Practical notes on tax, accounts, and practice economics, written for dentists and owners, not generic SMEs. For the firm itself, see our specialist dental accountants page.
Most first-time buyers assume they need a large cash deposit to buy a dental practice. In fact, qualifying dentists can often borrow up to 100% of the goodwill and equipment, and sometimes more, because lenders treat dentistry as a professional category with resilient, contract-backed income. This guide explains why that lending exists, exactly what 100% covers, the criteria you have to meet, the security and personal guarantees involved, how much you can borrow against practice earnings, and what to do when a lender only offers 90%.
Chairs, CBCT scanners and intraoral scanners are rarely bought with cash. This guide covers the funding side of dental equipment finance: hire purchase, finance lease and operating lease as products, the deposit, term, rate and balloon you should expect by equipment type, and when to fold kit into an acquisition loan instead. The tax treatment is summarised in a line and cross-linked to the detailed capital-allowances pages.
A dental commercial mortgage is the secured facility that funds a freehold surgery building, and it works very differently from the goodwill loan that buys the business. This guide covers the mechanics only: LTV and deposit, term and rate structure, the security and personal guarantees a lender takes, how a surgery is valued, and whether to hold the freehold personally, in the company or in a pension. Business-purpose lending only, with the tax of the holding structure summarised and cross-linked, not re-explained.
Even a profitable dental practice can be short of cash the month a large HMRC bill falls due. This guide covers the narrow job of borrowing to smooth those liabilities, the income tax payment on account, corporation tax, the VAT quarter and any NHS clawback, using a tax loan or VAT loan. It sets out which facility fits which bill, keeps the tax treatment to a summary with cross-links, and shows when borrowing is the wrong answer.
This is the map of the whole journey, from deciding whether to buy through to your first hundred days as an owner. It sequences the seven stages of a UK dental practice purchase, sets honest expectations on cost and timeline, and routes each stage to the detailed guide and the funding option behind it. The focus of this hub is how the deal is financed and how the pieces connect, not a re-run of valuation or due diligence, which have their own pages.
As a practice grows and legacy debt ages, refinancing can lower the margin you pay, release equity that has built up in the goodwill, restructure the term or move you to a lender that understands dentistry. This guide covers the lending mechanics: the four triggers to refinance, how equity release works as the valuation rises, early-repayment charges and break costs, a worked rate-review-plus-equity-release case, and the situations where refinancing is the wrong move. The tax of refinancing is summarised and cross-linked, not repeated.
Buying a second dental practice is a different funding conversation from buying your first. Lenders stop looking at you as a first-time buyer and start assessing you as a two-site operator, with an existing practice they can lend against and a management-capacity question they did not ask before. This guide covers how to fund practice number two: releasing equity from practice one, standalone acquisition facilities, how lenders weigh a combined covenant, how borrowing sits across a group structure, and a worked two-site funding stack. It stays in the lending lane and cross-links the tax and structuring detail.
A squat dental practice is built from scratch, so there is no goodwill and no patient base to lend against, which makes funding it a different conversation from buying an existing practice. This guide stays strictly in the lending lane: how much a startup lender will advance and against what, the business plan they expect, how staged drawdown releases the money against fit-out milestones, the CQC and NHS-contract conditions attached to drawdown, and how the loss-making ramp months are funded. The tax of the early loss is a summary with a link, not the subject here.
IR35 rules can affect associate dentists who work through a limited company. This guide explains how HMRC tests self-employment status, what off-payroll dental rules mean for NHS and private associates, and how to structure your working arrangements to stay on the right side of the legislation in 2026/27.
NHS dental contract reform in England is incremental, not a wholesale replacement. The UDA mechanism continues through 2026/27, with phased changes to urgent care, prevention and quality. This article explains what has actually changed and the practical message for practice owners and associates: plan on the contract as it stands.
A guide for locum dentists using a limited company on how to structure salary and dividend payments in 2026/27, covering tax efficiency, IR35 implications, and practical profit extraction planning.
England has 12,035 CQC-registered dental locations, an average of 20.5 per 100,000 people. But the average hides a wide spread. London runs at 26.2 practices per 100,000 while the North East sits at 16.8, a gap of more than nine practices per 100,000 population. This article maps dental provision across the nine English regions using CQC Care Directory and ONS population data, explains what practice density does and does not tell you, and sets out why the regional picture matters when you are valuing, buying, or planning a dental practice.