Dental Workforce Management Information: Supporting Information

This is a management information (MI) publication. MI provide transparency about business or operations when they are published. Data are collated from MI or administrative systems to present important indicators of interest to the organisation. 

These statistics report on the Dental workforce in England. 

Data were provided by holders of NHS contracts to provide Dental or Orthodontic services in England.

The Dental Workforce is one of the least understood parts of the workforce delivering NHS care in England. 

This publication aims to help understand the facilities available and numbers of staff across a range of professions involved in NHS dental care.  

It also aims to illustrate providers’ experience in recruitment, retention and the occurrence of long-term absences. 

The data behind this publication provide workforce information to allow local level analysis of workforce numbers alongside NHS dental activity data. 

Data in this publication covers;

• Long Term absence
• Headcount, FTE and NHS FTE
• Joiners and leavers
• Vacanices.

The accompanying csv also includes information on;

• The number of dental chairs
• Practice opening hours by day of the week

This information was collected from holders of NHS contracts to provide Dental or Orthodontic services in England. The information was collected by NHS Business Services Authority on behalf of NHS England.

The below outlines the data quality concerns with the Dental Workforce Management Information, December 2025.

Data is published at national level, regional level and ICB level.

Coverage varies between ICBs and is included in the publication in the response rate section.

6,381 contracts are covered by the survey responses included in this publication.

299 contracts were removed due to either data quality concerns or eligibility issues (closed prior to survey coverage period or were contracts outside of England).

The data source for this release is a survey return and as such we rely on respondents completing the survey. It is assumed that all fields have been completed.

We have removed the measure on how many posts that failed to recruit due to concerns with the field as data seemed to have been input in a combination of FTE, headcount and hours.

Coverage should always been considered when comparing across years.

Data is released once a year, and contains data for the 12 months to December of the preceding years.

Data is collected from January to April and released in August.