Dentists need to renew their registration and make their CPD and indemnity declarations by the relevant upcoming deadlines. Not doing so, or only partially doing so will put your GDC registration at risk.
Payment
Pay the Annual Retention Fee (ARF) by 31 December at the latest, and make your indemnity declaration as part of the process. Do not be caught out by any issue with your practice not making the payment correctly, or the payment not going through from your own account, which can happen. If you pay annually by card, check that the payment has gone through. If you pay by annual or quarterly Direct Debit, this payment should have gone out on 1 December, so confirm that the GDC has received it.
Payment reminders
Any payment reminders that you get through email, SMS or letter from the GDC between now and the end of December mean that your ARF has not been received. It is important to note that they are not general information messages to all registrants.
With this in mind, check your spam email folders to ensure that you are not missing any reminders.
Your recorded CPD
Check what CPD you have already declared to the GDC through the eGDC portal, and ensure that you have earned enough verifiable hours by 31 December to comply with the requirements. If you do not have enough, you will need to undertake some now urgently, because any CPD completed after 31 December will not count towards the total for this year.
Your CPD declaration needs to be made by 28 January 2026 at the latest.
If you are in the final year of your CPD cycle and you do not have enough hours, you can apply for an eight-week grace period through your eGDC account. For this, you must submit a request by 31 December.
Required CPD hours
Make sure that you declare a minimum of 10 hours between your declaration for last year, and your declaration for this year. For example, if you declared 2 hours for 2024, you must declare at least 8 hours for 2025. It warrants attention that being on a career break or maternity leave does not alter this requirement.
If you are at the end of a cycle, ensure that you declare the total required time of 100 hours over the last five years. Even if you comply with the total number of required hours, you must still also comply with the 10-hour rule outlined above. That rule also applies between cycles – that is, if your last cycle ended in December 2024 and you declared 7 hours for that year, you will need to declare at least 3 hours for 2025 even though it is a different cycle.
The importance of doing this correctly and on time
Every year, some registrants are deregistered due to non-payment of the ARF before the deadline, when they did not want to be deregistered.
It is not possible to pay the registration fee after 23:59 on 31 December 2025 because that is when the payment system closes. Then people who miss the deadline are deregistered, have to stop working from 1 January and go through a restoration process if they did not mean to come off the register. This involves putting together a full application pack and getting it assessed by the GDC.
All this is a highly involved administrative process. While the official GDC processing time is stated as around 15 working days, it sometimes takes longer, especially if the application is incomplete or if there are other administrative issues. As well as this, leaving the register, even involuntarily, means that your indemnity arrangements cease. It also affects your inclusion in NHS lists such as the dental performers list.
Action we have taken to improve this process
We have regularly highlighted to the GDC the devastating professional, financial and emotional ramifications of being deregistered and continue to do so. We have also pointed to the significant loss of patient care, but so far there have not been any changes except for an easier way to declare CPD compliance in certain circumstances.
In light of this, we emphasise the importance of making sure that your ARF payment has gone through and that you are making the required declarations for CPD and indemnity.
The voluntary collection of workforce data
We encourage registrants to take part in the GDC’s voluntary collection of workforce data, because the data collected since 2023-24 is helpful in informing future workforce policy considerations. The data collected is about the work that you undertake as registered dental professionals.
If you have not participated in the short survey before, we would encourage you to do so. If you have submitted information in the past, there is also an option to update it if it has changed. This data collection process has scope to give the clearest impression of the challenges facing the dental workforce across the UK. The regulator has assured us that the data collected will not be used to identify individuals, and will be published anonymously. Previous dentist and DCP datasets were published earlier in 2025.
