NHS Dental Recovery Continues, But Over 3,400 Contracts Still Missed Their UDA Target

The national picture is improving, but not resolved. England delivered more UDAs despite a lower recorded target base, and the number of severely underperforming contracts fell sharply. However, more than half of contracts still missed target by more than 2%, and underperformers collectively left 11.44 million UDAs undelivered.

Large Corporate Groups Continue to Lag Independents

Independent / Other contracts improved from 85.1% to 90.2% delivery. By contrast, the largest corporate group, myDentist, improved from 59.5% to 67.3% but still remained more than 20 percentage points below the independent-practice average. Oasis was effectively flat year-on-year, rising only from 65.3% to 65.7%.

Year-on-year movement identifies contracts where performance changed sharply, not just those with the largest shortfall. The table below compares contracts appearing in both years with targets above 1,000 UDAs in both periods. The reason for the drops are unclear - likely contract changes, closures, mergers etc.

Improvement tables are useful because they show where capacity may have returned after a disrupted year. The strongest movements include both independent practices and several myDentist sites.

Near-Misses Mask a Severe Tail

The largest single group of underperformers sits in the 85–98% band, missing target by a relatively small margin. More concerning is the 520 practices below 50% of target, which delivered less than half their contracted UDAs across the full year.

48 Contracts Recorded Zero UDAs

48 practices recorded zero UDA activity for the entire 2025/26 financial year, holding a combined target of approximately 314,000 UDAs. Zero UDA delivery may reflect formal contract handbacks, practice closures or mergers, or FP17/data-feed mapping issues.

Although national delivery improved by more than five percentage points, over 11 million UDAs still went undelivered by contracts missing target by more than 2%. Every undelivered UDA represents NHS dental capacity that patients could not access, or activity that commissioners expected but did not receive.

The 2025/26 data therefore points to recovery, not resolution. The next question is whether the improvements seen this year represent sustained rebuilding of NHS dental capacity, or whether the system is settling into a new lower-delivery ceiling under the current contract model.

• Group ownership is based on a verified contract-to-group mapping covering 15 named groups.
• Contracts not found in this mapping are reported as Independent / Other, even where the trading name suggests a possible brand affiliation.
• Records with a UDA Performance Target of 100 or below were excluded as likely placeholder data.
• Practice-level year-on-year movement only compares contracts appearing in both 2024/25 and 2025/26 datasets.
• Large swings should be treated as flags for further review because contract changes, closures, mergers, or data-feed issues can materially affect apparent performance.