How Dental Staffing Agencies Work - And What They Charge
When a dental practice calls a staffing agency for a locum nurse, the agency provides a nurse from its pool and charges the practice a total rate that includes:
The result is that a nurse earning £18/hour can cost a practice £25–£28/hour in total. For a single eight-hour day shift, that's a cost difference of £56–£80 compared with paying the nurse directly.
Running the Annual Numbers
Many practices rely on locum cover for planned absences (holiday, training days, maternity leave) as well as unplanned absences (sickness, family emergencies). A typical mid-sized dental practice might use 50–80 locum days per year.
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These figures exclude VAT (which adds a further 20% to agency-charged margin) and any agency registration or call-out fees. For multi-surgery practices or those with high absence rates, the savings from direct hiring are considerably larger.
Hidden Costs That Don't Show Up in the Hourly Rate
Beyond the direct hourly markup, agencies carry additional hidden costs:
Short-notice Premiums
Most agencies charge a premium for same-day or next-day bookings - sometimes 15–25% above the standard agency rate. A practice calling at 8am for a nurse to cover a 9am start will pay substantially more than one booking a week in advance.
Inconsistency of Staff
Agency nurses are drawn from a rotating pool and practices often get a different nurse each time. This means repeated induction time, potential for errors in unfamiliar practice management software, and a less cohesive clinical team. The hidden cost here is clinical time - a dentist spending 20 minutes inducting a new nurse every few weeks.
Lack of Transparency
Agencies rarely itemise their charges. A practice simply receives a total rate without knowing how much of it goes to the nurse and how much is margin. This makes benchmarking - or negotiating - very difficult.
Why the Agency Model Persists
Despite these costs, practices continue to use agencies for two main reasons: convenience and compliance. An agency guarantees it will find a nurse (or refund the placement fee) and takes responsibility for verifying credentials. For a busy practice manager, the path of least resistance is a single phone call to an agency.
Direct-hire platforms are now matching agencies on both counts - with verification built into the platform and a marketplace of nurses that responds to vacancy postings within hours.
The Direct-Hire Alternative
Direct-hire platforms like NetworkDental allow practices to post shifts and connect directly with verified, GDC-registered locum nurses. Because there is no agency taking a margin, the nurse receives their agreed rate and the practice pays only a transparent platform fee - a fraction of the agency markup.
Crucially, compliance is not sacrificed. On NetworkDental, every nurse on the platform has completed onboarding with GDC registration verification, DBS status confirmation, and indemnity insurance checks. Practices can see a nurse's verified credentials before booking, and timesheets are managed digitally within the platform.
How NetworkDental Helps
NetworkDental was built to remove agency fees from dental locum staffing entirely. Practices post standard or urgent SOS vacancies, set the rate they're willing to pay, and receive applications from pre-verified nurses - with full visibility of each nurse's GDC status, specialities, experience, and reviews from other practices.
There's no phone call to an agency, no opaque pricing, and no markup on the nurse's rate. Payments are handled through Stripe with a clear cost breakdown before you confirm. Practices using NetworkDental consistently report savings of 40–60% on their locum staffing spend compared with traditional agency use.
See how much you could save by going direct. Register your practice →
