seeing less clawback than in previous years, when unmet activity targets meant handing money back. In the compiler’s words, the same uplift produced “better remunerated dentists but a reduction in NHS availability.” In other words, this is a contract and policy effect, not a growth story. It rewarded the practices that hit their targets under a newly generous rate, in a year when the arithmetic happened to line up.
That is exactly why a buyer should not annualise it. A single strong benchmarking year, driven by a rate change and a fall in clawback, is a snapshot of one cohort of accounts under one set of contract conditions — not a durable ranking of which practice type earns more. It is the same caution we apply to the goodwill figures brokers quote: the survey describes a market in a moment, and applying its headline to your own practice produces a number with the right units and the wrong meaning. We set that out in full in our guide to how dental practice valuation actually works.
One more figure keeps the recovery honest. Wages and direct costs did not fall — they rose, from 45.8% to 47% of fees. So the profit increase was not a cost saving; it came from fee income growing faster than a rising cost base. In a year when that fee growth leaned heavily on an NHS rate uplift, the durability of the profit depends on the durability of the rate.
What “profit per principal” does and does not tell a buyer
Here is the part most coverage skips, and the part that decides whether these numbers help you. “Net profit per principal” is the profit the practice generates for its owner before the owner’s own tax and drawings. Crucially, for an owner who still works clinically — which is most of them — that figure bundles two very different things together: the reward for the dentistry the owner personally does, and the return on the business itself.
For a buyer, those two things could not be more different. If you are buying a practice to work in it, part of that £196,000 is simply the wage you will pay yourself for a chair’s worth of clinical work — income you could earn as an associate without buying anything. The part that justifies the purchase price is what is left after you notionally pay a dentist to do the owner’s clinical hours: the business profit. A benchmarking headline cannot tell you that split for a specific practice, and a seller has every reason not to volunteer it.
This is why a profit benchmark and a valuation are two halves of the same question, not the same thing. The benchmark tells you what a typical practice of this type earned. A valuation strips out the owner’s own labour to find the maintainable, transferable earnings a buyer actually inherits, and prices those. Use this data to sanity-check whether a practice’s claimed profit is in a believable range for its type — and then do the real work of separating the job from the business. Our checklist for buying a dental practice and our guide to valuation cover how.
What this means if you are buying or selling. For 2024-25 the accountants’ benchmark shows private, NHS and mixed practices earning within £4,759 of one another — so “is it NHS or private?” told you far less about profit than the sector assumes. Treat that convergence as one strong year, not a new order: the NHS jump was an UDA-rate uplift and lower clawback, a policy effect that can reverse, on top of a cost base that rose, not fell. And remember what the headline figure is: profit per principal, which for a working owner includes the pay for their own dentistry. The number that justifies a purchase price is the business profit left once you have paid someone to do the owner’s clinical work — always lower, and never in the brochure. Use the benchmark to test whether a claimed profit is plausible; use a proper valuation to decide what it is worth.
Where the numbers came from, and where to go next
Every figure here is from the NASDAL Annual Benchmarking Statistics for the 2024-25 financial year, compiled by chartered accountant Ian Simpson of Humphrey and Co from the filed accounts NASDAL’s member firms handle — independent of the brokers who market practices for sale. For how to turn a profit figure into a defensible price, see our guides to dental practice valuation and the buying a dental practice checklist; if you are weighing building over buying, see opening a squat practice. The full picture sits in our guide to buying and selling a dental practice and the Buying & Selling section.
This is the third piece in our “by the numbers” data series. For what the regulators’ own figures show about how rarely a concern ends a career, and why CQC cannot rate your practice, see dental regulation by the numbers; for the true shape of the workforce you would be buying the staff of, see dental workforce by the numbers.
This reference is produced by The Reliance and reviewed by David Hinckley, a GDC-registered Clinical Dental Technician (GDC No. 150038). All profitability figures are drawn from the NASDAL Annual Benchmarking Statistics for the 2024-25 financial year (accounts with year ends up to 5 April 2025), compiled by Ian Simpson of Humphrey and Co and reported April–May 2026; the survey covers the accountant members of NASDAL, who together act for more than a quarter of the UK’s self-employed dentists. “Net profit per principal” is profit attributable to an owner before the owner’s own tax and drawings and includes the reward for the owner’s own clinical work. Figures are averages of a self-selected sample for one financial year and are not a forecast. This is general information for those buying, selling or running dental practices, not investment, tax or valuation advice. See our editorial standards.