If you are a Dental Care Professional (DCP) it is important to renew your registration and make your declarations about CPD and indemnity by the relevant deadlines. If you do not do this, or only partially do this, it will put your registration at risk. Dentists should also remind their staff to renew.
Paying the fee
The Annual Retention Fee (ARF) needs to be paid by 31 July, and as part of the process you make your indemnity declaration. People get caught out when practices do not make the payment correctly, or the payment does not go through from their personal accounts correctly. If you pay every year by card, check the payment has gone through this year. Direct Debits, whether annual or quarterly, should have already gone out, so if you pay in this way, confirm this has been received by the GDC.
Reminder messages
Any reminders via email, SMS or post from the GDC between now and the end of July mean that your ARF has not been received. Do not ignore them thinking they are general information emails to all DCPs. It is a good idea to check your spam folder to make sure you do not have a reminder there.
Recorded CPD
Check the CPD hours you have declared on the GDC portal to make sure you have earned enough verifiable hours to comply with their requirements by 31 July. In case you have not earned enough, you will need to undertake some now urgently before the end of the month. Your CPD declaration itself can be made until 28 August, but the CPD for the declaration must have been earned before 31 July.
If you are in the final year of your CPD cycle and do not have enough hours, you can log in to your eGCD account before 31 July and apply for a grace period of eight weeks.
CPD hours required
You must bear in mind hours for this year, and over the last five years if you are at the end of a five-year cycle.
This year
You need to declare at least 10 hours between your declaration for last year and your declaration for this year. So if last summer you declared 2 hours, you must declare at least 8 hours this summer. This is the case even if you have been on maternity leave or taken a career break.
The last five years
If this year you are at the end of your cycle, make sure you declare the required hours for the registrant category you are in over the last five years.
- Dental nurses and dental technicians: 50 hours
- Dental hygienists, dental therapists, clinical dental technicians and orthodontic therapists: 75 hours.
Be aware that even if you have done the total number of required hours over the last five years, you still need to have done the 10 hours between this year and last as explained above. The rule also applies between cycles, so if your last cycle ended last year and you declared 7 hours in July 2024, this year you need to declare at least 3 hours.
Be sure to do this correctly, and on time
Some registrants are deregistered every year because they do not pay the ARF before the deadline.
At 23:59 on 31 July the payment system closes so you must make sure to pay before then. If your payment is not received you will have to stop working from 1 August and start the restoration process. This is a very involved process where you have to put together a full application pack and get it assessed by the GDC. The official GDC processing time is about 15 working days but it can take longer if there are any issues such as your application not being complete, or administration problems.
Leaving the register, even if you did not choose to do so, also means that your indemnity arrangements cease.
There are further details about the dangers of not meeting the deadline in the GDC’s blog post on helping DCPs navigate their CPD requirements.
We are working on your behalf to improve the GDC registration process
On several occasions we have emphasised the terrible effects of being deregistered to the GDC. These include professional, financial and potential mental health issues for the registrant as well as significant loss of patient care. So far however there have not been any changes apart from a more straightforward way to declare CPD compliance in certain circumstances.
Voluntary workforce data collection
We encourage all registrants to take part in the GDC’s voluntary collection of workforce data, because the data collected since 2023 is helpful in informing future workforce policy considerations.
Data collection takes the form of a short survey with additional questions during your renewals process. The questions cover the work that you undertake as registered dental professionals.
This process has scope to give the clearest impression of the challenges facing the UK-wide dental workforce. The regulator has assured us that the data will not be used to identify individuals, and its publication will be anonymous. Previous datasets were published earlier this year, and it gives us a clear impression of the challenges facing the dental workforce in the UK.