Two of the three deadlines have already gone. The third has not — and it is the one most likely to catch a practice out. Dental care professionals had to pay the annual retention fee and declare indemnity by 31 July. The CPD statement is due by 28 August. The distinction that matters is that only the declaration window is still open: the window for actually doing the CPD you are about to declare shut on 31 July.

The three parts of DCP renewal

Annual renewal for dental care professionals is not one task. It is three, with two different deadlines, and it is entirely possible to have done two of them and still lose your registration over the third.

The General Dental Council’s position on what happens if any of them is missed is not ambiguous. In its own words, DCPs who do not meet “the 31 July deadline for payment and the indemnity declaration, or the 28 August deadline for their CPD statement, risk being removed from the register and will no longer be able to legally practise in the UK.”

Why 28 August is a paperwork deadline, not a learning deadline

This is the part that is routinely misread, and the misreading is expensive.

A DCP’s CPD year runs from 1 August to 31 July — it is aligned to the registration year, not the calendar year. (For dentists it is 1 January to 31 December, which is why dentists renew in December and DCPs in July.) The statement can be made up to 28 days after the CPD year ends, which is where 28 August comes from, and 28 January for dentists.

But the GDC is explicit that “any CPD you do after the official end date of the year … cannot be counted towards the previous year.” So a hygienist who realises in early August that they are short of hours cannot fix it by booking a course this month. Anything they do now counts towards the year that began on 1 August. The twenty-eight days are for declaring what has already happened, not for catching up.

The window for doing the CPD closed on 31 July. Only the window for declaring it is still open. Booking a course this month does not fix last year’s shortfall — it starts this year’s.

The practical consequence for an owner is that the honest conversation with a short-of-hours team member has to happen now, and it is about how they declare accurately and what follows, not about a last-minute scramble for hours. The declared number must match the activity log and the evidence held, and the statement includes a declaration that it is full and accurate.

The hours themselves

Requirements run over a five-year cycle and differ by registrant title. All hours submitted to the GDC must be verifiable — non-verifiable CPD can still be worth doing, but it does not count towards the total.

Two details that catch people. First, dual registration: if you hold more than one title you must meet the higher requirement, and the CPD has to be relevant to your field of practice under both titles. The GDC’s own worked example is a clinical dental technician who is also a dental technician — 75 hours, not 50. Second, there is a spreading rule underneath the headline number: a minimum of 10 hours for every two consecutive CPD years, and you must not declare two consecutive years at zero. More than one zero year across a cycle is permitted, provided that rule holds. A team member who has front-loaded a cycle and coasted for two years can therefore be compliant on total hours and still in breach.

Records must be kept for five years after the cycle ends. Evidence is not routinely requested when a statement is made — it is requested when something does not add up, which is precisely when not having it is worst.

What actually happens if someone misses it

Not an instant strike-off. The GDC sends a notice and the professional has 28 days to respond. Non-response is what puts registration at risk. The sting is in the detail: CPD completed during that notice period still does not count towards the previous year, so the notice is an opportunity to explain, not a second chance to comply.

It is worth being clear that removal at renewal is a real, recurring event rather than a theoretical one. At the most recent dentist renewal cycle, Dentistry.co.uk reported that 900 dentists came off the register, up from 793 the year before. That figure covers voluntary removals, retirements and deaths as well as non-payment, so it is not a count of people caught out by a deadline — but it is the order of magnitude at which registers move each year.

The MyGDC complication

This year’s renewal ran on MyGDC, the service that replaced eGDC in March 2026, and it did not go smoothly. On 23 July the GDC confirmed that DCPs struggling to renew through the platform would not be removed, provided they made contact before the 31 July deadline. That route has closed, and as at the time of writing the GDC has published nothing about what followed, so no one outside the regulator knows how many registrations were affected.

The figures the GDC did publish, current as at 22 July, are the reason to treat the CPD statement with more care than usual this year. Of the DCP register, 64,298 (75%) had paid the retention fee and 56,580 (66%) had completed renewal — and 13,276, some 15% of the register, had not logged into MyGDC at all with nine days to go. A significant number of people were therefore doing this late, on an unfamiliar system, under pressure. Those are the conditions in which a CPD statement gets left until the end.

One small thing that trips people up: the GDC’s current CPD guidance document, last revised in February 2025, still refers to “eGDC” throughout, because it pre-dates the changeover. The requirements it sets out are the requirements; only the name of the website has moved on.

What this means for your practice

The GDC’s requirements sit with the individual registrant, not the employer. But the consequence of a lapse lands on the practice — an unregistered team member cannot legally treat patients, and hygiene and therapy lists cannot be redistributed at a day’s notice. Liability for the work delivered under an NHS contract stays with the contract holder regardless of whose registration failed.

Three things worth doing before 28 August:

• Ask for confirmation, not reassurance. For every DCP on the payroll or on contract, establish that the CPD statement has actually been submitted. “It’s in hand” is not evidence, and this year’s platform problems make the usual assumption riskier than normal.
• Check the two closed deadlines too. The retention fee and indemnity declaration were due on 31 July. If anyone is unsure whether theirs went through — plausible, given the MyGDC disruption — that needs establishing now rather than discovering it when a registration check fails.
• Put it on the calendar properly. The dates do not move: 31 July for the fee and indemnity, 28 August for the statement, and a CPD year that ends on 31 July, which means the real deadline for doing the hours is the one nobody writes down. Our dental practice compliance calendar covers where this sits among the year’s other recurring obligations.

What this is not is a patient-facing matter. There is no legitimate reason to raise registration mechanics with patients, and doing so manufactures doubt where none should exist. Nor is basic GDC registration something to market on — it is a legal minimum, and framing it as a differentiator implies competitors might not meet it, which is misleading by implication.

For the wider picture of who is on the register and how it is changing, see the dental workforce by the numbers; for what the GDC does when concerns are raised about a registrant, see our explainer on the GDC fitness-to-practise process. CPD compliance is not a fitness-to-practise matter, and the two should not be confused — but both are administered by the same regulator, and both start with a notice you have 28 days to answer. Our complete guide to dental practice compliance is the wider framework this fits into.