Financial services for dentists

From the numbers to the plan

• 1. We spot it. The gaps show up in the accounts — no protection line, private income with no pension, a practice with no will behind it. We raise it before it matters.
• 2. We introduce you to E&G. A telephone-first, independent advice conversation, with your real numbers shared ahead (only with your permission).
• 3. We implement together. Adviser recommends, we handle the tax side — contribution timing, structure, and the accounts reflecting it all correctly.

Related reading: the NHS pension explained and the two-year exit plan — both end in conversations this service exists to have.

Two dates that changed what a practice owner leaves behind

Estate planning for dentists stopped being theoretical in 2026, because two rules moved within eighteen months of each other and both land squarely on practice owners.

The first arrived on 6 April 2026. Business property relief used to take qualifying trading assets out of inheritance tax without limit. From that date, 100% relief is capped at a £2.5 million allowance per person, covering agricultural and business property combined, with 50% relief on anything above it — an effective rate of 20% rather than 40%. The allowance was originally announced at £1 million and raised to £2.5 million on 23 December 2025. Unused allowance is transferable to a surviving spouse or civil partner, so a couple can shelter up to £5 million between them.

The second arrives on 6 April 2027, when most unused pension funds and pension death benefits come into the estate for inheritance tax. Death-in-service benefits from a registered scheme and dependants' scheme pensions from a defined benefit arrangement stay outside it. For a dentist who has been quietly building a SIPP alongside the NHS scheme, that pot has just moved from outside the estate to inside it.

Around both sits the frozen furniture: a nil-rate band of £325,000, a residence nil-rate band of £175,000 which tapers by £1 for every £2 of estate above £2 million, and inheritance tax at 40%. All three are fixed at those levels until the end of the 2029/30 tax year.

The uncomfortable part is not the number. It is that £370,000 is due while the assets that created it are a dental practice and a house. Inheritance tax attributable to the business can be spread over ten annual instalments, but the tax on the home and the pension is payable six months after the end of the month of death, and probate is not granted until it is paid. Families in that position sell something, and what they sell is usually the practice, in a hurry, to whoever is available.

Four things worth checking this week

None of these needs an adviser appointment to start. All four are questions you can answer from documents you already hold:

• Read your shareholders' agreement for a binding sale obligation. If your estate is obliged to sell your shares and the survivors are obliged to buy, business property relief can be lost on the whole holding. A cross-option arrangement — each side holds an option rather than an obligation — preserves it. This is the single most expensive drafting error we see.
• Check who your pension death benefit nomination names. Many are years out of date, and from April 2027 the destination has inheritance tax consequences it never used to have.
• Add up the qualifying business property against the £2.5 million allowance. Include the practice, any second site, and premises used by the trade. If you are comfortably under it, the 2026 change costs you nothing and you can stop worrying about it.
• Find out whether your income protection is own-occupation. It is written on the policy schedule. If it says any occupation, the cover you are paying for is not the cover you think you have.

Send us the answers and we will tell you which of them needs a regulated conversation and which is simply an accounting job. Our valuation explainer is the right starting point for the first and third, because both depend on what the shares are actually worth rather than what they cost.