How much is a dentist in France?

A consultation with a French chirurgien-dentiste has a conventional tariff of €23. Assurance Maladie reimburses 60% of that, which is €13.80. The difference is the ticket modérateur, and it is yours to pay unless a complementary contract (a mutuelle) picks it up. Both figures are published by the French government on its dental reimbursement page, verified 30 January 2026: service-public.gouv.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F33956 (an English version loads at the same address with ?lang=en).

Two things catch out families arriving from the US or the UK. The conventional tariff is a billing base for the reimbursement calculation, not a ceiling on what every practitioner may charge for every act. And the 60% rate is the one for dental surgeons; the same page reimburses consultations with a doctor who is a stomatologist or oral surgeon at 70%.

These are the conventional tariffs and reimbursements published on the government page for patients aged over 26, verified 30 January 2026.

The gap between the two right-hand columns is the ticket modérateur. On routine work it is small in absolute terms, and a mutuelle contract will usually absorb it. It is on prosthetic work that the numbers change shape.

Dental prostheses (crowns, bridges, dentures) are reimbursed at 60% of their conventional rate, but the government page splits them into three baskets, and the basket decides what you actually pay:

• 100% Santé basket. Fully covered by compulsory insurance plus a complementary contract, with nothing left to pay.
• Tarifs maîtrisés (capped fees). The practitioner agrees not to exceed a fixed ceiling, so any remainder is limited and depends on your complementary contract.
• Tarifs libres (free fees). The practitioner sets the price. Reimbursement is still calculated on the low conventional base, so the remainder can be large.

The capped fees come from the national dental convention of 21 June 2018, described on the Sécurité sociale portal at securite-sociale.fr.

On implants, be careful with what you read online. Checked on 6 August 2026: the service-public dental reimbursement page (verified 30 January 2026) sets out tariffs for consultations, conservative and surgical care, prostheses and orthodontics, and does not list dental implants among them. Budget implant work as a private cost, and verify your own case with Assurance Maladie before you commit.

Practical habit that saves money: ask for the written estimate before prosthetic work starts, and ask which of the three baskets each line sits in. That single question is what separates a predictable bill from an open-ended one.

The same government page carries a separate tariff set for patients aged 1 to 26. The tariffs are higher, and because the 60% rate is applied to a bigger base, the reimbursement is higher too.

Orthodontics has its own rules on the same page. Treatment must begin before the age of 16 and needs prior agreement from Assurance Maladie. A semester of treatment is set at €193.50 and reimbursed at 100%, for a maximum of six semesters; a monitoring session is set at €10.75 and reimbursed at 60%, which is €6.45. Orthodontists commonly charge above those bases, so the estimate matters here as much as it does for crowns.

A mutuelle, or complementary health contract, is the second layer of French cover. On dental it does two jobs: it absorbs the 40% ticket modérateur on routine care, and it takes a share of the prosthetic gap according to the level written into the contract.

It is also the condition for the zero-out-of-pocket outcome. The Sécurité sociale portal explains that the 100% Santé reform reaches nothing left to pay only through the combination of compulsory insurance and a complementary contract that meets the contrat responsable standard, and states that 95% of contracts sold on the market meet it. Prosthetic dental care entered the scheme on 1 January 2020, with certain prosthetic care fully covered only under contracts taken out from 1 January 2021.

So the honest way to read a French dental quote is in two halves: what the state pays on the conventional base, then what your complementary contract does with the remainder. Contracts differ widely on the prosthetic half. Read the dental line of the schedule before you assume a crown is handled.

None of the reimbursements above reach you until you are registered with Assurance Maladie. Affiliation to protection universelle maladie (PUMa) runs on a residence condition set out on the government's PUMa page at service-public.gouv.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F34308, and new arrivals on a long-stay visa routinely spend their first months outside the system. In that window a dental bill is paid in full at the chair.

That gap is the practical reason most visa holders arrive with private cover already in force. Private plans vary a lot on dental: some carry a routine dental benefit, some treat it as an option, some exclude prosthetic work. Benefits are set by the plan wording and premiums are quote-based, so the useful step is to read the dental section of the policy schedule against the tariffs above and see which line items it actually reaches.

We can walk you through what a policy schedule says on dental before you buy, and what typically stops applying once your PUMa registration comes through.

A few things worth knowing before your first appointment:

• Ask for the estimate on any prosthetic or orthodontic work, and ask which basket each line falls in.
• Routine care is cheap by American standards and modest by British ones. It is the crowns, bridges and implants that carry the shock.
• If you settle in Alsace-Moselle, the local regime is different: the same government page reimburses dental surgeons at 90% there instead of 60%.
• Reimbursement rates move. The dental rate was cut in October 2023, so treat any figure you find on a blog as out of date until you have checked it against the government page.