Immediate Dentures After Extraction: Same-Day Teeth, Costs, and What to Expect

The question you're really asking, the one you haven't quite typed into Google but are hoping this post is going to answer, is whether you'll still look like yourself afterwards.

So, yes. You will.

And the stretch of time you're dreading, the one between your old teeth coming out and new teeth replacing them, doesn't exist. Not an afternoon. Not an hour. Not the short walk from the dentist's chair to the car park. You go into the appointment with teeth that aren't working anymore, and you come out of the same appointment with a full smile. That's what the word immediate is doing in "immediate dentures."

For people who've spent years quietly avoiding mirrors, or smiling with their lips pressed together in photographs, or turning down dinner invitations because they couldn't face eating in front of anyone, that's the sentence that finally gets them to pick up the phone.

How We Build a Mouth Before You Need It

Weeks before your extraction day, we take impressions and careful measurements of your mouth as it currently is, teeth and all. Those go to a dental laboratory, where a technician you will almost certainly never meet takes plaster casts of your current teeth and, one by one, removes from those casts the teeth you are having out. What they're left with is a model of your mouth in the future. A mouth that does not yet exist anywhere in the world.

And they build teeth for it. Working from clinical measurement, from decades of quiet craft, from careful prediction of how your gums will sit once the teeth aren't there to hold them, they sculpt and shape and colour-match a set of teeth that will fit a version of you that is still weeks away from existing. The shade of the teeth is picked from photographs of your current smile, so the new ones look like the ones you already have, only healthier. The pink acrylic of the gum-line is matched to the natural colour of yours.

And then on your extraction day, weeks later, that mouth arrives at our surgery in a small box. We take your old teeth out, the denture goes straight in, we check the bite and relieve any pressure points, and we hand you a mirror.

And there you are. Still you.

What Actually Happens on Extraction Day

The appointment itself is longer than a normal dental visit, because there's a lot going on. The extractions, the immediate placement, the bite check, the fine adjustments. Most of our patients choose IV sedation for this appointment, which at £399 is money very well spent if the thought of being fully present for multiple extractions is a lot. Under IV sedation you're conscious but deeply relaxed, and most people remember almost nothing of the procedure itself afterwards.

Once the teeth are out and the denture is in, the first few hours at home are quiet. Your mouth is still numb. The denture feels bulky, because your tongue has never met it before and has to work out where everything now sits. Your saliva gets busier for a little while, because your mouth is reading the denture as food. All completely normal, all settled within a few days.

That evening, you'll eat just fine. Something soft and cool: yoghurt, smooth soup, scrambled eggs, a banana. Not a roast dinner, not yet. But you'll eat, with your new teeth, on the same day you had your old ones taken out. The denture is giving you enough support to chew soft food from the first evening onwards. It's also quietly doing a second job underneath: sitting over the extraction sites like a gentle bandage, applying a light, even pressure that helps settle any bleeding and protects the healing tissue from the open mouth. Your new teeth are actively helping you heal.

The First Week With Your New Teeth

By day three, most patients are surprised by how quickly things are settling. By day five, speech is usually back to normal. By day seven, the denture has stopped feeling like a foreign object and has started to feel, quite simply, like your teeth.

You'll be eating pretty much what you want by the end of the second week. Days one and two are soft foods only (yoghurt, smooth soup, scrambled eggs, mashed potato), to let the extraction sites underneath have a quiet start. By mid-week you're back to things that need a bit of chewing. Bread returns to the menu around day four or five. After two weeks, the only things most of our patients still hold off on are the genuinely hard ones, raw apples and toffees and the like, and those can wait a few more weeks. Everything else is fair game.

And now you're wondering, will I sound like I'm talking a bit funny after getting false teeth? For the first week you might, but you'll be shocked at how fast you get used to them. It takes under a week for denture patients to get used to them, and you'll start to sound natural again especially quickly if you read aloud for five or ten minutes a day. It's less about learning to speak normally with them, and more your brain getting used to them. Then it becomes the new norm and you'll feel weird talking without them. That's just how brains work.

