Practice Vantageby Practice FitoutsRead your own suburb →

Opening a dental practice in Canberra?

Contested — 26+ practices for 45,285 people within 3 km.

Canberra has 2.1× the dental practices per head of Australia as a whole: 5.74+ per 10,000 people against 2.7 nationally, in a population that has grown 17.4% since 2019.

· re-read monthly while people keep opening it · run it live

There are 26 or more dentists within 3 km of Canberra, and most of them are working at it: 20 have a website and a real review base, and 2 are part of a chain. That is 5.74 practices for every 10,000 of the 45,300 people in range, more than the national 2.7, in a population growing quickly, up 17.4% since 2019. What is not here is a practice without a website: every listed dentist is marketing.

Who is already there

21 more on the live read →

Where patients come from

What this means if you are opening here

The opening: the population has grown 17.4% in 6 years, and growth arrives before the practices to serve it do.

The headwind: 20 practices are already marketing properly, so search visibility has to be bought or earned slowly; 2 are chain-backed, which means a corporate marketing budget rather than an owner's; there are already more practices per head than the national average.

The number to plan against: Canberra Dental Care has 311 reviews at 5.0. At a typical one review per twelve patient visits, matching that takes roughly 3,900 visits. That is the size of the head start, in a catchment where each practice sees about 940 dental patients a year.

All the numbers for Canberra
People in range45,285ABS estimated resident population 2025
Population change+17.4% over 6 years+1.6% in the last year
Dental practices per 10,000 people5.74+Australia: 2.7
People who see a dentist in a yearabout 24,500roughly 940 per practice; about 2,000 nationally
Median age32.6
Median household income$2,277 a weekCensus 2021
Speak a language other than English at home23.6%Australia: 22.3%
Born overseas31.4%Australia: 27.7%
Arthritis5.6%Australia: 8.5%
Asthma8.6%Australia: 8.1%
Diabetes2.2%Australia: 4.7%
Heart disease2.3%Australia: 3.9%
Lung condition0.9%Australia: 1.7%
Mental health condition11.8%Australia: 8.8%
Practices with no website0
Practices marketing properly20a website plus 25 or more reviews
Median reviews per practice83

Also in Canberra

Dental nearby

Already running a dental practice? Audit it with Practice Grader: how it shows up on Google, its reviews and its website, against the dentists around it.
Run it live. Open the interactive read: the map with people density, coverage gaps, referrers and drive time, and a comparison against other suburbs. Free.
Thinking about a practice here? Most of what goes wrong on a clinical fitout is decided in the lease, the shell and the approvals. Practice Fitouts starts before the lease is signed.
Where the numbers come from
  1. Google Places API, text search. The practice census, ratings, review counts, websites. Capped at 20 per search; dense circles are searched in tiles.
  2. Google Places API, result order for the discipline search from the suburb centre. Which practices Google lists first for this search. Google's relevance order from the centre of the circle, not a live local pack, which depends on where the searcher stands.
  3. ABS Regional population (estimated resident population by SA2), 2019 to 2025. People in range, population growth.
  4. ABS Census of Population and Housing 2021, tables G01 (age, language, birthplace), G02 (medians) and G19 (long-term health conditions), by SA2. Age profile, language, income, health conditions. National comparisons are the Australia row of the same tables.
  5. ABS Australian Statistical Geography Standard 2021 (SA1 and SA2 boundaries). Which areas fall inside the circle; SA1s hold about 400 people each, which is how partial areas are weighted.
  6. Dental Board of Australia registrant data (about 18,500 dentists) and IBISWorld Dental Services business counts. Dental practices per 10,000, derived: registered dentists over an assumed 2.5 dentists per location. IBISWorld's 20,900 'businesses' include contractors and sole traders and overstate locations.
  7. ABS Patient Experiences, 2024-25: 83.4% saw a GP, 53.9% saw a dental professional in the last 12 months. Annual use rates for GP and dental.

Practice listings, ratings and review counts are Powered by Google and are at most 30 days old. Benchmarks marked derived or estimated are indicative planning figures, not survey results. Google lists at most twenty places per search; dense catchments are searched in tiles and the count is a floor.