UK dental marketing costs: compare fees, ad spend and total acquisition cost

Disclosure. This site is published by the company behind Dental Mastery, which sells marketing services to dental practices. Dental Mastery is deliberately left out of the price table below.

Two quotes for "dental marketing" can differ by thousands of pounds a month and still not be comparable. One includes advertising spend, the other excludes it. One is quoted with VAT, the other without. One has a six-month minimum term, the other is rolling. Before comparing prices, I separate every quote into the same four lines, then judge the total against the patients it produces.

The four costs on every marketing bill

1. Advertising spend: what Google, Meta or another platform charges for your ads.
2. Management fee: what an agency or freelancer charges to run the work, usually monthly.
3. Setup and other costs: onboarding fees, landing pages, creative, call tracking and software.
4. VAT you cannot reclaim: for most practices this is a real cost, not a pass-through. More on this below.

The first is variable and largely set by auction. The second and third are set by your supplier. The fourth depends on your own VAT position. A quote that shows only one of them is incomplete, however good the number looks.

Advertising spend

Ad spend is not a fixed price. On Google Ads, the daily budget you set is an average: on a given day a campaign can spend up to twice that figure, and Google limits a month's spend to 30.4 times the average daily budget ^[1]. The price of each click comes from an auction, and you pay the minimum needed to clear the thresholds and beat the advertiser below you, which is usually less than your maximum bid ^[2].

Meta works on a weekly rhythm. It can spend up to 75% more than your daily budget on a given day, but no more than seven times the daily budget across a Sunday to Saturday week ^[3]. Which ad wins each placement depends on bid, estimated response and ad quality together ^[4].

The practical consequence: nobody can honestly promise a fixed cost per enquiry in advance. A supplier can control how well the budget is used. The auction sets the price.

Management fees and published prices

Most dental marketing suppliers do not publish prices. The table lists UK suppliers that do, taken only from each supplier's own website on 1 November 2026. It is in alphabetical order and is not a ranking or a recommendation. The packages cover different work, so the monthly figures are not like-for-like.

Three things stand out. Published monthly fees run from £875 to £3,250, mostly quoted before VAT. Setup fees range from nothing to £2,000. Minimum terms range from 30 days' notice to six months, which matters as much as the monthly figure: six months at £1,975 is a commitment of almost £12,000 in fees before any ad spend.

VAT: the cost most comparisons miss

The UK standard rate of VAT is 20% ^[12]. Dental care provided by registered dental professionals is generally exempt from VAT, although services carried out purely for cosmetic reasons are standard-rated ^[10]. A business that makes exempt supplies normally cannot recover the VAT it pays on costs that relate to them, subject to a de minimis test (broadly, exempt input tax of no more than £625 a month on average and no more than half of all input tax) ^[11].

For a practice whose income is mainly exempt dental care, that usually means the VAT on an agency's fee is simply part of the price. A £1,500 plus VAT retainer costs £1,800.

Advertising spend can be affected too. For UK business accounts billed by Google Ireland, Google does not add VAT to the invoice; the advertiser accounts for it under the reverse charge ^[13]. Meta applies the same approach when a business is billed by Meta Platforms Ireland, and adds VAT when billing through a local entity ^[14]. Either way, whether that VAT ends up as a cost depends on how much of it your practice can recover.

From monthly cost to cost per started patient

A low monthly price is not the same as a low cost of acquiring a patient. The useful question is what each started treatment cost you, and what it left after delivering the treatment. I work it through in stages:

1. Total monthly cost = ad spend + management fee + other costs + VAT you cannot reclaim.
2. Cost per enquiry = total monthly cost / new-patient enquiries.
3. Cost per consultation = total monthly cost / consultations attended.
4. Cost per started patient = total monthly cost / patients who start treatment.
5. Contribution = treatment revenue minus delivery costs (lab, materials, clinician pay), compared with the total marketing cost.

The middle steps are where most of the money is won or lost. If half the enquiries are never called back, cost per started patient doubles without any change in ad spend. That is why I look at enquiry handling and follow-up before recommending a bigger budget.

You can run these numbers for your own practice with the acquisition cost calculator. It shows the equation behind every result and handles months with no enquiries without breaking.

A worked example

These are round figures chosen to make the arithmetic easy to follow. They are not averages or benchmarks.

Change one assumption and the picture moves a long way. If consultation attendance falls from 50% to 30%, the same £3,600 produces about 7 starts instead of 12, and cost per started patient rises to roughly £500. That is the reason to measure every stage rather than only cost per click.

Questions to ask before you sign

• Is advertising spend included in the monthly figure, or billed separately by the platform?
• Is every price quoted before or after VAT?
• What is the setup fee, and what does it buy?
• What is the minimum term and the notice period?
• Whose name are the ad accounts, tracking and website in, and what do you keep if you leave?
• Will reporting count clicks, enquiries, attended consultations or started treatment?
• Who checks the ads against the rules? The General Dental Council expects advertising to be accurate and not misleading, to show the GDC number where a professional is named, and to say whether the practice is NHS, mixed or private ^[15]. The advertising regulators expect evidence to be held for any objective claim ^[16].