How Dental Groups Can Tell If They're Overpaying for Locum Cover

Most dental groups have no single number for what a locum shift actually costs them. The spend sits in separate practice budgets, split across two or three agencies, buried under booking fees, VAT, mileage and last-minute cancellation charges. Ask a regional manager what a covered sick day costs across the group and the honest answer is usually a shrug.

That gap is where overpayment lives. If you cannot see the all-in cost per shift across every site, you cannot know whether one practice is paying 40% more than the one down the road for the same cover. This piece sets out how to find that number, what good value looks like in 2026, and the specific figures worth benchmarking against.

Why locum spend hides so well in a dental group

A single practice manager booking one nurse through one agency can see the cost clearly. A group of thirty practices booking through a mix of agencies cannot, because the spend is never gathered in one place.

Three things blur the picture. Agencies quote an hourly rate but add booking fees, and the fee structure differs between providers, so a like-for-like comparison takes real work. VAT on an agency margin is often irrecoverable for a dental practice, which quietly inflates the true cost by a fifth. And cancellation terms vary so widely that two shifts at the same headline rate can settle at very different final figures once a late change is factored in.

The result is a group that knows its total agency invoice for the quarter but has no reliable cost-per-shift figure to judge it against. Without that unit cost, overpaying is invisible - there is nothing to compare against.

The five numbers worth benchmarking

A locum spend review does not need a consultant. It needs five figures, tracked the same way across every site. Gather these and the overpayment shows itself.

The trap is treating the booking fee as the whole cost. A low fee attached to a shift that never gets filled is expensive, because an unfilled chair loses a full session of revenue. Fill rate and time-to-fill belong in the same review as price, or the review measures the wrong thing.

What good value looks like in 2026

Benchmarks only help if they are concrete. Here are the figures a dental group can hold its own numbers against, drawn from platform data across more than 40,000 completed shifts.

On a direct-booking platform, the service fee runs at roughly £29 per shift, against the £60 to £80 per booking that agencies typically charge. Across a group running hundreds of shifts a month, that difference alone is a five-figure annual line.

Speed benchmarks matter as much as price. On Airlocum, 60% of shifts are filled in under five minutes, compared with the 30 to 60 minutes of phone calls an agency booking usually takes. Fill rate should sit above 85% in areas with reasonable locum supply. And a healthy rebook rate, the share of shifts going back to locums a practice already trusts, signals both quality and lower onboarding friction; the platform figure is 93%.

If your group's numbers are materially worse than these, you are either overpaying, under-filling, or both. If they are close, your staffing is in good shape and the review has told you something useful either way.

How to actually cut the cost across multiple sites

Finding the number is half the job. Bringing it down comes from three moves that only work at group level.

Consolidate the booking route. A group spending through three agencies has three fee structures, three invoices and no leverage. Moving to one booking channel gives you a single cost-per-shift figure and one compliance trail. Corporate groups including PortmanDentex, Riverdale Healthcare and Banning Dental Group run their cover this way, not because they lack options but because one route is easier to control and cheaper to run.

Give head office visibility without taking the booking away from managers. The practices closest to the rota should still book their own cover, but the group needs to see who covered what, where, and at what cost. Group-level oversight, usage and spend visible per site, in one place, is what turns a pile of separate invoices into a number you can manage.

Build a bench of trusted locums. Cover booked from professionals a practice has used before fills faster and needs less onboarding. Across a group, a shared history of reliable locums compounds: the more the group books, the faster and cheaper each subsequent shift becomes.

Suzie Lovick, Operations Manager, Banning Dental Group

Where to start this week

Pick one month and one region. Pull every locum invoice for those sites, add booking fees, VAT and any cancellation charges, and divide by the number of shifts filled. That single cost-per-shift figure, set against the benchmarks above, tells you within an afternoon whether your group is paying a fair rate or a premium.

From there, the fixes are structural rather than heroic: fewer booking channels, clearer group visibility, and a growing bench of trusted locums. None of it requires paying more. Most of it means paying less for cover that arrives faster.

See group-level locum spend in one place. Explore Airlocum for corporate dental groups at airlocum.co.uk.