How to Read Your Dental Treatment Plan, Line by Line

You’ve left the dentist with a sheet of paper (or a PDF in your inbox) that says something like “UR6 MOD comp, LL7 RCT + PFM crown, PMPR, total £1,840.” Your dentist explained it in the chair, but you were lying back with a bib on and nodding. Now you’re at home wondering whether you need any of it and whether £1,840 is a fair price.

The good news is that every treatment plan, NHS or private, from a high-street practice or a smart clinic in Harley Street, is built from the same four parts:

1. The tooth, which tooth is being treated
2. The procedure, what’s being done to it
3. The fee, what that item costs
4. The band or price structure, how the fees add up to what you actually pay

Once you can pick out those four things, the shorthand stops looking like code. Most plans take about five minutes to decode, and an AI tool like ChatGPT can make that quicker if you give it the right prompt.

Part 1: The tooth

UK dentists usually name teeth in one of two ways, and your plan will use one of them.

Palmer notation (the most common in UK practices) splits your mouth into four quarters, seen as if you’re facing the dentist: Upper Right (UR), Upper Left (UL), Lower Right (LR), Lower Left (LL). Teeth are numbered 1 to 8 from the middle outwards. So UR1 is your upper right front tooth, and LL8 is your bottom left wisdom tooth.

FDI notation uses two digits. The first digit is the quarter (1 = upper right, 2 = upper left, 3 = lower left, 4 = lower right) and the second is the tooth, again counting 1 to 8 from the front. FDI 36 means lower left, tooth 6, which is exactly the same tooth as LL6 in Palmer.

Teeth 4 and 5 are premolars, 6 and 7 are molars. That matters for price: root canal treatment on a molar (three or four roots) costs a lot more privately than on a front tooth (one root).

Part 2: The procedure

This is where the jargon lives, but there isn’t a lot of it. These are the abbreviations that turn up on most UK plans:

The surface letters cause a lot of confusion. “UR6 MOD comp” just means a tooth-coloured filling across three surfaces of your upper right first molar. It’s a bigger filling than “UR6 O comp”, which covers only the biting surface, and private practices will usually charge more for it.

Part 3 and 4: The fee and the band

This is the part people get wrong most often, and it depends on whether you’re NHS or private.

NHS plans: you pay per band, not per item

In England, NHS treatment is charged in bands per course of treatment. You pay the charge for the highest band your course reaches, once. You don’t pay it for every item on the list. The charges set in April 2025 were:

• Band 1: £27.40 for examination, diagnosis, X-rays, scale and polish if clinically needed, and advice
• Band 2: £75.30 for everything in Band 1 plus fillings, root canal treatment and extractions
• Band 3: £326.70 for everything in Bands 1 and 2 plus crowns, dentures and bridges

These figures usually change each April, so check the current amounts on nhs.uk before you compare. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland charge differently, so a plan from a Cardiff practice won’t match these numbers.

Here’s a worked example. Say your NHS plan lists:

UR6  MOD composite
LL7  RCT
LL7  PFM crown
UL5  extraction
     Scale and polish
NHS Charge: Band 3   £326.70

That’s five items, and the total is still £326.70, because the crown pushes the whole course into Band 3 and everything else comes with it. If you see an NHS plan adding up separate charges for a filling and an extraction and a crown, ask why. The NHS plan for Band 2 and Band 3 courses in England is often printed on a form called the FP17DC, so look for that heading.

The one twist is mixed plans. Your dentist is allowed to offer some items privately alongside NHS treatment, for example a white filling on a back tooth or an E.max crown instead of a PFM one. Those items must be clearly marked as private, with their own price. A plan that says “Band 2 £75.30 + private composite UR6 £145” is legitimate, as long as you were told that an NHS option existed.

Private plans: every line has a price

Private plans list a fee per item and add them up. Here’s a typical one, with the four parts spelled out:

Tooth   Procedure                 Fee
UR6     MOD composite filling     £185
LL7     Root canal treatment      £750
LL7     E.max crown               £795
-       Hygienist appointment     £85
                                  -----
Total                             £1,815

To sanity-check it, compare each line against a rough UK private range. As a guide in 2025–26, composite fillings tend to run £120 to £250, molar root canals £550 to £1,200 (more with a specialist endodontist), ceramic crowns £600 to £1,100, and a hygienist visit £60 to £110. Prices in central London often sit above those ranges. Nothing on the plan above is out of line. If the root canal had said £1,900 at a general practice, that would be worth a question.

Using ChatGPT (or Claude, or Gemini) to decode it

AI chat tools are very good at this kind of job: turning shorthand into plain English and laying it out in a table. They can’t see your X-rays and they don’t know your mouth, so use them to understand the plan, not to second-guess the diagnosis.

First, strip out personal details. Remove your name, date of birth, NHS number and address before you paste anything in. The tooth notation and prices are all the tool needs.

Then use a prompt along these lines:

I'm in England and have been given this dental treatment plan.
For each line, tell me: which tooth it is in plain English,
what the procedure involves, whether it's NHS or private,
and whether the fee looks typical for a UK private practice.
Then list three questions I should ask my dentist.
Don't tell me whether I need the treatment.

[paste plan here]

Fed the private example above, ChatGPT will return something close to this:

| Tooth | Plain English            | Procedure                  | Fee   | Typical? |
|-------|--------------------------|----------------------------|-------|----------|
| UR6   | Upper right first molar  | 3-surface white filling    | £185  | Yes, mid-range |
| LL7   | Lower left second molar  | Root canal treatment       | £750  | Yes, typical for a molar |
| LL7   | Lower left second molar  | All-ceramic crown          | £795  | Yes, mid-range |
| -     | -                        | Hygienist clean            | £85   | Yes |

Questions to ask:
1. Is the LL7 crown needed straight away, or can it wait until the root canal has settled?
2. Is there an NHS option for any of these items?
3. What is the success rate for the root canal, and what happens if it fails?

That last block is the most useful part. Questions like these turn a nervous “I’ll think about it” into a proper conversation with your dentist.

A practical tip: if the tool says a price is “high” or “low”, ask it why, and which region it’s assuming. The figures it gives are general estimates. They don’t come from a live price list, and they can be a year or two out of date.

The lines worth a second look

A few patterns are worth querying, whatever the AI says:

• Lots of crowns at once. Six crowns on teeth that don’t hurt might be right, but a second opinion costs £50 to £100 privately (or a Band 1 charge on the NHS), and that’s cheap next to a £5,000 plan.
• “Preventive” fillings on teeth with no symptoms. Ask to see the X-ray and have the decay pointed out to you.
• No NHS option mentioned at a practice that takes NHS patients. You’re entitled to know what’s clinically necessary and available on the NHS.
• A vague line, such as “restorative work £1,200” with no tooth and no procedure. Every line on a fair plan has a tooth and a procedure attached. If one doesn’t, ask for it to be itemised.

If you want the bigger picture on what each type of treatment involves and when it’s usually recommended, the Treatment Plans Explained guide goes through them one by one.

When the plan still doesn’t add up after all that, ring the practice and ask for an itemised version with tooth numbers, procedures and fees on every line. Reception teams get this request all the time, and a practice that’s happy to send one is usually a practice worth staying with.