The short version
- UK agencies publish costs of roughly £30 to £300 per new patient, depending on channel and treatment.
- Cost per click and cost per enquiry are not cost per patient: each step loses people.
- Published dental benchmarks mostly come from agencies and rarely give a method.
- Track calls and registrations by source for 90 days to get your own number.
Most UK dental practices pay between roughly £30 and £300 for each new patient, depending on the channel and the treatment. Published figures sit in that range, but nearly all of them come from agencies selling the service, so use them as a rough guide and calculate your own.
The cost per new patient is the total you spend on a channel divided by the number of people who attend a first appointment and become patients. It is a harder number than cost per click or cost per enquiry, and it is the one that decides whether marketing pays. Our guide to dental marketing costs in the UK covers monthly prices. This post covers what those monthly prices buy per patient.
What is a realistic cost per new patient in UK dental marketing?
A realistic cost per new patient for UK dental marketing is about £50 to £300 for paid search and £30 to £80 for organic search, according to agency published ranges. Cosmetic and implant patients cost more than emergency or general patients. Treat every range as a claim to test, not a promise.
Whito, a UK dental marketing agency, lists £80 to £200 per new patient from emergency Google Ads, £100 to £300 for cosmetic, and £30 to £80 from SEO. Its own methodology says the figures are compiled from keyword data, rate cards and community posts, with no sample size. That is typical of the whole category.
Cost per click, per enquiry and per new patient: what each tells you
Cost per click is what Google charges when someone clicks your advert. Cost per enquiry is your spend divided by the calls, forms and bookings it produced. Cost per new patient is your spend divided by people who attended and registered. Each step loses people, so the figures grow at every stage.
Say a practice spends £2,000 in a month on Google Ads, a hypothetical set of figures. It pays £8 a click and gets 250 clicks. Eight per cent of visitors call or fill in a form, which gives 20 enquiries at £100 each. Ten book and attend, so a consultation costs £200. Six accept treatment and register, so each new patient costs about £333.
The click price looked small. The patient price is more than 40 times larger. Practices that stop at cost per click, or at cost per lead, usually think their marketing is cheaper than it is.
That is why we ask for appointment and registration data before we report on any dental account. Our patient acquisition cost calculator follows the same chain.
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What do dental clicks cost by treatment?
Dental clicks in the UK cost roughly £3.50 for an NHS dentist search up to £15 for dental implants, based on one agency’s 2026 averages. Invisalign sits near £9. London and the South East run 15 to 30 per cent higher. Other agencies publish lower figures, so your own account data matters more.
Whito’s table gives average clicks of £15 for implants, £11.50 for emergency dentist, £9 for Invisalign, £6 for “dentist near me”, £4.50 for teeth whitening and £3.50 for NHS dentist. Another agency, dental-design.marketing, puts the average across high-intent dental keywords at £6.10 per click and £64.50 per lead.
Show the numbers
| Dental implants | £15 |
| Emergency dentist | £11.5 |
| Invisalign | £9 |
| Dentist near me | £6 |
| Teeth whitening | £4.5 |
| NHS dentist | £3.5 |
The gap between agencies is large. A third, Whitehat SEO, quotes implants at only £3.50 to £5.50. Neither is necessarily wrong. Location, match types, ad quality and competition all move the price, which is why a single national average tells you little about your postcode.
How does cost per new patient differ by channel?
Cost per new patient differs by channel mainly because of intent. Someone searching “emergency dentist” is ready to book. Someone seeing a social advert is not yet looking. Search channels usually produce patients at a lower price per head, while social channels produce more enquiries that convert less often.
| Channel | Published cost per new patient | What drives it |
|---|---|---|
| Google Ads, emergency | £80 to £200 | High intent, quick booking |
| Google Ads, cosmetic | £100 to £300 | Higher click price, longer decision |
| Organic search (SEO) | £30 to £80 | Spread over months of work |
| Referral scheme | £100 to £200 | Incentive paid per referral |
| Social media | £20 to £60 (organic) | Low intent, depends on content |
These ranges are Whito’s, from the page linked above, and they are agency estimates. A typical private practice should expect its own figure to land inside or above them until tracking is set up properly.
From our work: When we review paid accounts, the click price is rarely the problem. In a six-day Meta Ads sprint for a restaurant, cost per click fell from 1.80 PLN to 0.31 PLN, but the useful check was whether people actually visited. Dental accounts need the same check one step further: did they book and attend?
For implants and aligners, the price per patient is higher but each patient is worth more. Our Invisalign patient acquisition guide shows how that changes the target.
How do you work out your own cost per new patient?
To work out your own cost per new patient, divide a channel’s monthly spend by the number of new patients it brought in, counted from your practice management system. Use at least three months of data. You need call tracking and a source field on each new registration to do it properly.
Follow these steps:
- Add up the spend for one channel: ad budget, management fee and any tools.
- Track every call and form with a source. Google Ads can measure calls from ads and calls to a number on your website.
- Ask each new patient on registration how they found you, and record the answer.
- Count only people who attended and registered, not enquiries.
- Divide spend by that count, then compare with what a patient is worth to you over a few years.
Call tracking matters more than most owners expect. Whitehat SEO reports that only 35 per cent of UK practices track phone calls, although many enquiries arrive that way. Without it, a phone-heavy channel looks like it does nothing.
Why you should treat published dental figures with caution
Published dental marketing figures should be treated with caution because most come from agencies, rarely state a sample size and often disagree. One source puts Invisalign clicks near £9, another near £3. Use them to sense-check a quote, then replace them with numbers from your own practice.
When we compared the pages above, we found three recurring problems. Figures are labelled as 2026 benchmarks without a method. Some mix cost per lead with cost per booked treatment. And case studies describe one practice, often in London, then present the result as typical.
Our dental marketing budget guide takes the same careful line on percentages of revenue. For the wider picture of patient acquisition for private clinics, see our healthcare marketing page.
Frequently asked questions
A good cost per new patient is one comfortably below what the patient is worth to you over the following years. Published UK ranges run from about £30 to £300 by channel. A practice with high-value treatment can afford more, while a mostly NHS practice usually has to stay at the bottom.
A dental lead in the UK typically costs between £35 and £180 on Google, depending on treatment. Dominate Dental, an agency, lists about £35 for emergency, £85 for Invisalign, £95 for cosmetic and £140 for implants. These are unverified agency averages, so confirm them against your own account.
Cost per new patient is the better measure because it counts people who attended and registered. Cost per lead is useful for spotting problems early, since it moves first. A cheap lead that never books is worth nothing, so use both and watch the step between them.
One agency’s published figures put an Invisalign enquiry at about £85 and an implant enquiry at £100 to £180, though other sources differ. London practices pay more. Because these treatments carry larger fees, a higher cost per enquiry can still pay back if consultations convert well.
Give a channel at least 90 days, and longer for SEO. Early weeks include learning and low volume, so one month can mislead in either direction. Judge the trend over three months, and compare the same months year on year where you can, as demand rises in September and January.
Get your own figure worked out
If you want a cost per new patient based on your own bookings rather than agency averages, contact LineUp. We will look at your tracking, your channels and your patient data, and tell you plainly where the money is going.
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