From Premium Perk to Core Benefit: Making Dental Accessible Without Blowing Budgets

Dental: A Premium Offering for a Select Few

Dental has historically been positioned as a premium or executive-only benefit. For many organisations, it has sat alongside company cars and enhanced private medical cover, reserved for senior leaders or specialist roles as a retention strategy.

Today, only around 15% of UK employers offer dental benefits. For the other 85%, cost pressures and benefit budget scrutiny have kept dental off the agenda, let alone the idea of “dental for all”.

But employee expectations are changing. Access to healthcare benefits is increasingly seen as a baseline, not a bonus. Mental health support, virtual GP services and wellbeing platforms are now mainstream. Dental is the obvious gap in a holistic healthcare offering.

Now, new, scalable models are cutting costs, reducing queues and enabling employers to offer affordable dental access across the workforce.

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STAT BOX: The UK Dental Gap

Only 15–18% of UK employees receive dental cover through their employer

21% of UK employees avoided dental appointments due to cost in 2023

79% say they would take up dental benefits if offered by their employer

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Traditional Support Has Felt Unaffordable

Traditional dental provision has been expensive, inflexible and hard to justify.

Conventional insured dental plans come with fixed premiums that rise year on year. Awareness and utilisation are often low, meaning employers question whether they are getting value.

Clinical costs, provider fees and inflation continue to push treatment costs upward. At the same time, reward budgets are competing with pensions, private medical insurance, wellbeing platforms and financial benefits.

In that context, dental has often felt like a discretionary extra rather than a core investment.

Dental Has Lagged Behind the Tech Curve

Technology has transformed other premium benefits into affordable company-wide offerings. Virtual GP services, on-demand therapy platforms and online prescription services have made those aforementioned benefits commonplace; all were able to scale access while reducing cost.

But dentistry has lagged behind, largely due to an outdated belief that all interactions must be in person.

That is no longer the case. Around 70% of dental issues can now be managed remotely through virtual consultations, live chat and AI-enabled assessments. Advice, monitoring, prevention and early diagnosis can be delivered digitally.

Removing clinical overheads through digital-first dental engagement enables scalable delivery and faster roll-out of modern dental benefits. It is the same transformation seen across the rest of healthcare, finally arriving in dentistry.

An Affordable Way to Offer Dental

New providers like Toothfairy are entering the market with tech-driven, on-demand dental solutions that fundamentally change how dental support is delivered. By combining digital triage, virtual consultations and intelligent routing into in-person care only when needed, these models are helping to solve access challenges, reduce unnecessary clinical appointments and lower the overall cost of treatments with preventative care.

For the 85% of UK employers that do not currently offer dental insurance, this is a genuine turning point. For the first time, there is a cost-effective way to offer dental support across the workforce without significantly increasing reward budgets.

It allows employers to deliver meaningful health benefits, close equity gaps and strengthen their employee value proposition, while maintaining tight control over cost and utilisation.

Make Existing Benefits Work Smarter; the Hybrid Model

For the 15% with insurance baked into their current offering, a hybrid model is emerging as the most cost-effective approach. Technology-led touchpoints act as the front door to your dental strategy.

On-demand, digital engagement can solve 70% of routine dental queries that do not require physical intervention. The remaining 30% can be triaged into insurance provider appointments only when physical intervention is absolutely necessary.

This shifts dental from a high-cost insured product to a scalable service model. Instead of paying for blanket premiums and underused policies, organisations can provide accessible dental support that meets employees where they are, and act as a buffer between employees and costly claims.

This approach protects employees, protects premiums and protects renewal costs. It reduces unnecessary claims, optimises clinical resources and improves employee experience with accessible support available on-demand.

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STAT BOX: The Cost of Dental Inaction

• 28% of UK workers have taken time off due to toothache

• 23 million working days are lost to dental pain each year in the UK

• Employees taking dental sick leave miss an average of 6.5 hours, costing a 100o-person company over £40,000 annually in lost time alone

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The Strategic Payoff for Employers

Making dental accessible delivers tangible business outcomes.

It strengthens the employee value proposition in a competitive labour market.

It improves engagement and perception of benefits.

It reduces absence and presenteeism by supporting early intervention.

It improves equity across workforce demographics, particularly for lower earners who are more likely to delay treatment due to cost.

Prevention also helps contain long-term healthcare costs, reducing the likelihood of high-cost interventions and downstream claims after issues have worsened to crisis point. Claim costs can increase by as much as 13x when not caught and treated early.