What 162 clinics actually charge for a treatment room

Ask a practice owner what a treatment room should let for and you get a number with a shrug attached. Ask where the number came from and you get the clinic down the road — which got it from the clinic down the road from them.

So we went and counted.

Between July and August 2026 we read the public websites of 16,751 UK clinical practices — dental, aesthetics, veterinary, optical and physiotherapy — looking for a page offering a room, chair or surgery to let. We found 162 practices advertising space on their own site.

Of those 162, only 32 publish a price.

That is the first finding, and arguably the most important one: four out of five practices advertising a room will not tell you what it costs until you ask. The market is opaque by default, which is precisely why the number that circulates is a rumour.

What the 32 actually charge

By the hour — 16 practices, 24 published rates.

By the day — 14 practices, 21 published rates.

A spread of nearly seven times on the hourly rate is too wide to be about location. Something else is going on, and the distribution shows what.

The hourly market is two markets

Sort the hourly rates and a gap appears that has no business being there:

£6, £8.50, £10, £10, £10, £11, £12, £13, £15, £16 … then nothing … £20, £20, £25, £30, £40, £40

Ten practices sit at £16 an hour or below. Six sit at £20 or above. Almost nothing lands in between.

That is not one market with a wide range. That is two different products being advertised under the same word. The lower band is essentially desk-and-couch space — somewhere to see a client. The upper band is a clinical room: sink, autoclave access, reception cover, someone to answer the phone.

If you are pricing a room, the useful question is not "what is the going rate" — there isn't one. It is which of those two things you are actually selling.

A day is not eight hours

Five practices publish both an hourly and a daily rate, which lets you check one against the other. Four of the five price a day at between 3.3 and 4.5 times their own hourly rate.

So the standing day rate is roughly half a working day's hourly income. Practices are discounting the full day heavily — and they are doing it consistently enough, across independent businesses that have never spoken to each other, that it looks like a genuine market convention rather than a coincidence.

If you are letting a room by the day at eight times your hourly rate, you are priced well outside what everyone else is doing. If you are taking three and a half times, you are in the middle of the market.

What we left out, and why

Two of the "monthly" figures the crawler found were a dental payment plan at £15.97 and £22.47 a month, caught because they look exactly like a price on a page that also mentions rooms. They are not room rents and they are excluded. The monthly figures generally are the least reliable of the three, because monthly numbers on a clinic website are as likely to be treatment finance as rent.

We also have location data on 155 of the 162, and we are not publishing a London-versus-regional split. It exists in the data and it inverts — regional day rates read higher than London ones — because several London practices had no usable postcode and the cells hold two or three practices each. Publishing a benchmark we would reject from anyone else seemed a poor way to start.

Everything here is drawn from what practices published about themselves on their own websites. Nothing was scraped from a listings directory, and no practice is named except where it published a price openly and that price illustrates a point.

What to do with this

If you are letting a room, three things follow.

Publish your price. Eighty percent don't, which means the ones that do get the enquiry from anyone comparing before they call. It costs nothing and it filters out the conversations that were never going to convert.

Know which market you are in. The gap between £16 and £20 an hour is the difference between letting space and letting a clinical facility. Price for the one you are actually providing, and describe it accordingly.

Check the number against your own costs, not the market. A rate that looks fine next to the practice down the road can still be below what the room costs you to keep open. The market sets what you can charge; your costs set what you should refuse.

That last one has arithmetic behind it, which is set out separately in what to charge to rent out a treatment room — and the rate calculator does both halves: the floor you should not go below, then what you actually earn at the rate you have in mind.