What a root canal costs, when nobody will publish a price

The short answer, and why it is not one number

On the three published schedules below, root canal treatment on a molar is allowed at $500.00, $553.28 and $1,346.40. On the same three documents, the same treatment on a front tooth is allowed at $275.00, $403.10 and $978.40. Those are not estimates, a range somebody averaged, or a figure a marketing page produced: each is a line item, with a procedure code beside it, in a document that says what that payer pays.

We looked, on 24 September 2026, for a free primary source giving a national retail price in the United States. There is not one. The American Dental Association runs a fee survey, but it is a paid publication, and its file did not open for us at all. Commercial pages carry averages with no visible source underneath them, and we will not repeat a number we cannot trace. Printing a figure we had not read would have been the easy thing to do and would have been an invention.

What payer schedules can honestly show is the shape of the bill: which line is the canal, which line is the crown that has to follow it, how much bigger a molar is than an incisor, and how far apart two serious organisations can be about the same piece of work. That shape holds whoever is paying.

What kind of price each of these documents contains

None of the three is a retail price list, and it matters that you know which is which before reading a single figure.

• Pennsylvania publishes a Medical Assistance Program dental fee schedule, effective 1 August 2026. It is a state Medicaid schedule: what the programme pays a participating dentist.
• Montana publishes a Healthcare Programs fee schedule for dental services dated 1 January 2026, with the line rates effective 1 July 2025. Also state Medicaid, also a payer rate.
• Washington State Department of Corrections publishes a fee schedule for endodontic services alone, effective 1 January 2026 — a whole document for this one specialty, which is why its lines are the most detailed of the three.

A dentist in private practice sets their own fees and is bound by none of these documents. What a schedule gives you is a floor that somebody has committed to in public, and a sense of scale that a quote can be held against.

The same procedure, on three schedules

The molar figures span a factor of 2.7. The front-tooth figures span 3.6. That is the same words on the same code, priced by three payers in the same country in the same twelve months, and the reason is not that one of them is wrong. A Medicaid programme is buying access to care at a rate the legislature funded; a corrections health service is buying a specialty procedure inside a very different system. Both numbers are true statements about what will be paid. Neither is the price of a root canal.

If a quote you have been given is above all of these, that on its own proves nothing — but it is a reasonable thing to ask about, and asking is free.

Why a molar costs more than a front tooth

Because there is more of it. A front tooth usually has one canal; a molar has several, they are narrower, they curve, and they sit at the back of a mouth that has to stay open while somebody works on them. Every schedule prices that difference, but they price it differently: Pennsylvania's molar line is 1.8 times its front-tooth line, while Montana's and Washington's are both about 1.4 times.

This is the single most useful thing to know before a quote arrives. "Root canal" is not one procedure with one price — which tooth it is changes the number before anything else does.

The half of the bill that arrives afterwards

Every canal figure above is written "excluding final restoration". That is not a footnote. A tooth that has been opened up, cleaned out and filled still has a hole in the top of it and less structure than it started with, and on the two schedules that price both halves, putting it back together costs about as much again.

Put the two halves together on the one payer that prices both plainly and the picture is stark. In Pennsylvania a molar root canal plus a porcelain crown is $500.00 plus $500.00 — the crown is exactly half of a $1,000.00 total. In Montana the same three lines come to $1,501.76, of which the crown alone is just over half.

So the honest answer to "how much is a root canal" is: whatever you were told, ask whether the crown is in it. Two quotes that look far apart are often the same quote, one of them counting the restoration and one of them not.

What the first visit costs, which is the only bill you can be sure of

Before any of the above, somebody has to look at the tooth. All three schedules price that, and it is the cheapest line on every one of them.

Exam plus X-ray comes to $63.22 in Pennsylvania, $59.28 in Montana and $144.00 on the Washington schedule. Until that has happened, nobody knows whether the tooth needs a root canal at all — it might need a filling, or nothing. Every other number on this page is hypothetical until that one has been paid.

Doing it a second time

Root canal treatment sometimes has to be redone. Two of the three schedules price that explicitly, and both price it higher than doing it the first time: on a molar, Montana allows $652.08 against $553.28, and Washington allows $1,494.40 against $1,346.40 — $98.80 and $148.00 more respectively.

Pennsylvania's schedule has no retreatment line at all. Its endodontic lines also carry a limit printed in its own Limits column: "1 per lifetime". That is a rule about what the programme funds, not a statement about how long a treated tooth lasts, and nothing on this site treats it as one.

What none of these documents can tell you

They cannot tell you what you will be charged. They cannot tell you whether your own plan covers any of it, because that lives in your plan document and nowhere else. And they cannot tell you how long the tooth will last — we looked for a sourced figure for that and did not find one, so this site prints none.

In England the shape is completely different and much simpler to state. NHS dental charges put root canal treatment in Band 2, which is £76.60, and a crown in Band 3, at £332.10. Band 1 and urgent treatment are £27.90 each. Those are patient charges rather than payer rates — the only genuinely public retail prices in any of this — and the NHS page carrying them was last reviewed on 13 March 2025. It does not say when the current charges took effect, so neither do we, and Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland run separate systems.

If you are paying for this yourself

There is no elegant answer here. Three things are worth knowing, in this order.

Get the exam first. It is the cheapest thing on every schedule above, and it is the only step that converts a painful tooth into a priced plan. Buying anything before it is buying a discount on treatment nobody has told you that you need.

Ask for the whole plan in writing, priced line by line. Canal, build-up, crown, and any X-rays. A quote with one number on it cannot be compared to anything.

Then, if it helps, look at a discount dental plan. DentalPlans.com and Careington both sell memberships that buy access to a reduced fee list from dentists who have signed up to it. A discount plan is not insurance. Nobody pays a share of your bill; you pay the whole reduced fee yourself. There is no claim, no deductible and no annual maximum, because there is no insurer. Whether one saves you money depends entirely on whether a dentist near you takes it and what its own fee list says for these codes — questions to settle before paying a membership, not after. We have applied to Careington and have not been approved; that link goes to their site either way, and pays us nothing until it is.

If what you actually need is a dentist to look at the tooth, Opencare books appointments in US metro areas and pays us when a booking completes.