Overseas dental work could cost you more in the long term

The scale of it

A reported 10,000 Australians travel overseas for discounted dental work each year.

The Australian Dental Association has raised concerns about the practice, and its arguments are worth understanding on their merits — both the strong ones and the qualifications that belong with them.

A companion article, Dental tourism: what risks are involved?, covers the risks at the time of treatment; this page is about what happens afterwards. The pitfalls of dental tourism, the risks of having dental treatment overseas and Turkey teeth cover the rest of the ground.

The timing problem

This is the most substantive point, and it is not about the quality of any individual clinician.

ADA Federal Councillor Leonard Crocombe has noted that while dental work may initially appear satisfactory, patients can experience trouble in the longer term — “six months, 12 months after the treatment has been done, long after they've left the facilities.”

And that it usually occurs where a large amount of treatment has been done — crowns, bridges, veneers, whole-mouth reconstructions.

The structural issue is straightforward and applies regardless of where the work was done well or badly: complex restorative dentistry needs review and adjustment. Crowns and bridges are checked, bites are refined, margins are monitored. A treatment plan completed over ten days on the other side of the world has no follow-up pathway — and when something needs attention at month eight, the treating clinician is unreachable. How long porcelain veneers last gives a sense of the maintenance horizon involved.

The larger the case, the more that matters. A single filling that fails is a small problem. A full-mouth reconstruction that develops a problem is expensive to diagnose and expensive to remake — and the clinician asked to fix it did not plan it and has no records. Complex Dentistry sets out what planning a large case actually involves, and Prosthodontists are the specialists trained for reconstruction of that scale. Where work is made in an on-site laboratory, it can also be traced, adjusted and remade by the people who made it.

If you are already in that position, second opinions and corrective dentistry is the place to start, and anything acutely painful belongs with Emergency Dentistry.

Standards and registration

To practise in Australia, dentists must pass rigorous examinations, and Australian standards for specialisation are high by international comparison.

Although many overseas dental practices describe their dentists as specialists, they are recognised as specialists only under the requirements of the country in which they practise. Specialist registration is not transferable between countries, and the training standard behind the same title varies considerably.

Mr Crocombe has noted that around one third of dentists from overseas countries pass the Australian examinations.

That figure is worth reading precisely. It measures how many overseas-trained dentists who sit the Australian examination pass it. It does not tell you the standard of any particular clinic abroad — there are excellent dentists practising overseas, and Australians who have had good outcomes. What it does establish is that you cannot infer Australian-equivalent qualification from an overseas title.

What the Australian process actually requires

The Dental Board of Australia's published pathways show what “not transferable” means in practice, and they are worth setting out because they are the concrete version of the point.

A specialist qualified outside Australia cannot simply register here on the strength of that qualification. Either the qualification is one the Board has approved, or the applicant goes through the Board's qualification equivalence pathway — a formal assessment, specialty by specialty. The Board lists the specialties that route runs for, including endodontics, orthodontics, paediatric dentistry, periodontics and prosthodontics.

Oral and maxillofacial surgery is stricter again. The Board's requirement is that an applicant first have their qualification assessed by the Royal Australasian College of Dental Surgeons, because the specialty is recognised by both the Dental Board and the Medical Board — and the practitioner must hold qualifications in both medicine and dentistry. That is the standard behind the Australian title.

Even the closest jurisdiction is not automatic. A practitioner registered as a dental specialist in New Zealand may apply under the Trans-Tasman Mutual Recognition Act, but the Board assesses whether the role is an “equivalent occupation” and may impose conditions where the New Zealand scope of practice is narrower than the Australian one. The Board and the Dental Council of New Zealand have eleven specialties in common — not all of them.

And registration is not the end of it. The Board's Scope of practice registration standard applies to every registered dental practitioner and requires them to practise within the scope of their education, training and competence at all times. There is a named regulator, a public register and a complaints pathway standing behind that requirement. Those are the things that do not travel with you. (Source: Dental Board of Australia — Specialist Registration and FAQ: Specialist registration.)

In Australia the check takes about a minute and is free. Every registered practitioner appears on the AHPRA public register, which states whether their registration is general or specialist and in which of the thirteen recognised dental specialties. Specialist Care and Dentists and Registered Specialists explain what specialist registration requires here, Finding a dentist online in Australia covers how to run the check yourself, and Our Team lists the practitioners and their registration numbers.

Infection control

The ADA has also raised concerns about less stringent infection control standards in some settings.

Australian practices operate under specific infection control requirements, which are auditable and enforced by the regulator. Standards elsewhere vary, and are not always visible to a patient in a treatment chair.

