Dental Fee Benchmarks Explained: What You Should Pay in 2026

What are the dental fee benchmarks?

For years Singapore patients had no public reference for what a filling or a crown ought to cost in a private clinic. Surgical procedures had fee benchmarks from 2018 onwards, but dentistry was left out of them. That changed on 1 September 2025, when the Ministry of Health accepted and published the recommendations of the Dental Fee Benchmarking Advisory Committee, a group appointed in October 2023 and chaired by A/Prof Patrick Tseng, with oral and maxillofacial surgeon Dr Chan Siew Luen as co-chair.

MOH defines them this way: dental fee benchmarks are recommended charges for dental procedures in private clinics in the primary care setting, serving as a reference point for what patients could expect to pay for routine and typical cases. They were not invented in a committee room. The committee worked from roughly 1.9 million procedure claims made across about 900 CHAS dental clinics during 2024, and generally set the lower and upper bounds at around the 25th and 75th percentiles of what clinics were actually charging before subsidy.

That method matters when you read the table. A benchmark range is not a statement of what a procedure is worth. It is a description of the middle half of the market, which means a quarter of clinics were charging below the lower bound and a quarter above the upper one.

Which treatments have a benchmark?

This is where most coverage of the benchmarks goes wrong. The benchmarks attach to the 18 procedures that are subsidised under the Community Health Assist Scheme in primary care. That is check-ups, x-rays, scaling and polishing, fillings, simple extractions, root canals, permanent crowns, dentures and topical fluoride. It is the everyday half of dentistry.

It is not the expensive half. There is no MOH benchmark for wisdom tooth surgery, for dental implants, for braces or clear aligners, for veneers or for teeth whitening. Those are either surgical procedures outside the CHAS primary care list or elective treatments the committee has not reached yet. MOH's separate surgeon fee benchmarks do not fill the gap either: they explicitly exclude surgery predominantly performed by dentists.

Categories reflect what MOH has published as at August 2026. The advisory committee has stated that MediSave-claimable surgical dental procedures are the next phase, and that it will consider indirect restorations and orthodontic treatment after that.

The full 2026 benchmark list

These are the published ranges, using MOH's own procedure names. They exclude GST, and they describe the clinic's charge before any CHAS subsidy is applied. Nothing here has been revised since publication, so the September 2025 figures are still the current figures.

Source: Ministry of Health, Guide to Dental Treatment Costs, published 1 September 2025. Figures exclude GST.

One oddity worth explaining, because almost nobody does. MOH says 18 procedures, but the table has 19 lines. X-ray is a single CHAS procedure, and the committee chose to publish separate benchmarks for intra-oral and extra-oral radiographs to reflect their distinct nature and cost. So 18 procedures, 19 rows, and no error.

Is a benchmark a price cap?

No, and MOH has been unusually direct about it. The ministry states that the dental fee benchmarks are not meant to be strict fee caps, but rather to serve as a reference for patients and dental clinics. The advisory committee used the same framing in its report: a reference rather than a strict cap for compliance.

What the committee did add is an expectation. Where charges fall outside the benchmarks, dentists should document and explain such variations to patients. The report also notes that the ranges describe routine and typical cases rather than outliers or cases of higher complexity, and, pointedly, that business costs alone should not justify higher fees above the benchmarks.

Read together, that is a reasonable standard for you to hold a clinic to. A molar root canal on a tooth with an awkward extra canal, or a crown that needs the gum reshaped first, can legitimately sit above the range. Rent on Orchard Road is not, by MOH's reckoning, a reason on its own.

What this does to a real bill

Benchmarks describe the charge before subsidy, which is not the number that leaves your bank account. MOH published its own worked example when it announced the enhanced CHAS subsidies, and it is the clearest illustration available of how the layers stack.

The same bill written out as a receipt:

Illustrative only, and MOH's example rather than ours. The subsidy line is the difference between the $950 charge and the approximately $560 MOH quotes after subsidy. Your own figures depend on your card, the tooth and your MediSave balance. Our own published fees for every treatment are listed separately.

How CHAS and MediSave fit in

Three systems touch the same bill and they are routinely confused, so it is worth separating them cleanly.

The benchmark is a reference for the clinic's charge. The CHAS, Merdeka Generation and Pioneer Generation subsidy is money taken off that charge at the counter if you hold a card, with the amount payable being the clinic's total charge minus the subsidy. MediSave is different again: it pays for surgical procedures on the Table of Surgical Procedures, and none of the 18 benchmarked procedures qualify, because they are not surgical.

That last point catches people out constantly. A root canal and a permanent crown are benchmarked and CHAS-subsidised, but they are not MediSave-claimable in the ordinary way. A surgical wisdom tooth removal is the mirror image: MediSave-claimable, and with no benchmark at all. The one bridge between them is Flexi-MediSave, which MOH raised from $300 to $400 a year on 1 October 2025 and, from mid-2026, extended to root canals and permanent crowns for patients aged 60 and above. We covered that change in detail in our guide to Flexi-MediSave in 2026, and the wider subsidy picture in our 2026 CHAS dental subsidy guide.

If you are working out which scheme applies to you, our pages on using MediSave for dental treatment, dental insurance and the Baby Bonus scheme set out the eligibility rules for each.

What changes on 1 September 2026

The benchmarks arrived with a compliance timetable attached, and the next date on it is close.

For patients, the practical effect is that the benchmarks stop being a leaflet and start being a document a clinic has to reckon with. If you are quoted well above a range on a benchmarked procedure, the clinic will shortly need to be able to articulate why in writing anyway.

Using the benchmarks at your appointment

The benchmarks are only useful if you take them into the room. Four things to do:

1. Ask for the written quote first. A verbal estimate cannot be compared to anything. A written one can be held against the published range, procedure by procedure.
2. Check whether GST is in or out. The benchmarks exclude it. A quote that includes GST will look higher than the range even when the underlying fee sits comfortably inside it.
3. Separate the charge from the subsidy. Compare the benchmark against the clinic's charge before your card is applied, not against the amount you are asked to pay.
4. Ask for the reason if it is above range. An extra canal, a fractured root, a tooth that needs building up first: these are legitimate answers. From September 2026 a CHAS clinic has to record that reason anyway. You can book at Suntec City, Marina Square, Marine Parade or Tanjong Katong, and ask at any of them.

One caveat worth keeping in view. A fee inside the benchmark is not automatically the right treatment, and the cheapest quote is not automatically the best value. The range tells you about price, not about whether the filling should have been a crown, whether the scale and polish should have been gum treatment, or whether that extraction was avoidable. A proper examination answers those, and the benchmark answers none of them.

Frequently asked questions

Related reading

Sources: MOH, Guide to Dental Treatment Costs; MOH, Enhanced Financing Support for CHAS Dental Procedures, 1 September 2025; Report on Dental Fee Benchmarks 2025, Dental Fee Benchmarking Advisory Committee; MOH, Community Health Assist Scheme.