Someone with a cracked filling at eleven at night is not going to ring the practice. They are going to look at three or four websites, and the ones that will not tell them roughly what anything costs are the ones they close.
Most dental practices leave prices off, and the reasons are good ones. Every mouth is different. A quoted price invites a complaint when the real treatment turns out to be more involved. Nobody wants to be the cheapest listing in town, and nobody wants to be the most expensive either.
All of that is true. It is also a decision with a cost, and the cost is usually larger than the one being avoided.
What happens when there is no price
The patient does not conclude that it depends. They conclude one of two things, and both are worse than a number.
- They assume it is expensive. A price that is withheld reads as a price that would put people off. This is unfair to practices that are competitively priced and it is the most common assumption.
- They ring the practice that published one. Not because that practice is cheaper, but because they have already answered the question and are therefore easier to deal with.
The enquiry you lose is invisible. Nobody rings to say they did not ring, so a practice can hold this policy for years and never see what it costs.
A range is still a price
The objection to publishing is nearly always about the complicated treatments, and it gets applied to all of them. But most of what a practice does has a knowable price.
A check-up has a price. A hygienist appointment has a price. A standard white filling sits in a band that is narrow enough to publish. Those are also the treatments a new patient is most likely to be searching for, because they are the ones people book without being told to.
For the rest, a range with the reason attached does the job: "Root canal treatment, from X, depending on which tooth and how many canals it has." That sentence is honest, it is useful, and it does not commit you to a number you cannot keep.
What to publish, in order
Work down from the most commonly booked rather than trying to publish the full list on day one.
- New patient examination. This is the appointment a new patient actually books. It should have a price on it and the price should be easy to find.
- Hygienist. Frequently searched, easy to price, and often what brings someone back.
- Routine treatment bands. Fillings, extractions, crowns. Ranges are fine here.
- Everything else, as "from". Implants and orthodontics genuinely do depend. A starting figure with an honest explanation is better than silence.
Put them on one page, in a list the patient can read without working anything out. Do not bury them inside a treatment description three clicks in.
Which practices should not publish prices?
There are two cases where holding back is the right call.
If you are mid-way through repositioning, publishing the old prices to support the new ones is not helpful. And if your prices genuinely are at the top of your area, a bare list without the reason beside it will lose you the enquiry before you have had the chance to explain why.
In both cases the answer is not silence, it is context. Prices with a sentence about what is included tend to outperform prices alone, and they outperform no prices by a wide margin.
What does the regulator require?
In the UK, practices are required to display their prices, and have been for some years. The General Dental Council expects a price list to be available, and the CQC looks for it. Practices that treat it as an optional marketing decision are sometimes answering a question that was already settled for them.
Check what applies where you practise rather than taking our word for it. The point is that the compliance answer and the commercial answer usually agree here, which is not always the case.
Putting it on the site
A price list is a page, not a PDF. A PDF does not get read on a phone, does not show up in a search, and dates quietly because nobody wants to regenerate it.
Build it as a page you can edit in a minute when a price changes, with the date you last reviewed it at the bottom. That date does more for trust than the prices themselves, because it tells the reader somebody is still looking after this.
If you are costing up a new site to put it on, how much a medical practice website costs breaks down what the work actually involves.
FAQ
How often should a price list be reviewed?
Twice a year is enough for most practices, plus whenever something changes. The review matters more than the frequency: a list with a visible date on it that is six months old reads as maintained, and one with no date reads as abandoned however recent it is.
Should payment plans appear next to the prices?
Yes, on the same page rather than a separate one. The patient weighing a figure they find uncomfortable is exactly the person who needs to know the figure can be spread, and sending them to another page to find out loses most of them.
Will publishing prices attract people who only care about price?
Some, and they would have rung to ask anyway. The larger effect runs the other way: a published price filters out the enquiries you were never going to convert, which gives reception back the time those calls were taking.
What if a competitor undercuts us the week we publish?
They could already see your prices by ringing up as a patient, so publishing changes very little about what competitors know. It changes a great deal about what patients know.