The economics

The underlying argument is about total cost rather than headline price.

Where work needs repair or replacement on return, patients can end up paying more than the Australian cost of doing it once.

The usual sequence: the initial saving is real, the problem appears months later, and the remedial work is charged at Australian rates — on top of what was already spent. There is no warranty to call on, no records to work from, and often no realistic prospect of returning.

Add the travel, accommodation and time away to the comparison, and the gap on a small treatment plan narrows considerably — which is why the cases that appear to justify the trip are almost always the large ones, and the large ones are exactly where the follow-up risk sits.

“The Australian price” is not one number

This is the part that makes an online price comparison unreliable in both directions.

The ADA's Dental Fees Survey 2022 reported fees charged by ADA members in private practice as at 1 July 2022, drawn from 3,819 valid responses out of 11,035 dentists invited. Two findings from it are useful when you are weighing a quote:

• Fees moved modestly. Across the 122 items surveyed, fees charged by general practitioners “appear to have increased by 3.7% during the two-year period since 1 July 2020”. Movement was not even by category — the survey recorded the smallest increases in Preventive Services and Periodontics (1.6%) and the largest in Orthodontics (6.9%).
• Variation within Australia is substantial. The survey found “considerable variation in the fees charged within and between states”, with general practitioners in SA and WA charging the lowest fees on average and those in the ACT and NT the highest — though the ADA notes the ACT and NT samples were small and those results should be viewed with caution.

For specialists the survey is thinner and the ADA says so plainly: only 284 self-identified specialists responded, and “survey results for specialists should be interpreted with considerable caution”. With that caveat attached, a fifth (20%) of responding specialists charged an hourly rate, with a mean of $921 per hour in 2022 (up from $662 in 2020), a median of $800 (up from $600), and a range between $450 and $1,500 per hour.

None of that tells you what your own treatment will cost, and it is not a Smile Solutions fee list — for that, see the Price Guide. What it does tell you is that the spread between two legitimate Australian quotes can itself be wide, so “overseas is cheaper than Australia” is a comparison against a moving number. Get a written, itemised Australian quote for the same treatment plan before you use any price as a baseline.

For what treatments actually cost here, see How much does a dental crown cost in Melbourne?, How much do dental implants cost?, what implants actually cost in Melbourne, Bridges, implants and dentures compared and the Price Guide.

If you are considering it anyway

The sensible questions, whichever way you decide:

How large is the treatment plan? The risk scales with complexity. A single crown carries far less exposure than a full-mouth reconstruction.

Who reviews and adjusts it afterwards, and at whose cost? Get that answered before you go, not after.

How long are you there for? Complex work compressed into a short trip removes the checkpoints that normally catch problems while they are still adjustable.

What are the practitioner's qualifications, and what does that title mean where they practise? The useful follow-up is: which body registers them, is that register public, and what happens if something goes wrong after I leave?

And will an Australian dentist take on the follow-up? Some are reluctant to assume responsibility for work they did not plan and cannot warrant — which is a practical problem worth resolving in advance.

A consultation and a written quote from an Australian practice before you travel is worth having, if only so that you are comparing the same treatment plan rather than two different ones. Understanding your treatment sets out what that quote and that conversation should contain.

If cost here is the reason you are looking abroad, say that out loud to an Australian practice first. Staging treatment over time, treating what is urgent and reviewing the rest, and choosing the more conservative option are all legitimate clinical approaches — and payment plans exist. A practitioner who knows the constraint can plan around it; one who is never told cannot.

Common questions

Is this just one practice's opinion, or is there a formal professional position?

There is a formal position, it is published, and it is worth reading in its own words rather than through anyone's summary.

Australian Dental Association Policy Statement 2.2.6, *Elective Overseas Dental Treatment*** (document version November 2023), states in its position summary: **“Overseas elective dental treatment carries the risk of adverse oral and general health outcomes with long term problems which may be difficult to resolve on return to Australia. Australian residents should only seek elective dental care in Australia to ensure Australian standards are met, complications are managed promptly, and good oral health is maintained.”

It adds a second limb that is rarely quoted and is aimed at the sellers rather than the patients: “Australian promoters of health services in overseas countries should be required to indemnify consumers for all adverse outcomes of such treatment.”

The policy's own list of reasons is specific. It advises against elective treatment overseas because of the inability to maintain supportive maintenance dental visits; possible communication difficulties with the practitioner and practice staff which may impact on informed consent; the risk of adverse oral and general health outcomes with potential long-term problems which may be difficult to resolve; possible lack of insurance cover for complications; lack of recourse for treatment and maintenance problems; the inability to necessarily see the same dentist on a later visit to that country; lack of access to treatment records; and the potential to introduce new antimicrobial resistant organisms and disease transmission into Australia.

