No. The Care Quality Commission (CQC) does not rate dental practices in England, so if you are looking for CQC ratings for dentists, there are none to find. Primary dental services are exempt from CQC’s legal duty to give a rating. CQC still assesses them and publishes what it finds.
This article covers England, where CQC is the regulator for dental services.
Why there are no CQC ratings for dentists
CQC lists primary dental services among the types of service that sit outside its duty to rate. Its guidance on non-rated services says there is “no overall score or scoring for key questions, quality statements or evidence categories, and no overall rating”.
CQC’s page for people looking for a dentist says the same thing in plainer words: “We do not give ratings to dentist services but we do highlight if a service is meeting the standard of care we would expect.”
What CQC gives a dental practice instead
Inspectors make a judgement about whether the practice is complying with the regulations. There are only two possible outcomes:
- Regulations met means the provider is compliant with all the regulations related to that quality statement.
- Not all regulations met means the provider has breached one or more of those regulations.
Inspectors judge each evidence category they assess, and those judgements build up to the quality statement and then the key question. A judgement of “not all regulations met” in any evidence category means the related quality statement and key question will show the same result. One gap can therefore colour a whole key question, which is why small, repeated checks matter.
The five key questions are the same ones CQC uses elsewhere: safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led. Our CQC overview explains how they fit together.
What a CQC report on a dental practice shows
CQC has a legal duty to publish its inspection reports. Under its current model, findings are published as web content on its website, and services that do not receive a rating get a judgement for each key question of “regulations met” or “not all regulations met”.
On each dental service’s page, CQC says you will find the latest inspection report, older reports to download, and details of who is responsible for running the service.
Do you have to display a rating?
Not if you have no rating. Regulation 20A, the rule on displaying performance assessments, applies “where, and to the extent that, a service provider has received a rating of its performance”. A practice providing only primary dental services has no rating to show under it.
Be careful with marketing wording too. A practice cannot truthfully describe itself as holding a CQC rating that CQC does not give.
How often do CQC inspect dental practices?
There is no fixed cycle that a practice can count down to. CQC gives two statements that are worth reading together:
- Its public page on finding a dentist, last updated in May 2025, says: “We inspect 10% of dentists in England each year.”
- Its assessment guidance says: “The frequency of assessments will depend on the information we receive and the evidence we collect.”
An assessment of a non-rated service is either responsive, meaning it follows information of concern, or planned. CQC says planned assessments will initially focus on services it has not yet assessed, and that it will decide their order based on the level of risk.
In practice, a long gap since your last inspection tells you very little about when the next one will come. CQC’s monitoring page for dental services, which it marks as under review, says that if it asks for information before an inspection you will have five working days to respond. That is a short window if records are scattered.
CQC is changing how it assesses
CQC has consulted on replacing its single framework with separate frameworks for each sector, including a draft for primary care and community services. That consultation closed on 12 June 2026.
Its initial response to the wider consultation again describes primary dental care providers as exempt from the duty to rate. It says CQC will work with the sectors it does not rate as it develops how they will be assessed and which framework will apply. Expect the detail to move, and check CQC’s pages before relying on any description of the process, including this one. For the framework in use today, see our guide to the single assessment framework.
What to do with this
Because there is no grade to aim for, the useful question is whether you could show that each regulation is being met on the day someone asks. Our guides on preparing for a CQC dental inspection and running a mock inspection walk through that.
Compliance UK shows a readiness score for each of the five key questions, traced to the checks and evidence behind it. That score is our own measure of how prepared your records look. It is not a CQC rating and CQC does not use it.
If you need a view on a specific breach or an enforcement letter, speak to a solicitor who works with CQC-registered providers.
Sources
- CQC: Services we do not rate
- CQC: Find a dentist
- CQC: How often we assess
- CQC: How we publish our findings
- CQC: How we monitor primary care dental services
- CQC: Regulation 20A, requirement as to display of performance assessments
- CQC: Give your views on draft sector-specific assessment frameworks
- CQC: Initial response to the Better regulation, better care consultation
Sources checked on 10 November 2026.