We'll see you back within 24 to 48 hours, then a few more times over the first couple of weeks. Simple reason: as the tissue settles and the swelling comes down, a spot or two on the denture will press harder against your still-tender gums than it should, and we relieve those pressure points with a tiny adjustment. Five-minute visits. Included in the plan. Every single denture patient has them.

How Much Do Immediate Dentures Cost?

You probably arrived at this post with a figure in your head. Something you've seen quoted elsewhere, or something a friend mentioned, or just a vague sense that this was going to cost somewhere north of what you could comfortably afford. That figure is, almost certainly, wrong.

Our standard immediate denture at UrgentCare Dental is £699 per arch. If you need both arches, that's £1,398 for the pair. If you'd like the upgrade, our chrome dentures start from £999 and come in as metal-framed partials that are slimmer, stronger, and remarkably comfortable if you still have some natural teeth we're working around.

Extractions are priced separately per tooth, depending on how straightforward each tooth is to take out. Your full treatment plan, including all the extractions, the immediate denture, the adjustment visits, and the reline that'll come in at the six-month mark, is written out in full and costed to the pound before anything begins. There is no "ah, there's one more thing we need to add" partway through. You will know the exact number you are working with.

And the whole of it doesn't have to arrive as a single payment. We offer 0% finance over 12 months, which turns a £699 denture into roughly £58 a month. A full treatment plan covering extractions, denture, and reline sits comfortably under £100 a month for most of our patients. For a lot of the people who come to us, that's the number that turns "I can't afford to sort this out" into "actually, we can do this, and we can start next week."

The Year That Follows, Honestly

After the extractions, the bone that used to hold your teeth begins to shrink. This is completely normal. Bone is living tissue, and like any living tissue it responds to the work it's asked to do. Every time you bit and chewed, forces travelled down through your tooth roots and into the underlying bone, and the bone, being efficient, stayed strong in proportion to the work. Remove the roots, and those forces disappear. The body, not one to waste resources, gently reclaims the bone it no longer needs to keep reinforced. The gum tissue sitting above the bone changes shape accordingly.

So the mouth your immediate denture was built to fit, the mouth you had on extraction day, isn't quite the same shape as the mouth you have six months later. The fit gradually loosens. Sore spots can appear. The denture might slip a little when you eat.

This is where the rest of the plan comes in. In the first few months, we add a soft temporary relining material to the inside of the denture every few weeks, which keeps the fit snug as things settle. Each of these visits is quick and often included in your original fee. At around 3 to 6 months in, once the big changes have stabilised, we do a permanent reline: we rebuild the fitting surface of the denture against the new shape of your gums from scratch. And at around 12 to 18 months, many of our patients choose to have a fresh denture made, properly fitted to the fully healed mouth. That's the denture you'll settle into for 5 to 10 years.

So there are really two dentures across this journey. The immediate one, which gets you through the healing year without a single toothless day. And the long-term one, which is shaped to your final, settled mouth. Both of them are part of the plan from the beginning.

If Dental Implants Are the Dream

A lot of our patients ask, usually somewhere in the first consultation, whether going the immediate denture route now closes the door on dental implants later. It does not. Immediate dentures are often the first step on the road to implants, because they give you a full smile to live with while your bone heals and while you organise the finances for the next stage.

There's also a path that skips the denture phase entirely. All-on-4 and All-on-6 let us extract your teeth and place implants with a fixed temporary bridge in the same appointment. The result is a full arch of fixed, non-removable teeth on the day of surgery, and permanent teeth a few months later. The cost sits higher, full-mouth implants start from £8,000 to £15,000, but the outcome is teeth that never come out.

For patients who want implants eventually but can't quite stretch to them right now, immediate dentures are exactly the right call. A full smile today, with the implant path wide open for whenever the time is right.

Booking Your Consultation

At UrgentCare Dental, your first appointment is a proper conversation about where you are and where you want to get to. Which teeth are going, what's worth keeping, what matters most to you about the result, and what timeline and budget make sense. From that conversation we build your full treatment plan in writing, with every step and every pound accounted for.

And then, a few weeks later, a small box arrives at our surgery with a set of teeth in it, made for a version of you that doesn't quite exist yet.

When you leave that appointment, the version of you the box was made for is the version walking out of the door. Smiling. In the mirror, on the way home, in the car. That smile is yours.