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Crowns · bridges · bonding · fillings

A bridge is three things, and you pay for all three.

Elevation drawing of a three-unit dental bridge shown as a bridge span: two prepared teeth act as piers, each capped by a crown, with a deck between them carrying the false tooth across the gap.

Crowns, bridges, bonding and fillings, costed from three published payer fee schedules — every figure with the document it came from and the day we read it. No national average, because nobody publishes one.

Crown types & costWhat a bridge costs

Three published schedules · every figure dated · not reviewed by a dentist

Where the numbers come from

No free, public document publishes what a private US practice charges for a crown. These three do publish what somebody actually pays a dentist — so every figure on this site is traced to one of them, with the date on the document and the day we read it.

Pennsylvania

Medical Assistance Program Dental Fee Schedule (Pennsylvania Department of Human Services)

a state Medicaid programme. Schedule effective 1 August 2026; read 24 September 2026.

Montana

Montana Healthcare Programs Fee Schedule — Dental Services

a state Medicaid programme. Schedule schedule dated 1 January 2026; these lines carry an effective date of 1 July 2025; read 24 September 2026.

Washington

Washington State Department of Health, HIV Early Intervention Program — Schedule of Dental Coverage and Maximum Allowances (DOH 410-079)

a state public-health programme, capped at $3,000 per client per calendar year. Schedule allowances valid 1 April 2026 to 31 March 2027; read 24 September 2026.

The workbook

All sheets →
Sheet 01 · checked Sep 24, 2026

A crown has come off: what it costs to have it put back, and why we will not tell you how to glue it

Re-cementing a crown is allowed between $25.00 and $59.28 on the three schedules we read. It is one of the cheapest things in restorative dentistry, and it is not a job for a kitchen table.

Read the sheet →Sheet 02 · checked Sep 24, 2026

What dental bonding costs — and why no fee schedule has a line called bonding

Bonding is a technique, not a billing category. On the schedules it appears as a composite restoration priced by how many surfaces of the tooth it covers — from $50.00 to $227.00.

Read the sheet →Sheet 03 · checked Sep 24, 2026

Bonding for gaps and chipped teeth: what composite can do, and what a photograph cannot tell you

Closing a gap and rebuilding a chipped corner are the two jobs people most often want bonding for. Here is how each is billed, why the same work can be funded or not, and how to read the pictures.

Read the sheet →Sheet 04 · checked Sep 24, 2026

Dental bridge before and after: what the photographs leave out

The pictures show a gap and then no gap. What they cannot show is the two teeth that were cut down to make it happen, the stages in between, or what the plan is when it needs redoing.

Read the sheet →Sheet 05 · checked Sep 24, 2026

Traditional, cantilever and Maryland bridges — what each asks of the teeth beside the gap

Three ways to hang a false tooth from its neighbours, and one uncomfortable pattern: the less tooth a bridge destroys, the less likely a payer is to have a line for it at all.

Read the sheet →Sheet 06 · checked Sep 24, 2026

The codes on your dental bill: what the shape of the billing tells you

Every restoration on a treatment plan is a code with a fee beside it. You do not need the code book to read one — you need to know how the lines are counted, and which ones are hiding elsewhere.

Read the sheet →

Why this site prints schedules instead of averages

Search for the cost of a crown and you will be handed a range within seconds. Follow that range back and it usually ends nowhere — a survey behind a paywall, a marketing page, or another site quoting a third. We looked for a free, primary, public document giving a United States retail price for a crown, a bridge, bonding or a filling on 24 September 2026, and did not find one. So we stopped looking for an average and started reading fee schedules.

A fee schedule is a published list of what a payer allows a dentist for a defined procedure. It is not a shop price, and this site never calls it one. It is something better for a reader trying to judge a quote: a real number, attached to a named document, with a date on it, that anyone can open and check. Three of them are read in full here, and everything on the site is traced back to one of them.

The finding that shaped the whole site

One all-ceramic crown, one procedure code, three published allowances: $500.00, $790.40 and $1,028.00. Nothing clinical separates them. The lowest and the highest differ by just over two times, and both are documents you can download today. That spread is the reason an honest site cannot give you one number — and the reason it can still give you something useful, which is the full crown table with every type in it.

What is not here

No dentist reviews this site, and no page pretends otherwise. No practice, chain or group is named, ranked or linked anywhere on it. There are no before-and-after photographs, no patient stories and no success rates, because we could not source any of them honestly and an invented one reads exactly like a real one. There is no quote form, because a form that knows nothing about your tooth cannot produce a number and a form that collects dental details deserves a lawyer we do not have.

What is here is arithmetic you can check, sources you can open, and an honest account of who pays us and what we turned down.

Asked at the desk

How much does a dental crown cost?
Nobody publishes a free, primary figure for what a US private practice charges, so this site does not print one. What is published is what payers allow. For the same all-ceramic crown line, Pennsylvania's Medical Assistance schedule effective 1 August 2026 allows $500.00, Montana's January 2026 dental schedule allows $790.40, and Washington's HIV Early Intervention Program allowance for 2026–27 is $1,028.00 — just over two times the lowest, for the identical procedure code. Treat those as the floor of the market rather than a quote: a private practice sets its own fee, and your own number comes from a written treatment plan.
How much does a dental bridge cost?
A bridge is billed as separate units, not as one item, which is why a quote can look startling. A three-unit bridge is two retainer crowns plus one pontic — the false tooth. On Washington's 2026–27 allowances that is $800.00 plus $800.00 plus $800.00, so the schedule's own lines add up to $2,400.00. Pennsylvania's Medicaid schedule is more striking: it has no line for a new bridge at all, only for re-cementing one ($30.00) and repairing one ($35.00). Where a payer publishes nothing, it is usually because it funds nothing.
Is dental bonding the same as a filling?
On the bill, very often yes. None of the three schedules read for this site has a line called bonding — the word describes a technique, not a billing category. Tooth-coloured composite put onto a tooth is billed as a composite restoration, priced by how many surfaces of the tooth it covers: on Washington's schedule a one-surface composite on a back tooth is $125.00 and a four-or-more-surface one is $227.00. Bonding done for appearance alone, on a tooth with nothing wrong with it, is a different matter — a payer that funds restorations will not necessarily fund cosmetics, and the ADA notes composites are "occasionally not covered by some insurance plans".
Does dental insurance cover crowns and bridges?
It depends entirely on the plan document, and the honest answer is to read yours rather than a website. What is worth knowing is the shape of it: benefits for this kind of work are normally capped by an annual maximum, and payers attach frequency limits to crowns — Pennsylvania prints "1 per 5 years" against its crown lines, Washington prints "limit 1 per year, unless authorized". Those are funding rules, not clinical ones, and they are not a prediction of how long anything lasts. Choosing coverage is its own subject and not one this site teaches.
How long do crowns and bridges last?
No source this site trusts publishes a lifespan figure, so none appears here. The ADA's own consumer pages on crowns and bridges give no number at all, and the ADA says plainly of fillings that "no dental filling lasts forever". The NHS puts it in one sentence on its charges page: "Crowns may need to be replaced in the future." What can be quoted instead are payers' replacement intervals, which say how often somebody else will fund a new one — not how long yours will survive. Anyone promising a permanent or lifetime restoration is selling, not reporting.