Read your own suburb →Opening a dental practice in Geelong?
Contested — 40+ practices for 43,873 people within 3 km.
Geelong has 3.4× the dental practices per head of Australia as a whole: 9.12+ per 10,000 people against 2.7 nationally, in a population that has grown 2% since 2019.
· re-read monthly while people keep opening it · run it live
40 or more dentists share a 3 km circle around Geelong, and 15 of them have passed a hundred reviews. This is a mature field. That is 9.12 practices for every 10,000 of the 43,900 people in range, more than the national 2.7, in a population up 2% since 2019. What is not here is a practice without a website: every listed dentist is marketing. Review depth is shallow, a median of 24, which is the cheapest thing a newcomer can beat.
- 40+Practices in range3 km circle
- 43,873People in rangeABS 2025
- 9.12+Per 10,000 peopleAustralia 2.7
- +2%Population since 2019+0.6% last year
- 39.6Median age
Who is already there
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Myers Street Dental Clinic5.0 from 504 reviews · myersdental.com.au · 0.6 km
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Geelong West Dental4.9 from 386 reviews · geelongwestdental.com.au · 2.0 km
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Smile Care Dentists4.9 from 312 reviews · smilecaredentists.com.au · 0.2 km
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East Geelong Dental Practice5.0 from 147 reviews · eastgeelongdentalpractice.com.au · 1.4 km
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Geelong Dental Centre4.9 from 142 reviews · geelongdentalcentre.com.au · 0.4 km
Where patients come from
- 14 schools inside the circle. Families choose a dentist near the school run. Largest: Saint Patrick's School, Geelong Lutheran College St John's Newtown, St Mary's Primary School.
- 18 pharmacies inside the circle. The other health stop families already make in the suburb. Largest: Chemist Warehouse Geelong, Pharmacy 4 Less Belmont, Chemist Warehouse Geelong West.
What this means if you are opening here
The opening: the median practice has only 24 reviews, and reviews are the cheapest ground to take.
The headwind: 19 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: Myers Street Dental Clinic has 504 reviews at 5.0. At a typical one review per twelve patient visits, matching that takes roughly 6,300 visits. That is the size of the head start, in a catchment where each practice sees about 590 dental patients a year.
All the numbers for Geelong
| People in range | 43,873ABS estimated resident population 2025 |
|---|---|
| Population change | +2% over 6 years+0.6% in the last year |
| Dental practices per 10,000 people | 9.12+Australia: 2.7 |
| People who see a dentist in a year | about 23,700roughly 590 per practice; about 2,000 nationally |
| Median age | 39.6 |
| Median household income | $1,665 a weekCensus 2021 |
| Speak a language other than English at home | 12.1%Australia: 22.3% |
| Born overseas | 17.5%Australia: 27.7% |
| Arthritis | 8.3%Australia: 8.5% |
| Asthma | 9.5%Australia: 8.1% |
| Diabetes | 4.3%Australia: 4.7% |
| Heart disease | 4%Australia: 3.9% |
| Lung condition | 1.7%Australia: 1.7% |
| Mental health condition | 11%Australia: 8.8% |
| Practices with no website | 0 |
| Practices marketing properly | 19a website plus 25 or more reviews |
| Median reviews per practice | 24 |
Where the numbers come from
- Google Places API, text search. The practice census, ratings, review counts, websites. Capped at 20 per search; dense circles are searched in tiles.
- 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.
- ABS Regional population (estimated resident population by SA2), 2019 to 2025. People in range, population growth.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.