The headline NHSBSA figures
NHS dental activity in England rose again in 2025/26, according to newly published figures from the NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA), reported by GDPUK — but activity has still not returned to where it stood before the pandemic.
The data show around 25 million courses of treatment provided for adults and 13 million for children — a 6% year-on-year rise for adults and 7% for children, per the NHSBSA release. In the 24 months to 31 March 2026, 18.8 million adults were seen, and in the 12 months to the same date 7.17 million children — 40% and 60% of the respective populations of England. Of the treatments delivered, 61% were Band 1 and 11% were urgent.
Set against 2018/19, however, the picture is one of a system still catching up. The total of 37.6 million courses compares with 39.7 million in 2018/19, the last full year NHS Digital counted before the pandemic — leaving activity just under 95% of that level. (The NHSBSA's own series begins with 2019/20, at 38.8 million, a year whose final weeks were already hit by the March 2020 closures.)
The same data, two opposing stories
The British Dental Association (BDA) called the improvements "modest" and repeated its case for fundamental contract reform. Its chair, Eddie Crouch, said NHS dentistry "has not bounced back" and that even before Covid the service was "beset by access problems." The BDA also pointed to its own analysis, published earlier in the summer, estimating unmet need for NHS dental care among adults at more than 13 million in 2025/26 — over one in four adults. Separately, the Nuffield Trust has found that one in ten practices providing general NHS dentistry in England had ceased doing so since March 2017.
The Association of Dental Groups (ADG) read the figures more warmly. Executive chair Neil Carmichael called the uplift "good news" and "markedly so," contrasting it with the Nuffield Trust's closure analysis and stressing that NHS dentistry "is still delivered by most dentists."
It is worth naming what these two readings are. The BDA largely represents independent practitioners and has a clear interest in framing the system as in need of reform and more funding; the ADG represents corporate groups and has an interest in defending the consolidation model as delivering. Neither framing is a neutral read. The raw NHSBSA count supports neither "dentistry is broken" nor "dentistry is bouncing back" cleanly — it supports a narrower statement: activity rose modestly from a depressed base, for reasons the dataset itself cannot explain.
That last point matters. The figures do not tell us why activity rose. One plausible explanation the lobbying narratives both skate over is mechanical: pandemic-disrupted recall cycles normalising. If that is a significant driver, part of the uplift is a one-off correction rather than a durable trend — which should give pause to anyone building multi-year staffing or capacity plans on the back of it.
What the numbers do and don't measure
The strength of this data is that it is a near-complete administrative count of NHS activity, not a survey or a modelled estimate — the numbers themselves are reliable as a measure of volume. But volume of contact is all they measure. They say nothing about clinical outcomes, disease severity or quality of care. The BDA's unmet-need figure and the Nuffield Trust's closure analysis are, by contrast, modelled and separately sourced estimates, and should be read as such rather than as hard counts on a par with the activity data.
A "course of treatment" is also a broad unit — it can mean a single check-up or a full course of restorative work. The 61% Band 1 share suggests the bulk of activity is examinations, diagnostics and simple prevention rather than complex restorative care. So "activity is up" does not straightforwardly mean "the backlog of untreated disease is being cleared."
The 11% urgent figure invites a clinical inference — that a system heavy on urgent, pain-driven presentations points to patients arriving late rather than through planned recall. That reading is reasonable, but it is interpretation, not fact: no source quoted here makes the claim, and urgent-treatment coding also reflects contractual definitions and how individual practices triage and record activity. It should be treated as a hypothesis, not a finding.
On revenue, don't confuse throughput with income. UDA values are unchanged and the promised contract-reform consultation — expected this summer — has still not launched, so nothing in this release triggers a fee change or a re-contracting decision. As a general rule, Band 1 activity carries the lowest UDA value per unit of chair time, and urgent care displaces scheduled recall slots. If your NHS book is skewing towards Band 1 and urgent work, your effective income per clinical hour on the NHS side may be falling even as "courses delivered" rises. That is a calculation worth running against your own contract data rather than assuming volume growth equals income growth.
On capacity, this is where to act now. Audit your own Band 1/urgent split against the national averages above. Skill-mix is the available lever: routing preventive and Band 1 volume to hygienists and therapists protects dentist time for restorative and urgent care. Treat urgent demand as a capacity-planning line, not a footnote — practices without dedicated triage capacity risk having recall and consultation slots continually cannibalised.
On the corporate-versus-independent question, be careful. It is tempting to conclude from the ADG's comment that corporate groups are scaling NHS delivery faster than independents. This release contains no evidence for that — it is the ADG's own claim, and the ADG has every reason to attribute a national uplift to its members whether or not corporates specifically drove it. Read it as an interested party's framing, not an established operational trend.
On marketing, honesty and capacity have to move together. For practices with genuine NHS capacity — open books, children's places, or same-day urgent access — this national context is a reason to communicate clearly, because public coverage of access problems means many prospective patients assume NHS dentistry has simply vanished. Factual statements such as "we see NHS children" or "same-day urgent NHS appointments available" are low-risk and useful.
But the CAP Code requires claims to be true and current at the point of publication. Citing national NHSBSA figures to imply local availability that doesn't exist would be misleading by implication. Comparative framing ("unlike other practices, we still offer NHS dentistry") risks disparagement and unsubstantiated-comparison complaints. And any use of the unmet-need or crisis narrative to manufacture urgency ("book before NHS dentistry disappears") strays into exploiting patients' lack of knowledge — a concern under both ASA and GDC standards. Where you promote urgent NHS care, be precise: urgent contractually means pain relief, not a full course of treatment.
There is a subtler trap too. Successful "our books are open" advertising, pegged to a national uplift rather than your own sustained capacity, can generate more registrations than a practice can hold — and books opened then quietly closed within months invite exactly the bait-and-switch reputation damage and complaint-driven scrutiny that good marketing is supposed to avoid. Market the capacity you can actually sustain, not the capacity the national headline implies.
The honest summary is unglamorous: the system did a bit more work than last year, from a low base, for reasons this dataset can't confirm. That is worth knowing — and worth resisting the temptation to inflate in either direction.
Corrected 10 October 2026: an earlier version said children were counted over two years; the NHSBSA counts children seen over 12 months and adults over 24. Figures are now taken directly from the NHSBSA release as corrected on 24 September 2026, whose corrections did not affect any national figure used here.