One sentence from its background does more work than the rest put together, because it explains why a compressed trip is structurally difficult regardless of who is holding the handpiece: “Optimal ongoing oral health cannot be achieved in a single episode or short course of treatment and requires regular maintenance.”

Two honest caveats. It is a professional-body policy position, not a study — it contains no complication rates. And it is written by the organisation representing Australian dentists, which is a fact a reader is entitled to weigh. The specific mechanisms it names, though, are checkable ones: records, recourse, maintenance and insurance either exist in your arrangement or they do not.

Are there any actual numbers on how often it goes wrong?

Some, and they need labelling carefully, because the good numbers are British rather than Australian and they come from dentists rather than from patient records.

A 2025 review in the British Dental Journal of how UK news media report dental tourism cites, in its introduction, a British Dental Association survey of 1,000 UK dentists (2022). In that survey, almost all respondents reported that they had examined patients who had been on dental tourism trips, and most — 86 per cent — reported treating people suffering consequences after treatment abroad. Respondents believed that crowns and implant treatments were the most at risk of failure.

On what the repairs cost, in the UK: the cost of remedial dental care ranged between at least £500 (65 per cent of respondents) and more than £1,000 — and a significant number, 20 per cent, estimated the cost of rectifying complications as in excess of £5,000.

Now the caveats, which matter as much as the figures:

• These are self-reported survey responses from dentists, not a clinical audit. A dentist who has seen ten failures and a hundred successes will remember the ten, and the survey does not ask about the denominator.
• They are United Kingdom figures, not Australian.
• The paper they appear in is a qualitative analysis of 201 newspaper articles — it did not measure complication rates itself.

What survives all that is still useful: the failures that UK dentists report seeing are concentrated in crowns and implants, which are exactly the treatments this page identifies as carrying the most follow-up risk, and the remedial cost is frequently a four-figure sum on top of what was already spent. Nobody has published an Australian equivalent, so treat the percentages as indicative of a pattern rather than as a probability that applies to you.

If something goes wrong, will my travel insurance or health fund cover it?

Often not, and this is the item most likely to be assumed rather than checked.

The ADA policy states it directly: “Complications to health from elective dental treatments (i.e., treatment that can be scheduled in advance) obtained while overseas are not always covered by travel insurance and the treatments may not be covered by Australian health funds.”

The phrase doing the work is elective — treatment that can be scheduled in advance. Travel insurance is generally built around unforeseen events, and a procedure you booked before you left is by definition foreseen. That distinction is what tends to catch people, because the same policy might well cover a genuine dental emergency that arose during the trip.

There is a second exposure the policy names separately: “Dental practitioners are required to have professional indemnity insurance. This may not be the case in overseas clinics.” Indemnity insurance is what stands behind a claim if treatment goes wrong. Where it is absent, there may be nothing to claim against even if you are plainly in the right.

So, three things to establish in writing, before paying a deposit: exactly what your travel policy excludes in relation to planned treatment and its complications; what your Australian health fund will and will not pay towards treatment performed overseas, and towards repairing it afterwards; and whether the clinic carries indemnity insurance and under which country's law a dispute would be heard.

If the answers are hard to obtain, that is itself information.

Will an Australian dentist take over the work when I get back?

Sometimes, and the reluctance you may encounter is not snobbery — the ADA policy sets out the reasons, and they are practical ones.

Among its listed concerns is the “potential challenge of finding a dental practitioner to continue with, or repair, elective treatment started overseas due to concerns including incompatible product systems, techniques not consistent with Australian standards and materials not approved by the TGA.”

Unpack those three:

Incompatible product systems. Implants in particular are proprietary. The components that connect to an implant are made by its manufacturer, and a clinician who cannot identify the system — or cannot obtain its parts in Australia — cannot restore or repair it, however straightforward the problem looks.

Techniques not consistent with Australian standards. A clinician taking over a case is accepting a degree of responsibility for it. Where the original approach differs from the one they were trained in, the honest position may be that they cannot warrant the outcome.

Materials not approved by the TGA. The same policy notes that in Australia, equipment and materials “comply with the highest international standards and are subject to rigid scrutiny and approval by the Therapeutic Goods Administration.” A submission to the Australian Parliament on dental fees made the same point from the other direction, noting that the use of “potentially toxic overseas sourced, rather than TGA approved, dental materials” does occur.

