Which official files are used?
- NHS Business Services Authority, NHS Dental Statistics for England 2025/26 (published 27 August 2026, updated 20 October 2026). Official statistic, Open Government Licence v3.0. We use the patient-location view for “how many residents were seen”, and the contract-location view only as a supporting supply measure. National courses of treatment, units of dental activity, patients-seen time series and dentist counts come from the same publication and the workforce CSVs on the Open Data Portal.
- Office for National Statistics mid-2025 population estimates, as already applied in the NHSBSA local-authority percentage tables, and Local Authority Districts, December 2024, ultra-generalised boundaries (OGL v3.0; contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right).
- NHS dental charges in England from 1 April 2026, from the NHS website and NHSBSA notices, checked 11 November 2026. Wales and Scotland charges are from official NHSBSA and GOV.WALES pages opened the same day.
The 2025/26 patient-location tables use updated ONS codes for Barnsley (E08000038) and Sheffield (E08000039). These are joined to the December 2024 boundary codes E08000016 and E08000019 used on the map.
What do the main numbers mean?
- Adults seen — people aged 18 or over with at least one NHS dental visit (including orthodontics) in the 24 months to 31 March 2026, divided by the mid-2025 adult population of the council area.
- Children seen — people aged 17 or under with at least one visit in the 12 months to the same date, divided by the mid-2025 child population.
- Courses of treatment — counted in the financial year 2025/26 for people who live in the area (patient-location). One person can have more than one course.
- Small patient counts in the official files are sometimes redacted. We do not invent missing figures.
The files do not say whether a practice is taking new NHS patients. We never infer that from activity or patients-seen counts.
Private typical fees
These are published national typical figures from independent surveys of advertised practice fees, not a quote for a particular practice, and not official statistics. We did not collect prices from practice websites. Fees vary widely by treatment, materials and the practice. Sources: myTribe private dentist research, collected early August 2026 (8,158 UK practices that publish standard private fees); and TreatCompare median published fees in England, captured March 2026. We did not scrape practice websites.
Photographs
The photographs are real, freely licensed stock pictures. There are no identifiable patients and no NHS logo.
Limits
This is an England atlas. Comparable official activity-per-council files for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland were not added, because they are organised differently and are not a cheap like-for-like. National charges for Wales and Scotland are on the charges guide. Dentist Atlas is published by a private individual, is independent, and is not part of, or endorsed by, the NHS. The letters “NHS” appear only as a factual reference to official services and statistics, never in the brand or logo.
Information only, not medical advice. If you are in pain or worried about a dental problem, contact a dentist, call NHS 111, or call 999 in an emergency. Dentist Atlas is independent and is not part of, or endorsed by, the NHS.