Four in five UK clinics advertising a treatment room do not publish the price

Four out of five UK clinical practices advertising a treatment room, chair or surgery to let do not publish what it costs, according to a survey of practice websites carried out by cost-benchmarking platform SupplyIndex.io.

Between July and August 2026 the platform read the public websites of 16,751 UK clinical practices across dentistry, aesthetics, veterinary, optical and physiotherapy, looking for pages offering space to let.

It found 162 practices advertising a room. Of those, only 32 published a price.

The rates that were published ranged from £6 to £40 an hour and from £20 to £850 a day.

"The going rate for a treatment room is a rumour," said Peter Langdon of SupplyIndex.io, a chartered accountant and co-owner of an independent aesthetics clinic.

"Ask an owner what a room should let for and you get a number they heard from the practice down the road, which got it from the practice down the road from them. Nobody had counted, so we counted."

A spread too wide to be about location

Among the 16 practices publishing an hourly rate, the median was £13.50, with a lower quartile of £10 and an upper quartile of £28.75.

Among the 14 publishing a daily rate, the median was £160, with a lower quartile of £100 and an upper quartile of £225.

A near seven-fold spread on the hourly rate is wider than regional cost differences can explain, and the distribution suggests why.

Ten of the practices publishing an hourly rate charge £16 or below. Six charge £20 or above. Almost nothing is advertised in between.

"That is not one market with a wide range," Langdon said. "That is two different products being advertised under the same word."

"The lower band is desk-and-couch space — somewhere to see a client. The upper band is a clinical room, with sink and autoclave access, reception cover and someone to answer the phone. An owner pricing a room needs to know which of the two they are actually selling before the number means anything."

Practices discount a full day by roughly half

Five practices published both an hourly and a daily rate, allowing the two to be compared directly.

Four of the five priced a day at between 3.3 and 4.5 times their own hourly rate — well below the eight times a standard working day would imply.

The convention held across independent businesses in different disciplines and different parts of the country.

"They have never spoken to each other, and they have all landed in roughly the same place," Langdon said.

"A standing day is worth about half a day's hourly income. That looks like a genuine market convention rather than a coincidence — and it gives an owner letting a room by the day something to check their own number against."

Publishing a price is itself a commercial decision

SupplyIndex.io says the finding that four in five advertisers withhold the rate is the most consequential of the survey.

"Eighty percent don't publish, which means the ones that do get the enquiry from anyone comparing before they call," Langdon said.

"It costs nothing and it filters out the conversations that were never going to convert. The reason people don't is that they are not confident the number is right — and they are not confident because there has never been anything to check it against."

What was excluded

The survey excluded monthly figures found on practice websites as unreliable, on the basis that a monthly price on a clinic site is as likely to be treatment finance as rent. Two figures caught by the crawler, at £15.97 and £22.47 a month, were dental payment plans rather than room rents.

Location data was available for 155 of the 162 practices, but SupplyIndex.io has declined to publish a London-versus-regional comparison. The split inverts in the data — regional day rates read higher than London ones — because several London practices had no usable postcode and the resulting cells contain two or three practices each.

"It exists in the data and we are not publishing it," Langdon said. "Publishing a benchmark we would reject from anyone else seemed a poor way to start."

Method

All figures are drawn from what practices published about themselves on their own websites between July and August 2026. Nothing was taken from a listings directory. No practice is named except where it published a price openly.

The full analysis, including the underlying distributions, is published at supplyindex.io/insights/what-162-clinics-charge-for-a-treatment-room.

About SupplyIndex.io

SupplyIndex.io is a trading name of Indexeli Intelligence Limited.

It is a collective purchasing and cost-benchmarking platform serving independent medical, veterinary, optometry and allied health clinics.

SupplyIndex.io helps independent healthcare providers reduce recurring operating costs by aggregating demand and negotiating from a stronger collective position. Each participating provider retains its ownership, identity, clinical autonomy and commercial independence.

Notes to editors

The survey covered 16,751 UK clinical practice websites read between July and August 2026. Practices were included where the site carried a page or section offering a room, chair, surgery or clinical space to let. A price was recorded only where a rate was stated on the practice's own site.

Hourly figures are drawn from 24 published rates across 16 practices. Daily figures are drawn from 21 published rates across 14 practices. Quartiles are calculated across published rates rather than across practices, so a practice publishing several rates contributes each of them.

SupplyIndex.io is willing to make the anonymised underlying rate data available to journalists on request.

Peter Langdon is a chartered accountant and co-owner of Berkshire Aesthetics, an independent clinic.

SupplyIndex.io is a trading name of Indexeli Intelligence Limited.