Compounding all of it is the records problem: “Ongoing and corrective treatment may be compromised, as the records and complete details of treatment obtained overseas are unlikely to be available to those providing subsequent treatment in Australia.”

The practical response is to ask an Australian practice before you travel whether they will review and maintain the proposed work, and to get the answer in writing. Second opinions and corrective dentistry is where that conversation starts if you have already had the treatment.

What should I bring home with me?

If you go, the single most valuable thing you can return with — after the dentistry itself — is a complete record. It is also the thing most often not offered, and almost never requested.

The reason is the one quoted above: records and complete details of overseas treatment “are unlikely to be available to those providing subsequent treatment in Australia”, and that gap is what makes later repair slow and expensive. Ask for all of it before you fly home, while you are still standing in the clinic:

• An itemised record of every procedure, tooth by tooth, with dates.
• The brand and system of anything implanted or fitted, in full — manufacturer, product line, size, and the batch or lot numbers. For implants this is the difference between a repairable case and a replaceable one.
• All radiographs and scans, as files rather than as prints, plus any digital scans of your teeth.
• Details of the laboratory that made any crowns, bridges or veneers, and the materials used.
• Anything written about warranty or follow-up — what is covered, for how long, and what you would have to do to claim it.
• The practitioner's name and registration details, and the name of the body that registers them.

Store it somewhere you will still have it in five years, and give a copy to your Australian dentist at your next check-up rather than at the point something goes wrong. A problem diagnosed with the original records in hand is a materially different problem from the same one without them.

Why does this look so easy online, and so disastrous in the newspapers?

Because both are distorted, in opposite directions, and the research on the media coverage is quite specific about how.

The 2025 British Dental Journal study analysed 131 of 201 newspaper articles about dental tourism and identified five themes: push and pull factors reported to lead to seeking dentistry abroad; patient-reported outcomes and experiences; warnings from dental professionals; amplifying social media hype; and media shaming and stigmatising.

Its conclusion is worth quoting because it names the mechanism: “Social media viral health trends were a means of distributing health (dis/mis)information. The perspectives of social media were amplified by the UK press. Tabloids often stigmatised people who had dentistry abroad.”

So the feed shows you the result on the day the work was finished — which, as this page explains, is precisely the point at which large cases look their best and the problems have not yet surfaced. The newspapers then show you the worst outcomes, framed for outrage, with the person who had the treatment frequently made the object of it.

Neither is a basis for a decision. And the volume involved is real rather than a media invention: the same paper records that in the United Kingdom, 48,000 people sought dentistry outside the UK in 2014, rising to 144,000 in 2016, citing the Office for National Statistics International Passenger Survey.

One thing that follows from the shaming finding, and it matters here: if you have had treatment overseas that is now causing problems, that is a clinical situation, not a verdict on your judgement. Bring the records, bring the timeline, and say what happened. Nobody can help with a history they are not given.

Where to go next

• What specialist registration means in Australia — Specialist Care, Cosmetic Dentistry under Specialist Care
• Planning a large case — Complex Dentistry, Prosthodontists
• What the common treatments cost here — How much does a dental crown cost in Melbourne?
• Paying over time — Patient payment plans
• The practitioners and their registrations — Our Team

Practical details

Smile Solutions, Level 1, 220 Collins Street, Manchester Unity Building, Melbourne VIC 3000. Phone 13 13 96, or theteam@smilesolutions.com.au. Monday–Friday 8.00am–6.00pm, Saturday 8.30am–1.30pm, Sunday by appointment. Full details on Contact Us.

Specialist registration can be verified on the AHPRA register, or by calling 1300 419 495.

Published 24 February 2015. Statements attributed to the Australian Dental Association and Mr Leonard Crocombe are summarised from ADA material published at that date. The policy position quoted in the questions above is Australian Dental Association Policy Statement 2.2.6, Elective Overseas Dental Treatment (November 2023); it is a professional-body position and contains no complication rates. The dentist-survey figures are from a British Dental Association survey of 1,000 UK dentists (2022) as cited in Doughty et al., “Contemporary dental tourism: a review of reporting in the UK news media”, British Dental Journal (2025); they are self-reported, and British rather than Australian. The reference to overseas-sourced dental materials is from a submission to the Australian Parliament on private health insurance and dental fees. Fee figures quoted from the ADA Dental Fees Survey 2022 describe fees charged by surveyed ADA members as at 1 July 2022 and are not Smile Solutions fees. Standards, outcomes and individual practitioners vary considerably; this is general information and not a comment on any particular clinic. General information only; it does not replace advice from your treating practitioner.

Smile Solutions trades under ABN 28 193 514 103.